If Alfred Hitchcock is the ‘master of suspense’, then I think we can call filmmaker Brian Yuzna the ‘master of disgust’ (or at least, one of the masters in this subtype of horror). Born in 1949, the American director and producer is best known for his work in the science fiction and horror genres, most notably Society (1989), an anti-capitalist satirical film that takes aim at the wealthy elite. (Body horror director David Cronenberg was a significant influence on Yuzna, particularly the way in which Cronenberg used body transformations to make thematic points, such as in his 1979 film The Brood and the 1983 film Videodrome.)
Society is widely considered boundary-pushing in the body horror genre. However, the body horror elements only really emerge, at least in full force, in the finale of the film, although there is a sense up until then that the wealthy elite of Beverley Hills are up to something nefarious. In the final scene, we see ‘shunting’, a secret ritual in which the social elite physically deform their bodies and merge with each other in a mass of flesh. During the shunting scene, they feast on David Blanchard (Tim Bartell) as a human sacrifice. Shunting is an incestuous, orgiastic, cannibalistic banquet.
The rich survive, literally, by feeding on the poor. It’s by no means a subtle commentary on capitalism; it’s a pretty clear (perhaps heavy-handed) allegory for how the higher classes exploit the lower classes. The rich maintain a facade of normalcy and high society, but in Society, they are framed as monstrous, parasitic, and perverse. The disgust we feel towards them in their transmogrified state is a way for Yuzna to highlight the disgusting nature of class inequality. We also see the idea of the rich secretly engaged in self-gratifying, exploitative practices, enabled by their wealth and power, in films such as Eyes Wide Shut (1999) by Stanley Kubrick, Get Out (2017) by Jordan Peele, The Hunt (2020) by Craig Zobel, and Infinity Pool (2023) by Brandon Cronenberg (David Cronenberg’s son). These other films are likewise commentaries on class, privilege, and unjust social systems.
As the shunting scene in Society unfolded, I was amazed by how originally twisted it was. I hadn’t seen anything like it before in horror. ‘Batshit crazy’ is one way to describe it. Yuzna took inspiration from the surreal artwork of Salvador Dalí – his paintings Autumn Cannibalism and Soft Construction with Cold Beans (Premonition of Civil War) – and, knowing that, the influence becomes obvious. We see a truly surreal disfiguration of the human body. It’s also reminiscent of the artwork of H.R. Giger. The shunting scene was also inspired by Yuzna’s nightmares (I’d hate to have any dreams reminiscent of shunting), and it is itself nightmare fuel. Japanese special effects artist Screaming Mad George (Joji Tani) deserves a lot of praise for his work on Society.
In this film, as in other films by Yuzna, the body is made grotesquely surreal. Many words come to mind that capture Yuzna’s brand of horror: gooey, gloopy, gunky, slimy, fleshy, squelchy. Bodies are deformed, rearranged, enlarged, stretched, melted, penetrated, pulled apart, turned inside out.
In Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation (1990), part of a Christmas-themed horror film series (although Christmas is barely a theme in it, and it has almost nothing to do with the previous films), insects become a source of disgust and horror. The film, like Society, concerns a secret, conspiring cult that engages in human sacrifice (this time, witches). Screaming Mad George was involved in this one too. In his latest book, Hard to Watch, which is about films that are difficult to watch (for one reason or another), philosopher Matthew Strohl writes:
Arguably, no horror director has a slimier body of work than Brian Yuzna. I realized how far I’ve come as a horror fan when I found myself delighted by his occult insect movie Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation, which is absolutely disgusting. It depicts a female reporter who grows frustrated with sexism in the workplace and disobeys her boss by investigating a story on her own. She uncovers a cult of women who worship Lilith, the first bride of Adam who was cast out of Eden and became lord of all that crawls. As the reporter gets dragged deeper and deeper into the Lilith cult, the movie becomes an orgy of gory insect rituals. It reaches into a deep, dark part of the unconscious and dredges up sexually charged revulsions that will stretch the boundaries of even the most hardened horror fan.
While I appreciated the revolting insect and body horror in this, the rest of the film left much to be desired (i.e. the characters and acting). But this doesn’t take away from the value of the horror that Strohl identifies: Yuzna mingles the sexual and the revolting in his films. I’d call this particular cinematic vision the grotesque Dionysian – when reaching for higher (or the highest) pleasurable and ecstatic states leads to something horrifying. This isn’t horrifying in the sense of the dangerous varieties we know that the Dionysian impulse can take – religious fanaticism, sexual transgressions, and violence. In Yuzna’s work, cultic, ecstatic, and pleasure-seeking impulses lead to something much more bodily disturbing – the human body distorted in unprecedented ways; the body made truly alien and repulsive. The loss of inhibition and control is not always pretty. Yuzna’s horror films, however, tend to be a lot sillier than the body horror films of Cronenberg, for instance; they can make you laugh as well as gross you out (or make you laugh because of how absurd the gross factor becomes).
