Society (1989)

The basic premise of Society, of an unhappy teenager uncovering the truth of, ahem, society, had its roots in a Dan O'Bannon script titled The Men, that Brian Yuzna and his regular collaborator Stuart Gordon had been trying to adapt as a feature film.

The story of The Men focused on a woman discovering the truth that all men on the planet are actually aliens, echoing similar themes of sexuality that O'Bannon had explored in his scripts for Ridley Scott's Alien and Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce.

Sadly The Men never came to be, as both O'Bannon and Gordon had to leave for other projects, but the script had resonated with Yuzna, and so influenced his decision to adapt another script that came his way; Society. Brian Yuzna explained years later;

"The Men was a very paranoid vision, a very paranoid world that I loved. Dan dropped out of the project at the beginning of 1988, when I finally got the financing, and then I didn't know what to do! At that time, my friend Keith Wally started with company with Paul White, and they were making low-budget movies. They said, 'Do you wanna do one of these?', I said yeah, and they had financing from Japan.

At that time a writer named Rick Fry came to see me at my office and gave me a script for Society that he had written with Woody Keith. When I read it, it had the same paranoia that The Men had (...) So I immediately glommed onto it, I felt I could just take the energy I had worked up for The Men and put it into Society."

The science-fiction trappings of The Men also left a mark on the Society project. In Rick Fry's original script, the evil socialites are merely just a blood-drinking Satanic cult, which Yuzna found to be unoriginal. "The difference was Society originally was just about a blood cult for these Beverly Hills people, and my taste has always been weirder stuff (...) and I'm really into movie effects. I decided to develop Society as something more than just a blood cult."

Yuzna's revised script replaced the cultists with alien shapeshifters, implied to have been on our planet long before humanity evolved. These beings didn't feed on other beings by biting and tearing but instead would merge with the victim's body, draining them into nothing.

Yuzna christened the ritualistic feeding as 'shunting' after a process in blood vessels, and would later discuss how the idea for this wildly new form of vampirism came to him from his childhood nightmares, as well as his love for Surrealist artwork.

"The earliest root I can think of for the shunting, would come from a movie I saw on late night TV called Doctor X. It had this stuff called 'synthetic flesh', and there's this great scene where this guys smears all this sythetic flesh all over himself, and boy that gave me nightmares!

I had all these nightmares about people's bodies touching and melding together. It's also tied in with stuff like werewolves, I think any fleshy transformation is kind of in the same bucket of horror or aesthetic imagery. And I'm a big fan of surrealism in art, I really like Salvador Dali.

That is the part of horror movies that I've always really liked, the part that's kinda bordering on the dream-like logic. That goes even further back than Surrealism, it's Expressionism, where what you put on the screen is to give you a feeling, not for realism.

I'm not a big fan of just doing a realistic movie, a Lumiere Brothers movie, coming out the factory. I want them to come out the factory a la Georges Méliès, and go up to the moon. I want the sets to be lit that gives you a feeling, not to make it seem like this is real."

Assorted preliminary maquettes.

It was only too fitting that the makeup effects for Society were to be handled by Joji Tano aka 'Screaming Mad George'. Tano, already an admirer of Surrealists such as Max Ernst and Salvador Dali, drew upon the latter painter's work as a visual reference for the transformations.

George named two paintings by Dali, 'Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War' and 'Autumn Cannibalism', as the main inspirations for his effects. According to George, Yuzna hoped that leaning into grotesque fantasy, as opposed to realistic violence, would keep the censors at bay. "Brian knows my mentor is Dali and he wanted a more fantastic, more surreal look and didn't want it really gross. He was afraid of an X rating."

George's team had Motoyoshi Hata (aka Moto Hata) credited as head technician, and Makio Kida as first technician. Roberto Depalma and Jeff Edwards were credited as foam technicians, with Kevin Reter and Leigh Stephens credited as fibreglass mold technicians.

The credited lab technicians were Nick Benson, Dave Grasso, Christopher Bergschneider, Lewis Lamonica, Guy Himber, Rebeca Ricio, Jennifer Martin and Johnny Saico. Philip J. Slaghter, Mitchell J. Greenblatt, Roy Garcia and Mike Johnson were credited as puppeteers.

