In Society (1989), Beverly Hills high society feeds on people: its wealthy members belong to a separate species, and their survival depends on absorbing lower-class victims into their bodies.
Billy Warlock plays Bill Whitney, a wealthy high-schooler who feels increasingly alienated from his family. As he investigates their behavior and the disappearances around him, his suspicions lead him toward a ritual called the Shunting. The people running this world can fuse their bodies together, swallowing their victims into a communal mass of flesh.
That revelation gives the film’s class politics a biological mechanism. Membership in the elite is inherited, and everyone outside it is a potential meal. Bill’s money and comfortable upbringing offer him little protection from the people he’s grown up among.
Director Brian Yuzna made his feature debut with the film, taking a script originally built around cult sacrifice into body horror. He traced the concept to his own nightmares. The result moves from teenage paranoia and conspiracy into black comedy, with Screaming Mad George’s practical effects giving the final act its melting, merging bodies.
The sexual grotesquerie and absurd physical transformations make the feeding ritual both horrifying and comic. Even the music participates: the Eton Boating Song accompanies key moments, bringing an anthem associated with elite schooling into the film’s vision of inherited privilege.
Society screened at Cannes in 1989, but its U.S. release didn’t arrive until 1992. It found a more receptive audience in Europe and later built a cult following, helped by Arrow Video restorations.
