Society

Brian Yuzna wanted flesh that melts together. He told George the horror should come out of George’s own nightmares rather than the usual slasher inventory of cuts and stab wounds. In the finished film, the Beverly Hills rich are a separate species that feeds on everyone else. Executive producers Keizo Kabata and Terry Ogisu, representing the Japanese financing studio Shochiku-Fuji, had shown Yuzna George’s portfolio before the two ever spoke. Yuzna gave him the climax outright and did not ask for changes. ¹

George recalled getting a call to meet Brian Yuzna and finding the script hard to picture from the page alone. In Arrow Video’s featurette Society – The Arrow Video Story, a collaborator described him as a practical problem-solver, and George described his own process as instinctive and associative.

What the shunting actually is

The finished sequence — “the shunting” — shows the elite gathering in a country house and dissolving into one shared body. Skin stretches into other skin; limbs sprout from torsos that don’t own them and faces pull through other faces. George was working from Salvador Dalí, specifically Autumnal Cannibalism, filtered through H.R. Giger’s sense of anatomy as machinery. ¹ Yuzna said on camera that the goal was feeling rather than realism. George, separately, described the shunting as bystanders fusing with the victim and absorbing his body. These on-camera remarks, like the ones above, are paraphrased from captions, not from an audio-checked transcript: the Arrow featurette for Yuzna and the collaborator, and a 2014 exhibition talk for George.

Two gags stand out. The first is the one credited on set as “the Butthead”: Jim Whitney (Charles Lucia) grows a talking, animatronic face out of a sculpted replica of his own backside to mock his son Bill.

The second is Bill Whitney’s revenge on Ferguson: he drives his arm down Ferguson’s throat and pulls him inside out. The film shows the body turning into a soft, reversed mass. The internal rig remains undocumented.

The photographed result

The climax is a live, photographed mass: bodies stretch, performers disappear into one another and slime erases the boundary between skin and set. That much is visible. No timestamped crew account supports exact material recipes, quantities or operator assignments for it.

Release history

Society is dated 1989 but reached a U.S. release only in February 1992.