On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with midnight movies from any moment in film history.
First, the BAIT: a weird genre pick and why we’re exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, “Is this old cult classic actually worth recommending?”
The Bait: Stars, Stripes, and… Shunting?
There’s a smorgasbord of Fourth of July thrillers and horror movies worth checking out in these Trying Times. Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out” gets a strong reaction from anyone living in fear of the alleged police state, and you can’t celebrate the 50th anniversary of Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” without mentioning it as one of pop culture’s great indictments on local government.
Corruption is still the name of the game in this week’s After Dark — Brian Yuzna‘s eye-bursting, jaw-dropping, spine-inverting “Society” — but Independence Day and the fall of democracy don’t directly factor into his shocking directorial debut. A masterful entry in body horror, Yuzna’s gross-out satire about extreme wealth is set in a strange cult lurking beneath the shiny veneer of Beverly Hills. The movie had its world premiere in 1989, but “Society” wouldn’t get a wide release in the United States for three more years. That’s despite a notorious must-see ending (with special effects from genre legend Screaming Mad George) and buzzy popularity among European and UK audiences.
Billy Warlock stars as Big Beautiful Bill Whitney: a high schooler who doesn’t fit in with his well-to-do family from Southern California. As a creepy sense of capitalist consumption circles mom Nan (Connie Danese), dad Jim (Charles Lucia), and oddly sexy sister Jenny (Patrice Jennings), Bill can’t help but wonder if they know something about the scary feelings he shared with his shrink (Ben Slack). A grab-bag cast of archetypes flesh out the rest of this chunky puzzle written by Woody Keith and Rick Fry.
Not unlike our country’s current predicament, “Society” is a slow-burn, suburban-centric mystery (somewhat akin to a neutered “Blue Velvet”?) that explodes into a grotesque display of gore and neoliberalism. U.S. distributors were deterred by Yuzna’s frivolous approach to subjects like class war, violence, and incest. 36 years later, that hasn’t stopped Trump from ruling over the Republican party.
This past week, Congress passed seismic legislation widely expected to benefit the rich and decimate the poor. Watched in the middle of what could be a deathblow for the American Dream, “Society” won’t make you feel “better.” But there’s something to be said for using its gelatinous feel as a kind of shunt [spoiler-filled wink] for seriocomic catharsis. Whether you’re distracted by your phone, doom-scrolling on social media — or rewinding to double-check, “Are her boobs and butt really pointing… the SAME WAY?” — this will scratch the fold in your brain where the far-right meets billionaires like Jeff Bezos.
“Society” is streaming on Night Flight Plus, Fandango at Home, FuboTV, and more.
The Bite: We Are Failing Our Boys!
With his skin ripped, sucked, and absorbed in countless different directions by the cannibalistic and orgiastic elite, Bill’s friend and eventual shunting victim David Blanchard (Tim Bartell) embodies a literal argument against gerrymandering. It’s a miracle the utterly useless Milo (Evan Richards) gets away in the end, but there’s no doubt he’s voting — red, blue, pink, who cares — in the next election.
“The rich have always sucked off low-class shit like you,” might not be the most subtle dialogue ever written…. and that bizarre street fight with slick-back bully Ferguson (Ben Meyerson) makes zero sense. But what “Society” lacks in nuance and logic, it makes up for with Yuzna’s fierce commitment to rendering a practical hell on Earth. Released earlier this year, there’s a behind-the-scenes documentary about “Society” that picks apart the meaning of the script even further. It’s been divisive, but might be worth checking out if you’re interested in dissecting its story as an allegory for generational trauma.
There’s a metaphor about abortion access hiding somewhere between Bill’s two septic love interests, Shauna (Heidi Kozak) and Clarissa (Devin DeVasquez), too. But that’s hard to pin down in a film squishy enough to justify several different interpretations. No matter which read you pick, there’s no question that “Society” lets its final guy down in the end. Bill survives, but at what cost?
Watching “The Human Centipede” — aka the Authoritarian Communism of Extreme Horror Movies — genre fans agreed, “It would be the worst to be stuck in the middle.” Enduring “Society” as the world stands in 2025, it’s a toss-up whether it’s psychologically harder to be shunted first… or second. As the boundaries between right and wrong, and fact and fiction, start to blur, the Fourth of July feels an awful lot like waiting for the other goopy shoe (or is it foot?) to drop.