Yuzna also produced the films Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986), both directed by Stuart Gordon. The latter film much more clearly has the influence of Yuzna in it. As Strohl wrote of the film on Letterboxd, “Didn’t realize until recently how much this is a Brian Yuzna movie (in addition to being a Gordon movie).” (Side note: Both Gordon and Yuzna conceived the story for, and helped write, the 1989 film Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, so the two weren’t exclusively involved in horror.)
From Beyond perfectly encapsulates the marriage of the erotic and the gross. (Yuzna’s work could also be said to involve the meeting of Eros and Thanatos, or the meeting of Freud’s ‘will to pleasure’ and ‘death drive’; the hunger for pleasure leads to the characters’ destruction – the obliteration of themselves – although what emerges after the old self dies is a new, and truly disgusting, kind of being.) In From Beyond – which, like Re-Animator, is based on a Lovecraft short story – a machine known as the ‘Resonator’ can stimulate the pineal glands of humans. By doing so, previously unseen (but always present) creatures from another dimension can be perceived. The stimulation of the pineal gland activates the ‘sixth sense’, allowing for this extrasensory (or extradimensional) perception.
Descartes is mentioned in the film, as the French philosopher theorised that the pineal gland was the ‘seat of the soul’, the organ that mediated the interaction between the material body and the immaterial soul. The pineal gland is often viewed as the biological correlate of the ‘third eye’ discussed in certain Eastern and Western mystical traditions. In psychedelic culture, it is likewise framed as having a similar function, with the speculation that the tiny pinecone-shaped organ induces spiritual experiences through the production and release of DMT.
From Beyond takes the concept of the pineal gland as the seat of spiritual vision and makes the extradimensional something disgusting. Head scientist, Dr Edward Pretorius, developed the Resonator. When his assistant, Dr Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs), gets bitten by one of the strange creatures he sees in the air after activating the machine, he urges Pretorius to turn the machine off, but the crazed head scientist refuses. He’s consumed by lust for power and knowledge. The Resonator malfunctions, Crawford flees, and the police find Pretorius’ body decapitated on the floor. Crawford is arrested for murder and psychiatrically hospitalised. Dr Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton) is convinced of his innocence and gets him released into her custody. She encourages him to return to Pretorius’ house, where the experiments with the Resonator took place, accompanied by Detective Bubba Brownlee (Ken Foree, who played the protagonist Peter in George A. Romero’s 1978 horror film Dawn of the Dead).
Katherine and Crawford rebuild the Resonator. When Crawford reactivates it, more creatures appear, along with a naked Dr Pretorius, his body malformed and gelatinous. With his consciousness altered and expanded, he tells the others of a world far more pleasurable than earthly reality, and that his death allowed him to ascend to this greater existence. His body has become fused with that of an entity from this other dimension. He becomes a malleable entity, and we see him rip the flesh off his body. We later learn that Pretorius was not just a curious scientist interested in other dimensions; he was also into BDSM and looking for a greater form of carnal pleasure.
There is a strong parallel here with Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987) and Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980). In the latter, the scientist Edward Jessup (William Hurt) pursues altered states of consciousness, causing him to experience disturbing hallucinations and bodily transformations. Pretorius does the same, through the Resonator’s stimulation of his pineal gland. Due to his BDSM predilections, he – like the Cenobites in Hellraiser – is fixated on the pursuit of extreme experiences, that which lies beyond human limits. And the pursuit of such experiences results in grotesque physical transformations after crossing into this other dimension.
Pretorius becomes even more mutated and deformed (and less human) as the film goes on, and in his most mutated state at the end, he consumes Crawford. Crawford’s consciousness fights for control after he’s eaten, and the conflict between the two consciousnesses tears their shared body apart. The intimate combining of flesh and minds leads to destruction – here again we see the marriage of Eros and Thanatos. (The obscene, intimate mingling of flesh and bodies in Society likewise involves death – the death of the lower-class human sacrifices.)
Turning on the Resonator also ‘turns on’ Katherine; the activation of her pineal gland leads her to abandon her librarian clothing and instead put on a dominatrix outfit found in Pretorius’ room, and she becomes a different person – consumed by erotic impulses. Like Yuzna’s other work, From Beyond depicts a dark side to pleasure-seeking and the erotic. I’m reminded of Peter Tscherkassky’s short experimental film The Exquisite Corpus (2015). As I wrote in a blog post on Tscherrkasy’s work:
The film is based on various commercials and erotic films. The way Tscherkassky cuts up the footage and stitches it together creates, at times, a gruesome form of ecstasy: the scenes are orgiastic, but in a way that is more disturbing than traditionally erotic. (It reminds me somewhat of the 1982 psychedelic animated short Malice in Wonderland.) Mike Opal writes for MUBI’s publication Notebook, “Caresses and licks superimpose on themselves, off-kilter and out-of-sync, the edges of the image dilating and contracting. The sexual gestures seem rushed and over-eager.” He adds, “The frame itself warps, aspect ratios expand and contract the visual field, allowing new sensations in new areas.”
