The Eighth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE EIGHTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Society (1989), directed by Brian Yunza. This is a wild horror satire featuring lots of gloriously gooey practical creature effects. 

It’s about how the rich really are different from you and me, on a physiological level. In fact, they belong to a distinct species of incestuous shapeshifting parasites. Similar to the collective alien organism in John Carpenter’s The Thing, members of this Society all share one flesh. This allows them to transform into and borrow body parts from one another. 

This is all revealed in the literally orgiastic final ten minutes. Over the course of the main character’s increasingly paranoid investigation into his community’s upper crust, we are offered only brief hints of the monstrosities to come, like peeks between seams of a carnival sideshow tent. The movie’s restraint in saving everything for the finale, after an hour of tense build up, pays off fantastically by plunging us headlong into the boundlessly grotesque nightmare of the Society’s fleshy delights. Society’s creatures are made all the more menacing by how self-consciously cartoonish they are and how giddily confident they feel in their apex-predator status. And like They Live (released the year prior)—and other classic ‘80’s horror movies that got away with making unsubtly leftist statements by working outside the Hollywood system—Society’s memorable reveals all serve its scathing condemnation of capitalist elitism. 

“You’re not one of us. You have to be born into the Society,” a judge who is also a human-flesh devouring monster explains to the protagonist—which gets us back to our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme. Society’s subspecies of skin-walking shapeshifters occupy a diametrically opposite position on the pecking order from Us’s subterranean mirror people. Here, ordinary humans are under the elongated, pulsing thumb of a group of creatures who can wear any face that suits them and who are so literally tight-knit that their distinct identities have been smeared away with conformity to the hive. Our suspicion that members of the upper class in control of business, government, law enforcement, and the media are not what they seem, are in reality wearing duplicate human faces over lustily writhing tentacles, has rarely been so boldly illustrated as in Society. But which is it? Are doppelgängers our miserable shadows lurking beneath us, waiting for their hour of vengeance—or are they triumphant bourgeois overlords, masquerading in the public eye as humans that look and act like us, but ghoulishly feasting upon us behind country club doors?