Among the film's many prosthetics was a stretched mouth appliance on Ben Meyerson after he attempts to kiss Billy Warlock during their climactic fight. (I wish I could find any images of the backwards breasts and face on Patrice Jennings in the shower scene, or the 'glasgow smile' prosthetic on Ben Slack's evil psychiatrist, but haven't found anything yet...)

Several stretched face appliances were worn by extras in the 'shunting' sequence, with the stretched faces attached to several fake rubber body parts representing the victim they were feeding on. Dave Grasso recalled how tedious it was to keep the performers 'attached'!

"People were sucking on arms and legs, so we had to apply all these stretched faces to all these people that were already grafted onto body parts that we had. So they were having to hold the bodypart while we were trying to get the makeup on, which was really hard."

The demise of Meyerson's frat bro, where his eyes are popped out as he is pulled inside out, was a simple latex skin that was then covered in worms and slugs. Benson remembered an amusing detail about George and the creepy-crawlies.

"The funniest part of it all was that George was completely creeped out by slugs and all the stuff that we put on the body when we turned it inside out. We had worms, we had slugs, all kinds of disgusting things we put on it, and he didn't want to be within ten feet of it!"

The sequence where Ben Slack's crazed psychiatrist transforms his head into a massive hand, was actually based on 'Self Portrait', an artwork that George had done back in 1977 during his time studying at New York City's School of Visual Arts.

The hand head was a simple slip-on latex mask, with Slack also holding a stretched out dummy arm; the sequence was strategically shot to make it appear as if the arm was cartoonishly elongating towards the camera.

Another of Society's many grotesque images was when Charles Lucia's father has reshaped his so body so that he is now, as the scene goes, 'a butthead'. This was achieved as a sculpted posterior and legs that Lucia's own face could poke out of.

A similarly queasy visual was when Billy Warlock's stepmother and stepsister have merged together into a parody of a human body. This was achived as a performer wearing appliances over their legs that were sculpted to resemble arms, with a mask in Connie Danese's likeness.

The shot where the stepsister's head erupts out of the waste used a dummy head resembling Patrice Jenning. (Wish there was more behind the scenes images of this suit!)

The makeup effects team's piece de resistance was the 'shunting' in all its disgusting glory; a melding of human bodies twisted into unnatural shapes. This was realized as several props, with at least one prosthetic made for the ringleader's malformed visage.

Preliminary maquette for the shunting mass.

George remembered how challenging it was to realize. "The final shunting scene, that was a huge deal. I had to make five huge sculptures on the couch. We didn't really have much time, only a month and a half. I had to do each individual sculpture one day at a time! That week, I almost didn't sleep much at all. My sleeping was maybe just three hours a day.

My assistants were making the basic form with mesh wire, burlap and plaster, and once it's done I'm putting the clay over and sculpting the entire thing, one each day. You can tell how hard it was, because usually for (sculptures of) that size, you need four or five days at the least to sculpt each one! But we didn't have that luxury, so I did it, but it turned out really nice."

The shunting mass was actually a fairly simple prop, according to George. "There's practically nothing inside it. It's a soft polyfoam core. No radio controls, no cables. We're using (air) bladders for a more organic feeling. It's freer, more realistic; less expensive and more effect."

As usual for large puppets, the puppeteers would have to operate under the floor; a taxing job in usual circumstances, but Society's shunting sequence needed dozens of extras walking all over the set! Nick Benson recalled how chaotic it was. "I was inside that, for the shunting scene, I was in there with I don't know how many other puppeteers who were helping us out. I was under the 'centrepiece', and everything from hearing all the groans and grunts from all the people moving around this thing, I was having champagne dumped on my head."

Grasso also remembered the filming to be hectic thanks to the amount of extras. "It was just weird. We had to be under the floor, puppeteering this stuff. A few times actors would miss their mark and fall through the floor. It was bizarre, but everyone was into it, everyone was cool. It was really a fun set experience, but it was pretty disgusting!"

Society was not a critical or commercial success at the time of its release, but would go on to garner a cult following, partly thanks to the work of Screaming Mad George and his effects team. Screaming Mad George especially had fond feelings towards Society.

"I really love this movie because it was so much fun. It was extremely hard work, but it was me making my own work! It was a great collaboration with Brian Yuzna, he let me do so much fun stuff. I still think this is one of my favorite films that I worked on."

Sources:

• Fangoria #87 'Society and Me' by Chas. Balun
• 'Governer of Society' featurette
• 'Champions of the Shunt' featurette