Society (1990)
Directed by Brian Yuzna
Bill Whitney is worried that he is different to his sister and parents. They mix with other upper-class people while Bill is more down to earth. Even his girlfriend seems a bit odd. All is revealed when Bill returns home to find a party in full swing.
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What critics compared Society to
While some films are invoked for more specific reasons, like the body horror of Brian Yuzna's cult horror-comedy Society and Ridley Scott's sci-fi slasher Alien, others like Hitchcock's Psycho become reference points without clear purpose, as though Fargeat were attempting to simultaneously pay homage to Hollywood's male-centric, female-focused horror canon while defying and deconstructing it.
In that vein, it makes sense to lean on Showgirls and Brian de Palma's Carrie and Brian Yuzna's Society and even Cronenberg's The Fly, but the late-inning embrace of the imagery of Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream feels slapdash, momentarily knocking The Substance off its axis.
But it’s hard, then, to square these images with what the director does next, as The Substance’s final stretch descends into a full-blown, blood-fountain homage to gross-out cult classics like Brian Yuzna’s 1989 horror film Society. It turns the body into a public spectacle and invites the audience in, a little too eagerly, to gawk at what has elsewhere been presented as such intimate, secret disgust.
Coming off as an unholy fusion between “The Portrait of Dorian Gray” and Death Becomes Her – with some loving nods to The Shining, John Carpenter’s The Thing and Brian Yuzna’s cult nightmare Society - The Substance is one hell of a wild ride.
Just as long as you’re not squeamish at the sight of blood, cascades of organs and the most grotesque prosthetic creations since 1989’s Society.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde initially seems to be a template, but Fargeat instead taps into hardboiled 1980s nightmare fuel, like Larry Cohen's The Stuff (1985), anything by Frank Henenlotter, and, in its final act, Brian Yuzna's Society (1989).
Men is a work of social horror, but it’s leavened with other strains, notably folk horror (it is the second A24 movie in as many years to draw upon the imagery of the green man and the woodwose) and body horror (as in a jaw-dropping finale, which brings to mind Brian Yuzna’s Society).
After a skin-crawling sequence in which Cassius is forced to “Rap! Rap! Rap!” by a roomful of drunk white partygoers, the narrative takes an O Lucky Man! -style left turn, unexpectedly recalling the cross-generic shuntings of Brian Yuzna’s seminal socio-economic comic-shocker Society .
One has to wonder whether Peele is a fan of Brian Yuzna’s 1989 “Society” and Wes Craven’s 1991 “The People Under the Stairs,” since there are echoes of both here.
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But the attempt at social commentary—along with the final revelation of who the family’s ultimate savior turns out to be (an outcome that the least-seasoned filmgoer will predict without any trouble)—is delivered with a hysterical sledgehammer, rather like the one Brian Yuzna used in his little-seen but similarly themed “Society” back in 1989.
This episode, which tries for a sense of surrealism it never achieves, pales in comparison to the similarly off-the-wall, but far more literal, portrayal of the rich feeding off the poor in Brian Yuzna’s wacky but oddly effective 1989 satire “Society.”
Yet as the plot progresses, the movie surprises us by veering into fascinatingly surrealist territory with shades of the 'rich literally feed off the poor' ending of Brian Yuzna's allegorical shocker Society.
Towards the end, the demons reconfigure as an amalgam of possessed people, multiple heads, arms and legs, a little like a mobile version of the infamous group sexual ‘shunt’ at the end of Society (Brian Yuzna, 1989).
And to be fair, it’s not like there haven’t been surrealist horror films that have gone and critiqued capitalist excess at its most gruesome and ludicrous (see La Grande Bouffe or Brian Yuzna’s Society for some great examples), but this film feels stuck between its filmmakers’ two competing and contrasting goals.
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But the notion that the less fortunate in society have been badly treated is really nothing new to the genre (see Brian Yuzna’s “Society” and Wes Craven’s “The People Under the Stairs” for examples—or even the “Purge” franchise), and the Peele doesn’t really make his point clearly enough to fully resgister.