Society
Society is a 1989 American and Japanese body horror film directed by Brian Yuzna.
A Beverly Hills teenager suspects his family are not human. The last twenty minutes prove it, wetly.
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Bill feels like he does not belong in his wealthy family. He is right. The rich of his neighbourhood are a separate species that feeds on the poor, literally, in a ritual called the shunting.
Brian Yuzna, who produced Re-Animator, made his directorial debut a blunt class allegory that spends an hour as a paranoid teen drama and then delivers one of the most extreme practical-effects sequences ever filmed.
The Japanese effects artist Screaming Mad George built the finale, a party in which the bodies of the wealthy merge, invert and consume, and it is truly unlike anything else: bodies stretched into impossible shapes, a hand emerging from a mouth.
The metaphor is not subtle and does not need to be. The rich eat the poor.
It flopped in America and was a hit in Britain, and the shunting is the reason it survives.
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Trailer
The sleeves
The same film, sold as a different film in each territory. Click any of them.
Where to watch
UK
Legal sources only. Availability data from JustWatch via TMDB.
Checked 10 Aug 2026
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