Videodrome

Max Renn runs Civic TV, a small Toronto cable station specializing in soft-core porn and pirated extreme content. His engineer Harlan pulls down a pirate satellite signal called 'Videodrome' — what appears to be a Malaysian snuff broadcast: real people being tortured and killed in a red-tiled room with no plot or characters. Max is fascinated and wants to acquire it for broadcast.

He meets Nicki Brand, a Toronto radio sex therapist who is drawn to the violence on Max's tapes and to her own taste for sadomasochism. She and Max begin a relationship. She becomes obsessed with Videodrome and auditions to appear in it; soon afterward she travels to Malaysia and vanishes.

Max begins suffering intense hallucinations. His television set bulges and pulses with lips and breathing; a vaginal slit opens in his abdomen; later he pushes a VHS tape into it as if loading a player. The visions are indistinguishable from reality. He searches for the source of Videodrome and is led to Bianca O'Blivion, daughter of the late media philosopher Brian O'Blivion, who only ever appears on TV (he died years ago but pre-recorded thousands of monologues). She tells Max that Videodrome induces brain tumors which produce the visions — her father was 'the public's first victim.'

The conspiracy is uncovered: Videodrome is the project of Spectacular Optical, a defense contractor that uses the signal to identify viewers susceptible to violent imagery and execute them as a moral culling. Spectacular Optical's chairman Barry Convex programs Max via the slit in his belly, turning him into an assassin. Max murders his Civic TV business partners under instruction.

Bianca finds Max and reprograms him at her father's video archive, the Cathode Ray Mission, to kill the conspiracy instead. Max guns down Harlan, who is revealed to be a Spectacular Optical agent. He confronts Convex at a Spectacular Optical product unveiling and shoots him repeatedly; Convex's body erupts into tumors and rips itself open before collapsing.

Max becomes a hunted drifter and hides on an abandoned boat at the Toronto docks. A small television tunes itself on. Nicki appears on the screen, alive in some form, and tells Max that he is ready — that to defeat Videodrome he must leave the old flesh behind and become the new flesh. On the screen, an image of Max himself puts a pistol to his head, pulls the trigger, and his skull erupts in a froth of organic gore. The real Max watches, raises his own gun, declares 'Long live the new flesh,' and pulls the trigger. The screen cuts to black.