There are movies that scare you, movies that disgust you, and movies that make you look at your own family and wonder if maybe—just maybe—your mother is planning to liquefy your organs and absorb you into her upper thigh while your dad laughs and smokes a cigar. Brian Yuzna’s Society belongs squarely in that last category. It’s not just body horror. It’s Beverly Hills body horror. It’s the American Dream with a latex face and a sphincter where its nose should be.
Bill Whitney’s Suburban Nightmare
Billy Warlock plays Bill Whitney, a privileged Beverly Hills teenager who should be living a dream life: ocean views, nice cars, plastic smiles, the works. But instead, Bill feels like the cuckoo chick in the nest. He doesn’t trust his parents. He doesn’t trust his debutante sister. Hell, he doesn’t even trust his therapist, who listens with the same fake sympathy you’d give a child complaining about ghosts under the bed.
And why should he? Everyone around him radiates that Stepford smugness, the kind of just got back from a country club orgy glow. When Bill’s sister’s ex-boyfriend provides him with an audio tape that sounds like his entire family engaged in a slimy, sweaty murder-orgy, Bill realizes he’s onto something bigger than teen angst. Too bad every adult in his life gaslights him like he’s just another spoiled brat in need of a hug and a sedative.
The Rich Eat the Poor (Literally)
Yuzna, making his directorial debut, took what could’ve been a standard “rich cult sacrifices the poor” slasher flick and twisted it into something grotesque, brilliant, and disturbingly funny. The cult isn’t just sacrificing people. They’re feeding. They are an alien species—or maybe just a higher order of humanity—who literally shunt together in a writhing mass of flesh, absorbing nutrients from the bodies of “lesser” humans like David, the unlucky ex-boyfriend.
It’s the perfect metaphor for the rich. Forget trickle-down economics. In Society, wealth literally drips down your face while your intestines are slurped like spaghetti. Beverly Hills doesn’t just bleed you dry. It consumes you, cell by cell, until your body becomes a hors d’oeuvre.
The Party Scene: Cinema’s Most Disgusting Cotillion
And then there’s the shunting. Good God, the shunting. It’s the kind of sequence that makes you wonder how this movie got made without someone being arrested. The Beverly Hills elite strip down to their underwear and start melting into each other like wax figures left in the sun too long. Faces stretch, limbs dissolve, torsos morph into wet funnels of latex and KY jelly. A man’s head becomes part of someone else’s rear end. The judge in charge of the ceremony gets a little too enthusiastic with his tongue.
If H. R. Giger and Salvador Dalí got drunk together and directed an orgy in a Beverly Hills mansion, it would look like this. Screaming Mad George, the special effects genius behind the mayhem, doesn’t just create monsters—he creates a living metaphor for America’s ruling class: greedy, incestuous, and utterly in love with its own excess.
And then there’s the final cherry on top: Bill literally turning his rival Ted inside out during a fistfight. You’ve seen fights where the hero pulls a rabbit punch or a suplex. Here, the hero shoves his hand up Ted’s rear and pulls him inside out like a human sock. It’s so absurd you laugh. Then you gag. Then you applaud.
Satire With a Slimy Smile
The genius of Society is that it’s not just body horror for shock’s sake. It’s satire—sloppy, messy, and grotesque, but satire all the same. The rich aren’t just detached from the rest of us. They’re literally another species. Your boss doesn’t just want to exploit you. He wants to digest you.
Yuzna’s Beverly Hills is a nightmare where every smiling face hides teeth sharp enough to chew your femur. The whole movie plays like a parody of John Hughes comedies gone horribly wrong. Instead of wholesome teen drama, we get incestuous siblings, therapists in on the conspiracy, and parents who’d rather merge flesh than share a family dinner.
The message is obvious, but no less effective: wealth isn’t just corrupt—it’s carnivorous.
Performances: Soap Stars in Slime
Billy Warlock, fresh off Baywatch and Days of Our Lives, is a perfectly earnest everyman. His Bill is wide-eyed, paranoid, and increasingly sweaty, the only normal kid in a sea of plastic people. He grounds the movie—well, as much as anyone can while knee-deep in latex tentacles.
Patrice Jennings as his sister Jenny delivers the kind of performance where you’re not sure if she’s playing a spoiled brat, a victim, or a full-on incest enthusiast. Either way, it’s unsettling.
Ben Slack as Dr. Cleveland deserves a nod too. There’s something so wonderfully oily about a therapist who listens kindly while knowing full well he’s fattening you up for the buffet.
And then there’s Devin DeVasquez as Clarissa, the love interest who turns out to be part of the slime-people herself but switches sides because she likes Bill. Nothing says romance like betraying your species to avoid watching your boyfriend get absorbed into your dad’s butt cheeks.
A Cannes Darling Nobody Wanted at Home
Society actually premiered at Cannes in 1989, probably traumatizing some poor French film critic who came for Godard and got a Beverly Hills orgy. But in America, no distributor wanted to touch it. Too weird. Too slimy. Too naked. It sat on the shelf until 1992, when it slithered onto VHS and immediately found its cult audience—the kind of people who see “body horror orgy” on a tape cover and think, yes, Friday night plans sorted.
Over time, it’s gained a reputation not just as a cult curiosity, but as a genuine piece of horror history. It’s been dissected in academic papers, referenced in political critiques, and still grosses out new viewers three decades later. Few films manage to be both disgusting and intelligent, but Society pulls it off with a grin and a gallon of slime.
Why It Still Works
The practical effects are insane. The satire still stings. And the central metaphor—that the rich don’t just exploit us, they consume us—feels even more relevant in 2025 than it did in Reagan’s America. Today, billionaires don’t need to sprout tentacles to absorb the working class. They just need an app, a trademark lawyer, and a few politicians in their pocket.
Watching Society now feels like watching a prophecy. Beverly Hills hasn’t changed. The parties are still grotesque, the smiles still fake, and the rich still feed on the poor. They just don’t call it shunting.
Final Thoughts
Society is the rare horror movie that’s equal parts hilarious, revolting, and smart. It’s not perfect—sometimes the pacing drags, and the teen melodrama in the first half feels like a warmed-over 90210 episode—but when it hits, it hits like a baseball bat dipped in slime.
It’s body horror as social critique, a grotesque reminder that money doesn’t just buy privilege, it buys a ticket to a different species entirely. And once you’ve seen the shunting, you’ll never look at Beverly Hills the same way again.
