Society

At least initially, Brian Yuzna's Society plays with a similar psychosexual disquiet as John Carpenter's Halloween. Billy Warlock, playing the 17 year old Bill Whitney when he was himself in his mid-20s, paces around a dark household whilst someone - presumably his parents and their friends - are having sex in a bedroom upstairs. Bill's response to this disconnected swinging is to to rifle through a kitchen drawer and seize on a knife, holding it close to his chest. Where a young Michael Myers felt empowered enough to sweep upstairs and kill his sister, Bill remains trapped downstairs. The teenager is frozen, intimidated by whatever it is that is taking place in his parent's bedroom. This fear marks Bill as the odd one out in his family. His parents openly flirt with his sister, and she with them. These three relations are happy to openly paw at each other, while wearing very little, much to Bill's obvious and understandable alarm. 

Warlock's teenager is surrounded by strange sexual energies, all aggressively inappropriate and played at a pitch, in this upper middle-class American suburb, that seems to denote an incestuous conspiracy. In its beginnings, Yuzna's film appears to be using the stilted pageantry of coming-out parties or debutante ceremonies as a way to denote a passage into the secrets of the cultish adulthood that rules this neighbourhood. Patrice Jenning's Jenny, Bill's older sister, has gone on ahead, joining her parents in their grown up world and leaving her little brother behind. In spite of this obvious point of allegorical friction, there's precious little connective tissue between Bill and Jenny. If anything she seems to regard him with a light curiosity rather than any familial affection. They are always distinct parties, each never taking the other into their confidence. Bill, for his part, nurses a desire to inspect his sister, watching agog as her body contorts in a masturbatory ecstasy behind frosted glass. 

Nakedness is linked with terror throughout Society, the human body twisting in ways it shouldn't be capable of. Sometimes this happens willingly, equally as often not. The finale, in which the rich and powerful of Beverly Hills are revealed to be an extremely callous sub-species of human able to combine their ageing bodies into a massive ravenous goop, appears to be premised on the childlike panic of witnessing a sexual act with no prior frame of reference. Screaming Mad George's glistening special effects work depicts the prolonged and violent rape of a teenage boy by a cackling country club set. They gleefully invade the young man's body, digesting him alive. As a viewer we are forced into the position of being an innocent, observing these blubbery bodies as they fuck and intertwine in alien intercourse. We judge them to be inherently violent, cannibalistic entities, rutting away with abandon. After all, they are all plainly feasting on each other. Yuzna's film even goes one step further: as horrifying as it would be to witness your parents locked in a strange or aberrant embrace, it would be truly nightmarish to then be expected to join in.