Society, starring Billy Warlock, Devin DeVasquez, Evan Richards, and Ben Meyerson, is a 1989 American body horror film directed by Brian Yuzna. The story follows a Beverly Hills kid who fears his wealthy parents are members of a nefarious cult for the social elite. Rick Fry wrote the screenplay, with Woody Keith conceiving and writing the story. It was Yuzna’s directorial debut. Screaming Mad George did all of the special effects. It is body horror, and it is a little gooey, but it is also a conspiracy horror movie. From the first seconds of the film, we are left wondering what is real and what is in Billy’s mind. It is an intriguing mash-up of all things gruesome, with equal parts pitch-black comedy and horror.
With abandon, the script tosses in a range of sexual perversions and obsessions. Watersports, voyeurism, and exhibitionism are all highlighted. It is body horror, and it is a little gooey, but it is also a conspiracy thriller. From the first seconds of the film, we are left wondering what is real and what is in Billy’s head. It is an intriguing mash-up of all things gruesome, with equal parts pitch-black comedy and horror. Society has recently been rediscovered by horror film culture as a film that was ahead of its time and underrated for how well-made it was. Today, we are going to dissect it for you.
If you don’t belong, they’ll eat you alive – Society (1989)
The story centers around Bill Whitney who enjoys the benefits of upper-class, worry-free life in Beverly Hills, California, at the pinnacle of the grabby-greedy ’80s. So, what’s the big deal? He has a therapist called Dr. Cleveland with whom he can discuss his unfocused, free-floating anxiety, and he is surrounded by a social validation network. Billy’s therapy sessions with Dr. Cleveland were actually not part of the original script. They were added during the filming process to help improve the storyline. In fact, The Spiral Staircase (1946) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) were two of the film’s strongest influences, according to Brian Yuzna, especially in terms of paranoia as a significant theme which strongly present throughout Billy’s experiences.
That includes Clarissa Carlyn, Billy’s gorgeous girlfriend and a replacement for the even shallower Barbie doll who dumps Billy because he lacks social status. The problem begins here as we see Billy experience intense Paranoia and even delusions leading him to think that something is wrong and that he might be adopted because he looks absolutely nothing like the rest of his family. However, a friend of a friend plays him a video of what Billy’s family says behind his back, then later of an exclusive party that sounds like an orgy in Hell. Billy is lured to the heart of a web that leads to unpleasant and frightening revelations as he works his way through the mystery.
Bill begins to suspect that his thoughts are justified after his sister’s ex-boyfriend David Blanchard delivers him a secretly recorded audio of what sounds like his family indulging in a deadly orgy – making him the friend of a friend that gives him the potentially damning tape. This causes him to spiral as he believes his suspicions of things being horribly wrong have finally been confirmed.
He also sees his sister in a weird, contorted position which makes him even more creeped out. Interestingly, Director Brian Yuzna felt another startling sequence was needed earlier in the film, therefore in this scene when Billy watches Jenny’s body contort in the shower was inserted during production.
When Bill hands the tape over to Dr. Cleveland, he discovers that the audio has been modified to his sister’s coming-out celebration. When Bill goes to see Blanchard for a second copy, he discovers an ambulance and cops gathered around Blanchard’s crashed van. Bill is unable to see the face of the body placed in the back of the ambulance.
Billy then goes to a party held by his upper-class classmate Ted Ferguson, who confirms the authenticity of the first tape. Bill leaves the party, enraged and perplexed, with Clarissa, a lovely girl he had been eyeing. While hooking up with her, he notices the same body contortion.
Devin DeVasquez and one of DeVasquez’s pals, who was buried under the sheets with her legs exposed, were used to create the shot of Clarissa contorted in bed. Clarissa’s body looks to be twisted in an unusual posture since the two were put at such an angle. Bill confronts his parents and sister the next day. Bill and his friend Milo find that Blanchard’s body may be a fake at Blanchard’s burial.
Martin Petrie, Bill’s competitor for the high school presidency, contacts him. Bill arrives at their scheduled meeting to find Petrie’s throat slit. The body is gone when he returns with the cops. Petrie shows up to school the next day, alive and well. When Bill returns home, he confronts his family once more, but they drug him with the help of Dr. Cleveland.Bill is brought to a hospital while Milo follows him. Bill wakes up in a hospital bed, thinking he hears Blanchard scream, but there is no one around. Milo attempts to warn him, but he returns to his home.
Bill returns home to see a large, formal gathering and this is the beginning of the famously gory orgy-like climax. Bill’s family and their high-society pals are actually a different species than Bill, according to Dr. Cleveland. They were apparently species that have been around as long as humans have and have, through breeding managed to take most of the rich, famous, and influential under their control – but more on that later. They drag in a still-living Blanchard to illustrate what exactly was going to happen to Billy.
It is revealed that Billy is adopted and was raised by his family as a sacrifice for society. The rich partygoers strip down to their underwear and begin “shunting” – physically deforming and fusing with one another – as they suck Blanchard’s nutrition and absorb him. A shunt is a hole or a small tube in the body that permits fluid to flow from one portion of the body to another. Congenital or acquired shunts can be biological or mechanical, and acquired shunts can be biological or mechanical.
It is quite possibly some of the goriest and gross scenes in cinema which does remind one of the 1992 horror film, Braindead. Brian Yuzna would hang a sign on the sound stage door that said “Abandon all hope ye who enter here” while filming the famed “shunting” sequences. He also refrained from using any blood because he was afraid of retribution from the MPAA.
