Brian Yuzna: The Society of Splatter

Brian Yuzna’s directing debut ends with the rich eating the poor, and it means this at the level of anatomy. The wealthy of Beverly Hills strip off, liquefy, and physically merge with the bodies of the young people they have been grooming, in a twenty-minute orgy of prosthetics that the effects artist Screaming Mad George named “the shunting”. Hands emerge from mouths. A torso becomes a doorway. Society was shot in 1989; its American distributor waited until 1992 to release it, which tells you exactly how well the industry took the news.

That literalism is the Yuzna signature and the reason his career is more coherent than its scattered credits suggest. He is a producer by temperament — a man who identifies talent, assembles money, and gets a film finished — and when he directs, the thing he directs is a metaphor being taken at its word until it bleeds.

The producer who made the eighties happen

Before any of his own films, Yuzna produced the two pictures that define American Lovecraft cinema. He met Stuart Gordon in Chicago, talked him out of the television-series plan, and produced Re-Animator (1985) as a feature. Then From Beyond (1986), then Dolls (1987). He also produced Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), from a story he developed with Gordon and Ed Naha — a fact that mildly delights everyone who learns it, since the same partnership that gave Disney its biggest live-action hit of the decade had spent the previous four years photographing a talking severed head.

Yuzna’s role in those films is easy to undervalue and hard to overstate. Gordon supplied the theatre discipline and the tone; Yuzna supplied the belief that a thirty-seven-year-old stage director with no film experience should be given a camera and a corpse. Nearly every producer in Los Angeles could have made that call. One did.

The shunting

Society (1989) runs for an hour as a fairly ordinary paranoid thriller about a Beverly Hills teenager, Bill Whitney, who suspects his family are not what they appear. Billy Warlock plays him with a scrubbed television blandness that turns out to be the joke. The mounting evidence is deliberately unconvincing — a tape recording, a body that vanishes, a sister behaving strangely — and Yuzna keeps the register at the level of a 1980s afterschool special about privilege.

Then the last reel arrives and the film becomes the most extreme thing anyone had put on screen in a decade. Screaming Mad George, a Japanese effects artist and former punk musician, built the shunting as an unbroken physical event: bodies pouring into bodies, a hand emerging from a mouth, a man turned inside out and worn. It is the rare effects sequence that carries the argument rather than decorating it. The wealthy in Society are a different species who feed on the ordinary, and the film declines to soften that into allegory. They are literally a different species. They literally feed.

Read it alongside Snowpiercer or any of the modern eat-the-rich films and the difference is nerve. The polite version keeps the metaphor at metaphor distance so the audience can enjoy the politics without the taste. Yuzna puts the taste in your mouth.

The mechanics: hire the maniac, hold the tone, spend it all at the end

Yuzna’s craft is the craft of a producer directing, and it has a specific shape.

He casts his effects team the way other directors cast leads. Screaming Mad George on Society, then again on Bride of Re-Animator and Return of the Living Dead 3; the collaboration is the authorship. Yuzna’s contribution is structural — he builds a film whose entire architecture is a delivery system for one sequence, and then protects the budget for it by shooting everything else flatly and quickly. It is a deeply unfashionable way to make a film and it is why his best work has a shape nobody else’s has: eighty minutes of competent setup, twenty minutes of the sublime.

He also holds tone with real discipline. Viewers who find the first hour of Society dull have identified the technique and mistaken it for a failure: it is a controlled imitation of a Reagan-era teen drama, right down to the tennis, the convertible and the therapy sessions, and it commits so completely that the film reads as tame. The shunting detonates because the setup was so obedient. A director who winked in reel two would have nothing to detonate, which is the trap most eat-the-rich horror walks into — signalling its cleverness from the first scene and arriving at the feast with the audience already ahead of it.

The third element is the practical effect as thesis. Yuzna’s horror is always about the body’s boundaries failing, and a physical effect fails at exactly the boundary the audience is watching — latex against skin, in the same light, on the same day. It puts him squarely in the body horror lineage alongside Cronenberg, working the class end of the same street.

