Max Renn runs CIVIC-TV, a Toronto station that shows sensationalist programmes. His satellite operator, Harlan, finds a pirate broadcast called Videodrome, showing people being tortured and murdered. Max thinks it is the future of television. His girlfriend, radio host Nicki Brand, watches it and is aroused. Learning that it comes from Pittsburgh, she goes to audition for the show and never returns.
Max learns that the footage is real and that a media theorist, Brian O'Blivion, knows about it. At O'Blivion's mission, where homeless people watch television, his daughter Bianca reveals that the Videodrome signal causes brain tumours that produce hallucinations. O'Blivion, who helped create it, was killed by it, and now exists only through thousands of videotapes.
Max's hallucinations grow worse. His television pulses and swells as Nicki calls to him, and a slit opens in his stomach. Barry Convex, of Spectacular Optical, a front for a weapons company, reveals that he is behind Videodrome. Max hallucinates whipping Nicki, then wakes beside the dead body of his friend Masha, which disappears.
Harlan admits he has been working with Convex, who wants to use Videodrome to kill people obsessed with sex and violence. Convex inserts a videotape into Max's stomach, programming him to kill. Max murders his business partners, but Bianca stops him and reprograms him with a new message: "Death to Videodrome. Long live the new flesh." Max kills Harlan, whose hand turns into a grenade inside Max's stomach, and Convex, whose body bursts into tumours.
Wanted for murder, Max hides on an abandoned ship. Nicki appears on a television and tells him that to defeat Videodrome he must leave his old flesh behind. The TV shows Max shooting himself. Max says "Long live the new flesh" and pulls the trigger.
