RIP Screaming Mad George. If You Don’t Know That Name, Watch Society Immediately.
Pure goopy genius.
Earlier this week, some of the more delightfully weird corners of the internet wept as they learned of the loss of Screaming Mad George, who passed earlier this year at the age of 69. Although he had a name befitting a rock star — and he did front his share of punk bands — George was primarily known as a special effects and makeup artist for horror movies. Once you’ve seen his work, you’ll never forget it: he designed the flying eyeball in Big Trouble in Little China, the roach transformation in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, and the MTV-era freak show in Alex Winter’s Freaked. He even dabbled in video games, designing the very odd 1998 PlayStation title ParanoiaScape. But it’s Society that made him a legend.
Born Joji Tani, George changed his name while studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, choosing “Screaming” for musician and actor Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and “Mad” for Mad magazine. Besides having the best pseudonym in the business, what set George apart when he entered the industry in the mid-’80s was his fine-art background, particularly his love of surrealism. He preferred to be credited as a “surrealistic” effects artist, and that tendency was never more prominent than in Brian Yuzna’s 1989 eat-the-rich horror satire.
As George described it, Woody Keith and Rick Fry’s original script for Society ended in a “bloodbath.” But Yuzna — then best known as the writer of Re-Animator — wanted to do something different. So he called George, who brought paintings by Salvador Dalí, including “Autumnal Cannibalism,” to the director as inspiration for Society’s all-important final scene. He was hired, and began designing a series of latex prosthetics that would push the art of practical effects makeup to its limit.
These effects begin subtly, as Bill (Billy Warlock), a rich kid who’s never fit in, begins to notice strange things around the margins of his comfortable but empty life. A torso that turns backward in the shower. A limb that twists at an unnatural angle. Billy is pretty sure he’s seeing things, as is the audience. But then Yuzna cuts away, leaving Billy — and us — doubting our own eyes.
Then Society enters its famous last act, and the “Shunting” begins. Movies about the decadence and depravity of the wealthy are nothing new, but the Shunting — basically, a body-horror orgy where Billy’s parents and their Beverly Hills friends fuse their bodies into goopy, rubbery, surreal shapes — is still unequaled in terms of sheer creativity more than 35 years later. And that’s all thanks to George’s designs.
One of Society’s more restrained special effects.
The starfish of wriggling flesh at the center of the festivities, and its long, spindly appendages that recall Rob Bottin’s monsters from John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), is bizarre and upsetting enough. But as Billy flees through the family mansion, he encounters even stranger combinations of limbs and heads, all of whom seem to have been assembled in one of the Exquisite Corpse games the Surrealists loved so much. Add in a soupçon (goopçon?) of juvenile humor in the form of the film’s famous butthead joke, and you’ve got a sequence that’s like nothing else in cinema.
Like Screaming Mad George, it’s a true original, which makes it an ideal testament to the man and his legacy. If you haven’t seen it in a while, watch it again. If you haven’t watched it yet — buckle up.
