Brian Yuzna’s Society is the film where Screaming Mad George got full creative freedom, and he spent all of it on one idea: the human body rejecting its own rules. The climax — the “shunting” — depicts Beverly Hills’ elite dissolving into a single writhing, melting orgy of shared tissue. It stands as a landmark of physical effects work and of Salvador Dalí-filtered-through-Cronenberg surrealism, and it is the single most-cited sequence in his career.
What the Shunting Actually Is
Critics reviewing Society keep reaching for the same pairing: Dalí meets Cronenberg. Where the era’s other masters — Stan Winston, Rick Baker — aimed for biological realism, George abandoned the pretense of reality entirely. The shunting isn’t anatomy gone wrong; it’s dream logic made of foam latex. Bodies stretch, merge, and fold into each other in ways that are deliberately impossible, executed with materials so tactile that the impossibility feels wet and present.
He put his mission statement plainly in an interview: he liked “doing something unreal but doing it so realistically that everyone gets nauseated.”
Built In-Camera, Like Everything He Does
No digital assistance — foam latex, rubber, slime, and puppetry, all photographed live. This is the “Rebellion of Flesh” style at full power: chaotic, frenetic, rubbery, and paradoxically more convincing for how artificial it looks. The materials read on camera as flesh precisely because they behave like nothing flesh should do.
Legacy
Society was received poorly on release and grew into a cult masterpiece — with the shunting sequence routinely singled out as one of the great achievements of practical effects, full stop. It’s the reason critics argue for treating George as an effects auteur: his visual fingerprint is so strong that his contribution is instantly recognizable regardless of the film around it.