Did You Know?

The chest-slit sequences had James Woods built into a couch with the chest-slit apparatus glued onto him. Woods swore he would never work with anything that had to be glued onto him ever again! During filming the sequences with the flesh-gun (which "fired" bursts of cold, vaporous gas), Woods played a prank on director David Cronenberg by smearing his (real) hand with blue paint and pretending he had frostbite.

An epilogue was planned but never filmed. In it, Max Renn, Bianca O'Blivion and Nicki Brand appear on the set of Videodrome. Bianca and Nicki are shown to have chest slits (vaginas) of their own, from which emerge strange mutated sex organs. The scene was scrapped along with many others due to cost overruns, bad timing (Deborah Harry had stomach flu and James Woods was visiting relatives), and the sheer difficulty of executing such a special-effects scene. A number of other ambitious special effects sequences were also dropped.

Among the scenes that were scripted but deleted was one where Max Renn's TV rises up out of his bathtub, while showing an image. The crew had researched how to do this - there had been talk of having the actor IN the tub - and had come up with several solutions. One involved filling the tub with a clear fluid that was nonconductive, but that would have cost $25 a quart. The crew eventually decided to take a real TV and simply cover its insides with layers of waterproofing insulation. It worked - they dunked the TV into a swimming pool and found, to their astonishment, that TVs float due to the airspace inside the picture tube. The scene was axed just before it was to be filmed.

Andy Warhol called the movie the "A Clockwork Orange of the 1980s".

One of five Sci-Fi/Horror movies that were heavily promoted by Universal Pictures prior to their impending releases in 1982 and given prospective release dates. The others were: E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, The Thing (both set release dates for that summer), Halloween 3 (October), The Dark Crystal and this film (December). This ultimately changed when Universal pushed back the film from it's original slated release date to February 1983.

Most of the major characters in the film make their appearance in the film from a television screen.