FEATURE: The Weird Trend of Eighties Flesh-Faces

Watching Leviathan a few weeks back, it struck me that a lot of memorable horror films of the eighties feature dripping-wet flesh-faces, in which the human face is submersed in extra-human goo and made part of something larger and eviller.  While it's possible that this emerged out of a subsumed cultural anxiety about getting our faces stuck in a big mound of gooey crap, it's more likely that everyone looked at The Thing and say, "Hey that was cool right."

Ground zero is John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), in which an alien takes DNA from other creatures and incorporates their features into its bodice.  The finale features a victim's face connected to an enormous pair of jaws.  Therefore, we get the prime example of flesh-face.

Next up is Stuart Gordon's From Beyond (1986), which featured a Doctor Pretorious who's taken over by a creature called a shoggoth.  The chief result?  A nasty flesh-face.  Gross.

One year later, Sam Raimi upped the flesh-face ante in Evil Dead II by sticking the faces of people possessed onto the side of an enormous demon head.  From left to right, Ash, someone, someone, and...someone.  Four people?  That's some good flesh-facing bang for your buck.

One year later, Chuck Russell directed a remake of The Blob (review here), and he couldn't resist adding a bit of flesh-face.  Here, a devoured sheriff's face is slowly merging with the creature.

One year later (notice a pattern?), George P. Casmatos directed Leviathan, which featured a disease that got inside its victims and merged them together to make a big monster.  Naturally, flesh-face.

The final example of flesh-facing in the eighties was produced in 1989 but wasn't released until 1992, and maybe that's because the world wasn't ready for the logical conclusion of flesh-face.  Brian Yuzna (producer of From Beyond) took flesh-facing to its ultimate conclusion in the movie Society, in which an entire room full of upper-class alien-people merge together in a perverted act called "shunting."  It involves a lot of faces, a lot of flesh, a lot of nudity, and a lot of sweat.

Warning, the following pictures are more than not safe for work.

I don't think they're safe for anybody.

Seriously.

What is this.