Creature Classic Companion: Society (1989)

So ends a month spent with Arrow, and let’s cap it off with the type of movie that makes you appreciate the existence of these specialty services, because you know most mainstream streamers wouldn’t touch this with a ten-foot pole.

There’s a particular strain of eighties movies, genre movies especially, which are almost entirely about how the eighties were terrible, and specifically railed against the wealthy and the corporate culture that seemed to increasingly dominate everything during the Reagan era. Robocop is probably the highest profile example, but you also have John Carpenter’s The Live and Larry Cohen’s The Stuff all espousing the same kind of anti-authority stance—and in using genres and styles that were considered disreputable to mainstream consensus feels like an appropriate punkish way to do so. Horror with B-movie sensibilities, ultra-violent action, and an emphasis on gross special effects have a visceral anger to them, and thumbing your nose at the idea of good taste probably felt like the most subversive way to get your point across. Society is another example of this from the tail end of the decade, and it acquired a strong cult following among horror aficionados by taking things as far as they could go.

This is the first film directed by Brian Yuzna, who was mostly known for producing the movies of the late Stuart Gordon, including such favourites as Re-Animator and From Beyond (which he co-wrote.) Apparently after Gordon and him co-wrote the initial version of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids(!), Yuzna wanted more independence, and was able to secure financing for whatever he wanted as long as he also produced a sequel to Re-Animator. Taking that sweet deal for all it was worth, he picked up an intriguing script about a Beverly Hills teen becoming increasingly suspicious of his rich family’s secret life, but felt that the cult/slasher angle of its ending was not his speed, and so altered the twist into something else entirely—a monster movie, but more than that. What was produced was one of the most audacious and disgusting of all eighties horror movies, one that left an indelible impression on everyone who stumbled upon it during the heyday of practical horror effects.

The Great Yokai War (2005)

Being so inundated with Hollywood blockbusters for so long, it’s nice to see how other movie industries go about it—what you find is often eminently familiar in their storytelling and reliance on special effects, but in a way that makes their idiosyncratic approaches and cultural differences all the more noticeable. The Great Yokai War is ostensibly a big budget remake of previous subject Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare, but in effect the films are barely connected—instead, it takes Japan’s beloved spirits and monsters and puts them in a big special effects extravaganza and a children’s adventure story with your standard “learning to be brave” character arc for the pre-adolescent hero. An even more important difference is that unlike Daiei’s Yokai trilogy, this is set in the modern day and actually grapples with some of the spiritual underpinnings of yokai myths as they apply to a current consumerist culture—all in the name of broad action and comedy, mind you, but it’s still an angle on yokai that I haven’t seen in a movie.

Blood Tide (1982)

I’ve already seen a few monster movies based around the eternal, extremely generalized struggle of good vs. evil—see The Creeping Flesh—and also a few that do the same thing while also contrasting Christianity with pre-Christian beliefs—see Viy—so I was prepared for what Blood Tide had on offer. There is obviously something very Wicker Man about the set-up here: outsiders intruding into an isolated place where the old beliefs still hold sway, maybe inviting a terror upon themselves with their unwariness, maybe being pulled in by destiny—certainly they both have a village full of people who are maybe outside the mainstream and are thus entirely suspicious. Substitute the British Isles with the Greek Isles and have the human sacrifice come with a monster, and you’ve got a pretty good idea. Those themes and the choice of location provides an atmosphere for this movie, one that helps it straddle the line between early eighties horror schlock and maybe a more serious kind of horror schlock.

The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (1968)

The streaming site of cult movie distributor Arrow Video came to my attention last year, and their selection of genre fare is a curated bunch of weird world cinema from across the ages, so I felt like covering a few creature feature selections currently streaming on there (most of it seems to be available on Blu-Ray as well, for collectors and lovers of special features.) What initially brought me there was their complete collection of Daiei’s various monster series—the entire Gamera saga (including the Heisei trilogy and Gamera the Brave), and both the Daimajin and Yokai Monsters trilogies…basically, a lot of things I’ve written about before on this site. With that in mind, a good place to start this month would be with another Daiei monster mash, which brought me to The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch, which is sort of that? It’s complicated.

Directed by Noriaki Yuasa, who directed all but one of the Showa Gamera films (this released nine months after Gamera vs. Viras, and three months before Gamera vs. Guiron—Yuasa was clearly a workhorse), this movie is a loose adaptation of multiple comics by horror master Kazuo Umezu, best known for manga like Cat Eyed Boy and The Drifting Classroom. The collected version of the stories is called Reptilia in English, and while many plot elements and even specific moments are taken from them, this is a completely new story. Even so, it carries over some of the horror ideas from Umezu’s work, which were often written for a younger audience, but are filled with truly grotesque imagery (contrasted with Umezu’s sixties manga kewpie doll figures) and cruelly play on specific childhood fears. This is a strange movie that goes in many different directions, but throughout it is the consistent story of a child trying to find familial love by enduring a constant stream of nightmare situations.