The sequels, and the best one nobody expects

Bride of Re-Animator (1990) is Yuzna’s second film and Gordon’s absence is felt — the West-and-Cain rivalry loses the theatrical crackle — though the finale, a woman assembled from the parts of other women who is then asked to consent to her own existence, is a genuinely upsetting idea executed with total commitment.

Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993) is the surprise. The original is a punk comedy; Yuzna’s third instalment is a tragic romance about a boy who reanimates his dead girlfriend and watches her manage her hunger by driving metal through her own flesh. Melinda Clarke’s Julie is one of the great horror creations of the decade — a young woman whose self-mutilation is a discipline rather than a symptom — and the film is sincerely sad in a way the series had no obligation to attempt. It is the strongest thing Yuzna directed.

Necronomicon (1993) is an anthology in which he directed the wraparound and the final segment, with Christophe Gans and Shusuke Kaneko taking the others. The Dentist (1996) and its sequel gave Corbin Bernsen a career in torment. Progeny (1998) came from a Gordon and Dennis Paoli story.

Barcelona

Then the most interesting act, and the one that gets forgotten: from 2000 Yuzna ran the Fantastic Factory at Filmax in Barcelona, an attempt to build a standing genre studio in Spain producing English-language horror on European money. It made Gordon’s Dagon (2001), Jaume Balagueró’s Darkness (2002), Romasanta, Arachnid, and Yuzna’s own Faust: Love of the Damned (2000), Beyond Re-Animator (2003) and Rottweiler (2004). The factory folded after roughly five years. Its output is patchy and its ambition was real, and the Spanish horror wave that followed had a shop floor to learn on partly because Yuzna built one.

There is a personal footnote to the Barcelona years worth recording. Yuzna was born in Manila in 1949 and raised largely in Central America, and the decision to relocate an American horror operation to Europe rather than fight for scraps in Los Angeles looks, from this distance, like the instinct of someone who never regarded the American industry as the natural centre of anything. The Fantastic Factory’s economics were sound on paper — Spanish tax structures, cheap crews, English-language product for the international market — and the model has since been run successfully by other people in other countries. He was early and under-capitalised, which is the usual epitaph.

The case against

Most of his filmography is mediocre, and pretending otherwise is fandom rather than criticism. Faust is incoherent. Beyond Re-Animator is a contractual exercise. The Fantastic Factory films are frequently under-lit and over-plotted, and Yuzna’s direction of actors — set beside Gordon’s rehearsed ensembles — is often flat enough that performers seem to be waiting for the effects to arrive. The eighty-minutes-of-setup structure is a virtue in Society and an excuse everywhere else.

The honest verdict is that he made one masterpiece, one very good film, and enabled two more that he did not direct. That is a better career than almost anyone in low-budget horror manages, and Society alone has outlived thousands of more competent pictures because it has an idea and the stomach to finish it.

Start with Society, then Return of the Living Dead 3. Both have had loving restorations from the boutique labels; Society’s finale is best met without any further description than the one you have already had, which is a great deal more than I had at fifteen, watching a tape somebody’s brother had brought back from Europe.

Spoilers below

Society’s last twist is the one people forget between viewings. Bill survives the shunting, and the film’s final beats reveal that his sister Jenny is one of them, that he was adopted as livestock, and that Clarissa — the girl who saves him — is also one of them and has simply chosen him. He escapes into a world where the species that owns everything now knows he can identify it. Yuzna closes on a joke, a hand reaching into a torso and pulling out a lump the film treats as a punchline, and the tonal whiplash is the point: after what you have watched, comedy is the only available exit.

Return of the Living Dead 3 ends with Julie and Curt embracing inside an incinerator, choosing cremation together, and Yuzna shoots it as a wedding. The trioxin gag from the earlier films — the dead cannot die, only burn — becomes the only romantic gesture available. It is the most tender ending in any zombie film, and it is in the third instalment of a punk comedy franchise, which is roughly the most Yuzna sentence available.