Society

Producer Brian Yuzna, known for his work with the Lovecraftian filmmaker Stuart Gordon, tried his hand at solo directing in 1989, when he leveraged the Re-Animator (1985) sequel rights and secured a two-picture deal. The first film that resulted was Society, an adaptation of Woody Keith and Rick Fry’s screenplay, which featured an upper-class cult sacrificing the poor. Inspired by images he had seen in his dreams, Yuzna gave Keith and Fry’s straightforward slasher script a body-horror twist, and had the evil society literally feed off the flesh of the lower class. He employed the Japanese special-effects artist Screaming Mad George and went all out on the film’s final sequence, using Dalí’s painting The Great Masturbator as one particular influence.

The opening credits of Society project over dark images of that final scene, zoomed in so that it’s difficult to discern what is going on. Clearly, something sinister, sexual, and slimy is afoot—we just can’t tell exactly what. Everything that follows, although worthwhile, is merely leading up to that grand finale that trumps everything that came before.

Society stars Billy Warlock as Bill Whitney, a Beverly Hills teen who feels out of place in his snobby, upper-crust family. His parents, Jim (Charles Lucia) and Nan (Connie Danese), obviously favor his younger sister, Jenny (Patrice Jennings), who regularly dismisses Bill with a vapid smile. The family disapproves of his friend Milo (Evan Richards), who is intimated to be Jewish, and Jenny’s ex David Blanchard (Tim Bartell), both of whom carry suspicions about the Whitney family. Blanchard soon approaches Bill with an illicit recording of Jenny’s “coming-out party,” which sounds more like a murderous orgy than a debutante ball. Now that Bill’s fears are piqued, the film turns noirish, with nods to Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Blanchard is quickly killed off—or is he?—and Bill hooks up with Shauna (Heidi Kozak), one of the strangest femme fatales ever to grace the screen. She’s a member of the nefarious society, but also seems to have a screw loose. Dipping into several different genres, Yuzna’s movie remains delightfully campy, which, of course, provides a perfect backdrop for satire. Society is also relentlessly kinky—for example, when Shauna offers Bill a post-coital cup of tea, she asks: “Cream, sugar, or do you want me to pee in it?”

After some more hijinks and a quick game of cat and mouse, Bill arrives back at the family mansion, where he witnesses the mammoth orgy, which includes a grotesque ritual known as “shunting.” However, before the festivities begin, a policeman apprehends Bill in the main hall using a catchpole meant for a large animal. It is genuinely chilling to watch Bill sweating and restrained on the floor as the society members humiliate him and force him to preview the horrific shunting. But other than those brief moments of genuine discomfort, the sick ceremony is actually fun to watch, in all of its foul, goopy glory. It may be disgusting, but it is also entirely bloodless, so it shocks and offends in a different way than a gory slasher would. Bodies meld, melt, and transform under gallons of shiny lubricant as the rich literally feed off of one poor victim at the center of it all, soon to be “shunted,” or turned inside out through his ass. The whole ceremony is inherently sexual, as strange body parts make familiar movements, and one woman gobbles up her partner’s eyeball with nymphatic fervor. It is also wonderfully surreal, as Bill’s parents and sister break off into a separate bedroom and form their bodies into a kind of exquisite corpse, or a bizarre totem pole of body parts, with Jim occupying the now-infamous “butthead” position in the configuration.

I recently told a friend that I was writing about this film, and their response was, “Is that the film with the butthead?”—which I believe to be indicative of the film’s cult status. Shot in early 1989, Society played at the Cannes Film Festival later that year, but was not released until 1992 in the U.S., where it was poorly received. It initially gained a better response overseas, but as time passed it developed a strong following in its home country. As campy as the film is, its themes are still pertinent, while upper-crust societies rage on and continue to feed off the poor in countries throughout the world. That’s no joke, so it’s nice to watch a sticky satire like Society to get away from it all.