The hidden society was exposed as a cult in the original script, and it was out to sacrifice Billy for its own bizarre purposes. However, Brian Yuzna and makeup artist Screaming Mad George wanted a far more amazing reveal, so they came up with the notion of the society being hideous animalistic species that ate the lesser classes. For the shunting finale, a dozen crew people were used to manipulate the huge, deformed puppet. The puppet was relocated from the stage floor, where the crew workers were hidden, to the front of the stage.
They planned to also devour Bill, but he manages to flee and run around the home, where he discovers his family indulging in similarly repulsive behavior. He is attacked and followed from all angles however, things come to a head when he approaches Ferguson for a showdown and kills him by reaching inside him and dragging him inside-out in the middle of a shunt. Finally, with the help of Milo and Clarissa, Bill is ultimately able to flee. Turns out that Clarissa fell in love with Billy even though she herself was also a socialite and tried helping Billy every time she could.
Brian Yuzna claims that he back-engineered the film’s storyline points based on special effects concepts or gimmicks, claiming that the surrealism of the story was more important to him than the logic. This is evident as the film focuses heavily on the suspense, surrealism, paranoia, and body horror elements.
Mutated Shape-Shifting Monster
Now to make a deep dive into the biggest, most mind-bending question, who are these people, what species do they belong to, and what is their end goal? These monsters look completely human and one would not even give them a second glance however, there seems to have something heavily unsettling about them. They seem to either be extremely suave or obsessed with sex and interpersonal interaction is quite creepy as seen in the case of Bill’s sister, father, and mother – charged with this sort of hyper-sexual energy. Thus, the Socialites have the appearance of an average affluent, aristocratic person. They may, however, change their bodies into bizarre forms and fuse into a massive solid mass.
The understanding that they are able to change their bodies and shapeshift is introduced slowly in the film as Billy sees his own sister in an unthinkable position and then he sees Clarissa contort to an inhuman level – and no, we’re not talking about contortionist-level but something way, way worse and terrifying to look at. The fact that this happens while they are getting intimate, makes it much worse for poor Billy and us. The fact that they are a sex cult is also dropped on the audience as we realize that Billy’s sister has had sex with her own parents and that is a part and parcel of being in the cult, especially the initiation ritual.
The final climax is where we sort of understand who they are and what they want, although it is still left quite ambiguous. We learn that years of selective breeding have allowed a small group of aristocratic individuals to morph their body parts and even merge together. Billy repeatedly calls them aliens and belonging to an alien species, to which they take some offense, re-iterating that they aren’t alien and have been on Earth for as long as humans have.
This seems to be taken from conspiracy theories of lizard people walking among us and actually making up a majority of the elite, influential individuals that have a lot of say in worldly matters. We also learn that these mutated shape-shifting monsters are not limited to Beverly hills but are spread all over America. This cult is present in places of importance everywhere. In fact, with the exception of Ted Ferguson, who is turned inside out by Billy, none of the Socialites are killed by the end of the film, allowing them to continue to spread towards Washington, D.C.
The Socialites may moderately shape-shift and unite with one another, resulting in a nasty, gigantic mass of skin and organs covered in clear ooze. Their powers are attributed to “impeccable breeding,” according to them. They are insanely wealthy and massively influential and they literally, ‘eat’ the lower classes. Their organs and vitality are sucked out by this group of elites as they only feast on the poor and non-famous. Amongst themselves, their activities are only for the purpose of carnal pleasure. They are obviously heavily investing in keeping their secret. This is evident by their growth in numbers, wealth, and influence. And they do this by literally devouring anyone who squeals at their gory secret.
Billy does get away at the end of the film, even when he is warned by his adoptive father that he will never truly get away with what he had done and the Society would definitely find him and hold him accountable. What Society has in store with regards to its future is something that is unanswerable as they now have 3 teenagers on the run, with all the information they need to blow it all up and grab the headlines.
As of 2013, a sequel, Society 2: Body Modification, was in the works, with a script by Stephan Biro but it seems to have been shelved because it has now been 9 years post the announcement with not a peep from Biro, Yuzna or any of the others that were involved in the making of the first film.
Why should you watch Society?
Society becomes more relevant with each passing year in an age when terms like “the one percent” and “Occupy Wall Street” are widespread. It’s a sour parody of class conflict, satire being yet another element that has to be reintroduced into modern horror cinema in the worst possible way. We’re not talking about the Scary Movie franchise; we’re talking about the type of satire that takes a panic tale from the news and exaggerates it to criticize either the fear or the situation that caused it.
Society takes aim at the “greed is good” age of the 1980s in its own rough-and-ready, unsubtle style. And, like Swift’s 18th-century essay, Society’s conclusion makes a timeless observation about the divide between the wealthy and the rest of us – here, the wealthy are truly a breed apart – a shapeless, gelatinous mass of champagne and costly underwear. “The affluent have always sucked off low-class crap like you,” Ferguson sneers at Bill in high school.
It’s the quintessential late-eighties cult film. Billy Warlock does an excellent job at making the audience feel nervous throughout the film, making it even more enjoyable to watch. Screaming Mad George, a Japanese special effects artist, has made one of the biggest contributions to Society.
He realizes Yuzna’s gloopy, sexual vision, which goes into overdrive in the film’s mesmerizing last third, as suggested by producers Keizo Kabata and Terry Ogisu. Society shifts gears from fear and loathing in the style of the 1950s to something even more explicit. The darkness that has been lurking beneath the surface explodes into full view, engulfing Billy and the audience like a picture by Dali, Goya, or Bosch come to life in the most terrible and spine-chilling way.
Sure, it’s strange, and that’s saying a lot. In this film, crazy moments, cult dynamics, and moral dictates are Brian Yuznas’ brilliance. This film skillfully builds tension, and the ending is terrifying, frightening, and makes you look over your shoulder, just as a good horror film should!