We see a similar disturbing vision of the erotic in Yuzna’s work. In Society, the wealthy elite transform into something like carnal pests, mindlessly licking, writhing, gyrating, sucking, and consuming. They turn into pleasure-crazed, carnivorous beasts. In the shunting scene, carnival music plays, which is very fitting; it matches the darkly carnival-esque orgy. Yuzna depicts a Dionysian freak show, a slimy and flesh-eating circle of hell. His cinematic visions in Society and his other films reveal, as Strohl points out, dark layers of the unconscious. They confront us with what disgusts us – from the insectile to the incestuous, using textures and sounds, and bodily contorting, merging, and modification in novel ways.
In aesthetics, there has long been a discussion about why people are attracted to forms of art that evoke negative emotions, such as fear, horror, sadness, and disgust. Philosophers have varying responses to this difficult question. I’ve written about the value of these negative emotions in the context of horror films in previous blog posts (see here, here, and here). But I haven’t really addressed the (potential) value of the disgust response. What do we gain by watching the gross-out films of Yuzna? I think there are several possible benefits.
First, like other forms of art that cause disgust or shock, what may disgust us may also be aesthetically interesting or novel. To see something familiar made unfamiliar or strange may cause us disgust, but this disgust doesn’t take away from this unfamiliarity also holding our attention. In fact, when, as in Yuzna’s films, we are simultaneously drawn in by the disgusting imagery, this should lead us to question whether the ‘disgusting’ should be viewed as wholly or always negative. In this way, the boundary between enjoyment and disgust breaks down, just as it does in Yuzna’s films. Art can be experienced as both beautiful and disgusting at the same time.
This point is contrary to Immanuel Kant’s argument, in his Critique of Judgment (1790), that disgust is the complete opposite of enjoyment, and so art regarded as disgusting cannot be a source of aesthetic pleasure or satisfaction. He argued that a work that evokes disgust cannot be beautiful. To experience disgust is to reject the object of disgust, whereas the beautiful, for Kant, is what causes ‘disinterested pleasure’ – that is, we experience pleasure in contemplating the object itself, not because of any personal desire, use, or purpose for the object. But can we consider any of Yuzna’s work beautiful? What about beautifully horrible? Perhaps many people will experience a kind of ‘disinterested pleasure’ in the shock, novelty, absurdity, and silliness of his body horror, even if they also find it gross.
Second, because disgust is such a strong reaction, it can make certain art ‘stronger’ and be felt more viscerally, which makes it more likely to stick in our minds. And this can contribute to its aesthetic value, although perhaps many people would resist concluding that this therefore makes the art ‘pleasing’ or ‘satisfying’, at least in a narrow sense of ‘satisfying’ as that which causes positive feelings. So we might want to say that ‘aesthetic value’ should be broadened beyond the pleasurable and beautiful, so it can also encapsulate the novel, imaginative, and ingenious renderings of the horrible.
Third, we should recognise the value of how powerful and primal disgust is as a response. There are many things we find disgusting that we’d rather not think about, including in the unconscious, in terms of our desires, fears, revulsions, and taboos. For example, some of Yuzna’s cinematic visions remind me of the drawings of cartoonist Robert Crumb. Influenced by his LSD experiences and sexual fantasies, Crumb’s art, as his wife said, could be described as an expression of ‘pure id’ – ‘id’ being our unconscious, basic desires and instincts, such as sexual desires and aggression. As Freud argued, id is driven by the pleasure principle (the tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain) and, if given free rein, it could lead to socially unacceptable behaviour. The ego and superego prevent this from happening. Crumb’s work could be viewed as the ego and superego dropping away, leading to images that fuse sexual fetishes and violence. I think some of the scenes in Society are reminiscent of the libidinal, crazed, violent, grotesque, and surreal artwork created by Crumb – and so they could also be viewed as expressions of id. (For more insight into Crumb as a person and his work, I highly recommend watching Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary Crumb.)
In some psychedelic trips, with eyes open or closed, it is possible to perceive sexual or orgiastic imagery, or disturbing imagery of insects, spiders, worms, or reptiles (or insect-, spider-, worm-, or reptile-like creatures). The visionary artist Alex Grey depicts the latter in works such as Bad Trip (featuring parasitic-type creatures) and Prostration (the bottom of the painting features these as representations of obstacles on the spiritual path). These psychedelic perceptions can be surreal, like something depicted in a Yuzna film. Such imagery can likewise be viewed as expressions of the unconscious, as can certain bug-themed nightmares. As the Czech psychiatrist and LSD researcher Stan Grof argued, psychedelics are magnifiers of the psyche.
When art causes us disgust, it can invite us to think about why it disgusts us. This may lead to discussions about moral disgust – what causes us revulsion because we judge it to be wrong? But then there is also amoral disgust, related to phenomena like putrefaction, disfiguration, bodily destruction, and the side of the body we never see (i.e. its inside). In this way, we may start to think more deeply about the normative, cultural, and evolutionary roots of different kinds of disgust. Disgust can raise important questions about mortality, social norms, and the human condition. It is a psychologically rich emotion.
For these reasons, Yuzna perhaps deserves more attention from horror aficionados and cinephiles. His films are not ‘merely’ gross; they are nightmarishly gross, and this can invite us to consider why certain imagery affects us so viscerally.
