BRIAN YUZNA (1949)

MASTER OF SPLATTER

Although he is better known as a producer, Brian Yuzna’s cult status rests on an audacious, jaw-droppingly gory directorial debut, whose reputation has only grown with time.

With the advent of home video in the 1970s, it became possible to make a small fortune from feature filmmaking if you could produce a movie on a low budget and appeal to a wide audience. Nowhere was the recipe more successful than the straight-to-video horror market. Yuzna was one of the key US horror producers to emerge through this route, and whose films featured production values of high enough quality to warrant the occasional cinema release.

Brian Yuzna was born in the Philippines, and it was during a peripatetic childhood, growing up in Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Panama and the United States, that he first began experimenting with a Super8 camera. He claimed his initial training came through watching François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973), which mostly takes place on a film set. An encounter with a film crew on location in Cartagena inspired Yuzna to purchase a 16mm Bolex and to attempt his first film, but it was not until Society (1989) that he directed his first commercial feature.

After making the unreleased Self Portrait in Brains, about an artist who blows his brains out onto a canvas, Yuzna moved to Los Angeles and met the director Stuart Gordon. Their first collaboration, Re-Animator (1985), an adaptation of an H. P. Lovecraft tale, featured such an outrageous amount of gore that it got the pair noticed, and the film went on to become a key horror of the 1980s. Another Lovecraft adaptation, From Beyond (1986), followed and cemented Yuzna’s status as a horror producer with a keen commercial sensibility. Most of his films existed in a deranged universe detached from reality, whereas Society offered up a wildly surreal portrait of the world Yuzna observed in 1980s Hollywood.

Yuzna’s pop trash masterpiece has the rich elite of Beverly Hills literally feeding off the less entitled denizens residing in the City of Angels. Unlike his other productions, which overflow with excess throughout, Yuzna holds off his moment of gore until the extraordinary climax, inspired by Salvador Dalí’s The Great Masturbator (1929), and played out against the strains of the benign ‘Eton Boating Song’. It is a savage political satire that ranks alongside John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) as one of the great cult genre films of the 1980s.