The Darkside of Society

- Okay, do something fancy darling.

Got you on video.

- I sat down to write "Society."

I felt naughty, I felt bad.

For me, it was like,

"Don't do it, don't touch it, don't go there.

Don't stir that up, leave that alone."

There were some really bad things that went on in there.

I was Truman, man, I was completely brainwashed, 100%.

100% means 100%, it means there is no thought

that it might be real.

(bright suspenseful music continues)

Everyone knows that story is real.

- 1988. - Just yesterday.

- When- - You look great, by the way.

You look great.

When Rick Fry. - Ah, ha.

- Grabbed me as I was coming outta my office

and handed me this,

the first draft of "Society."

And I had just finished a year of working with the

kind of insane Dan O'Bannon

on a project we called The Men

and it was about a woman who discovers

that all men are alien.

And it was this great, ironic paranoic,

real paranoic atmosphere.

And then he bailed on the project

and when Rick gave me this

and I read it, I went, "Wow, talk about paranoia."

- Recently recognized by Entertainment Weekly

as one of the best horror movies of the eighties

is 1989' "Society."

The directorial debut of Brian Yuzna.

Don't get too hot.

- "Society" offers a scathing satire.

Anything?

- A timeless comment on the division

between the rich and the poor,

featuring one of the most bizarre endings

in cinematic history

courtesy of special effects master Screaming Mad George.

"Society" is widely regarded

as one of the most influential genre films of its era.

- Every sort of horror film that was coming out

was a franchise sequel.

I mean, it was like "Friday the 13th,"

it was the latest "Nightmare on Elm Street,"

the new "Stepfather," there was "The Exorcist III."

I mean, all these films and you know,

okay, some of them are really good movies,

but they weren't anything really original.

And of course, and "Society" came along

and that's one of the reasons why I thought it would work.

(suspenseful rock music continues)

- This film came out after the era of gore

because slasher films and George Romero's zombie films

where we loved these movies because they were full of blood

and slashing and guts

and all the stuff that had now become illegal,

certainly in England,

but it had also been cracked down on in the US as well.

So horror movie directors had to get creative

with what they could get past censors at the time.

- Basic concept of this whole movie is the paranoia.

Its main concern was the ending festivity shunting,

crazy orgy, the original script was in a blood bath,

there was like really a cult madness,

you know, with just bloody everything.

Brian Yuzna didn't really want to go for a gore,

but he wanted to do something very, very fantastic.

And so listening to that,

and I asked him, "Well can we do Dali?"

And he said, "Well, that sounds good."

I brought two paintings of Dali,

one is called "Autumn Carnivals,"

which gives the whole essence of shunting

and another one is the "Premonition for Civil War."

This paintings also gives one of the structure,

or like the how they transform in the shunting.

It's a good example

of the way horror movies deal with

society's issues in their own unique way,

like the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"

dealt with McCarthyism,

"Dawn of the Dead" dealt with consumerism,

and this deals with the whole idea of the rich

feeding off the poor, literally.

- It is a microscope put onto an elite

upper class and how they feel they can tell anybody to do,

you know, when you think about it,

if you've got so much money, so much time to waste,

what are you gonna do?

You're gonna sort of like exercise

probably the worst tastes and the worst sort of

extremes that you're ever gonna go through.

- It's a shame that here in the States

there was a long drawn out problem getting into theaters

or even on video at the time.

It was held up for at least four years where

the film was creating a sensation in Europe

and we finally got to see it here in '92.

But you know it was maybe a little

too little, too late by that point.

I think sex is something that

Americans are a lot more prudish about,

especially in mainstream cinema.

We Brits we just lap it out,

we can't get enough sex in our movies,

but the Americans tend to shy away from it

and I think the sexual content of the movie

probably put a lot of Americans off.

Clarissa?

- Because it was such a strange film

I don't know that it was

considered among contemporary horror fans at the time as

a classic, but over time it has become that way

and it's one that's absolutely survived

because it's a quintessential example

of that kind of horror.

He looks really weird.

- "Society" has wormed its way into the consciousness

of a lot of today's horror filmmakers

like Gary Astor and Jordan Peele,

even though they've taken a different tangent

you could just feel that they must have been

watching this film on late night TV

when they were growing up.

- "Society" really, I guess, embodies that

basic paranoid archetype.

The notion that the whole world,

the conventional civilization, society is lying to us.

That our parents are lying to us.

- They don't approve of me, okay?

They, they, they don't accept my friends.

They don't, they don't talk to me like they do Jenny.

- That we are essentially being set up

for sacrifice or used as fuel or breeding stock by

a privileged inhuman elite

who are secretly manipulating world affairs.

The notion of quite who these elite are

changes from generation to generation

and I think in "Society" it quite wisely postulates

that they're not even human, but there are another species

which are essentially using us like cattle.

That the rich are truly different.

Perhaps it was in keeping with this theme that the movie was

publicized with the tagline, "This time it's for real."

- The phone rang and I picked it up in the,

there's a bedroom at the top of,

there's like a traditional house.

And I got it and you know, and

it was a person that says

they knew me and she had just read the script

and she said it was all true.

You have to understand I've been going

years and years and years

without anything like that bothering me.

So I kind of like, that was crazy.

You know calling me almost what from the casting office

and I ran into Brian, I ran back to the room.

She, I mean, she just called up

and she said it was all true.

She found these Polaroids and I never said to Brian

what was on them or anything like that,

but you know and then Brian said,

and I mean this is my memory,

said, "I don't want you to be hurt.

I don't want you damage from this,

we can just pull the production."

She mentioned the Polaroids because she wanted me

to understand that this is not just opinion.

She addressed me as if I wrote the screenplay

and didn't know what I wrote, that's the other main thing.

She wanted to tell me,

in case you don't know this is real, it's real.

It happened, it's happening, the Polaroids.

She also indicated that everybody knew.

Everybody knew.

Everyone knows that story is real.

But what I saw when I was a child, what happened to me

was, yeah, there was Satanic ritual abuse,

that is a satanic ritual involving children and adults

being groomed for sex, okay?

And orgies and things like that and also assaults,

you know, rape assault and all those things

that happened to my brother, it happened to me,

and happened to, well, in the words of some of these people,

like in the words of my own mother, it was like,

"Well, that happens to everybody."

A lot of it's like they're all tied in with witchcraft

and sorcery and satanic rituals are for power,

power to influence people, power to hurt people.

They don't need to believe in Satan to be a satanist,

they don't even have to believe in

any kind of gods or anything.

To be a a satanist is really more about

the sacraments of death and the sacraments of perversion

and that's what it really is.

It's everything opposite of what's good.