[COLUMN] The Substance Updates the Classic Body Horror Template | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for The Substance, which is in cinemas now. You should watch it, it’s great. But if you want to wait until it’s on MUBI, that’s also cool. You can bookmark the article and come back. The article will still be here.

It seems like Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance has struck a nerve. The film has garnered strong reviews from critics, won the screenplay prize and Cannes, and it is already the highest-grossing theatrical release for indie distributor MUBI. In particular, the film has been celebrated as a return to – and update of – the classic 1980s body horror template.

The Substance tells the story of former superstar Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), an Oscar winner who reinvented herself as the host of a popular fitness program in the style of Jane Fonda. The film begins on Elisabeth’s 50th birthday, when sleazy executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid) basically fires her from the show. In Harvey’s words, “At 50, it stops.” When Elisabeth presses him, Harvey doesn’t clearly elaborate on what “it” is, beyond implying that “it” encompasses any value a woman has.

This news sends Elisabeth into a spiral, leading to a car accident that sends her to hospital. There, a young nurse (Robin Greer) gives her a card for “The Substance”, with the promise that it could change her life. Elisabeth reaches out to the number and receives a pitch video. An announcer (Yann Bean) offers an enticing and alluring proposal. “Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself?” the video asks. “Younger, more beautiful, more perfect?”

Elisabeth signs herself up for the Substance, and receives a starter pack. Administering her first dose, she discovers that the voice in the video was not speaking metaphorically. In the beautiful white tiled bathroom of her Los Angeles condo, Elisabeth births a younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley), which she names Sue. As Elisabeth’s body lies unconscious in the condo, sustained by an intravenous drip, Sue gets to experience the joy and vitality of youth.

This is the central tension and horror of The Substance. Are Elisabeth and Sue fundamentally the same person? Sue clearly has the same wants and desires as Elisabeth, sharing her memories and experiences. Elisabeth clearly enjoys the experience of having been Sue. The pitch stresses that both the original subject and the new creation aren’t two separate entities. As the video warns Elisabeth, “The one and only thing not to forget: You. Are. One. You can't escape from yourself.”

The entire procedure operates on the assumption that Elisabeth and Sue are two facets of the same person. In order to maintain stability, Elisabeth and Sue need to coexist in harmony. Sue can only live for a week, before needing to revive Elisabeth. Then, Elisabeth has about a week to recover before she can reawaken Sue. “You just have to share,” the voice tells Elisabeth. “One week for one and one week for the other. A perfect balance of seven days each.”

However, it becomes clear that this arrangement – while perfectly rational – does not reflect the reality of the relationship between Elisabeth and Sue. Sue is not content to alternate weeks with Elisabeth, to have what amounts to half of a life. So Sue begins to effectively steal time from Elisabeth, staying awake for longer than a week. As Sue harvests Elisabeth’s body, taking more and more from her older self, Elisabeth finds herself ageing quicker.

This is the beautiful paradox of The Substance. Awakening to discover that her hand has been wrinkled and deformed as a result of Sue’s greed, Elisabeth tries to call the company to mediate. She talks about Sue as if Sue is some other person. The voice on the other end of the phone reiterates: “You are one.” On some level, Elisabeth knows this. As the voice points out, Elisabeth could simply give up the treatment at any time. She doesn’t have to wake Sue up, but she chooses to.

The Substance is obviously a very gendered take on the classic body horror template, a movie about the unreal beauty standards applied to women in general and in Los Angeles in particular. Indeed, it’s possible to contextualize The Substance as part of a contemporary wave of female-focused body horror. It’s even possible to understand the graphic body horror of director Coralie Fargeat’s work alongside movies like Julia Ducournau’s Raw and Titane as part of a “new New French Extremity.”

The Substance is also clearly rooted in the great traditions and themes of body horror, even if it filters them through a new lens. The central fear of body horror is the creeping sense that the body and the self are fundamentally different concepts, that the physical construction of a human being is in no way tethered to the essence of the person. Human beings are just machines made of meat, and that the version of one’s self that interacts with the world is not meaningfully one’s self.

As Kelly Hurley wrote in response to the body horror of Ridley Scott’s Alien, “The narrative told by body horror, again and again, is of a human subject dismantled and demolished: a human body whose integrity is violated, a human identity whose boundaries are breached from all sides.” Justin Edwards argued that the essence of body horror lies in “an uncanny dualism wherein the singularity of the human self is disordered and a coherent personal identity is thrown into doubt.”

In some ways, every generation gets a version of body horror that speaks to its particular anxieties and uncertainties. During the 1980s, for example, there were a wave of remakes of 1950s classics: John Carpenter’s The Thing, David Cronenberg’s The Fly, Chuck Russell’s The Blob. These films could in some ways be understood as part of the same wave of 1950s nostalgia that informed Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future and which even bled into the 1990s.

In the 1950s, these body horrors spoke to the Cold War, literalizing the fear that communism was effectively an attack upon the very idea of individual autonomy and self-determination. However, by the 1980s, the Cold War was winding down and was less of a concern. As such, it seems like a bit of a reach to read movies like The Thing, The Fly and The Blob as allegories for the corrosive and infectious nature of communism. There was something else at play.

Much like the superhero boom of the 2000s, it’s possible to argue that the explosion in body horror was driven as much by industry trends and technical innovation as by cultural forces. It was just easier to make these sorts of effects than it had been in earlier decades, and there was more willingness to put them in big studio films. Still, it feels pointed that these movies came out during the 1980s as AIDS crept into the margins of popular discourse, rarely directly acknowledged.

John Carpenter has argued that his work on The Thing was inspired by early accounts of the auto-immune disease. Much of the critical discussion around Cronenberg’s The Fly was filtered through discussions of HIV and AIDS. Much of the language of the AIDS crisis was that of betrayal, of the human body betraying its owner. “My blood has turned against me,” poet Gil Cuadros wrote in “Hands”, the opening essay of his collection My Body is Paper.

As a genre, body horror is preoccupied with the “othering” of the body, the fear that human beings cannot meaningfully exert control over the flesh in which they find themselves. As such, the body can be the enemy. The body can deceive. The body can transform in ways that its owner does not want or desire. In The Substance, this fear is literalized. Sue and Elisabeth might be the same person, bound together by the same flesh, but they cannot trust one another. They will betray each other.

The Substance unfolds in a sort of weird fairytale version of Los Angeles, one shot entirely in France. It is a heightened reality, one that feels somewhat frozen in the era where Jane Fonda was making workout videos. For their big end-of-year presentation, studio executives pile into what looks like a high school auditorium. There is no mention of social media within the film itself. However, The Substance feels very much attuned – at least metaphorically – with that modern reality.

Social media creates a world where people are encouraged to cultivate and present perfect versions of themselves, using filters and lighting set-ups to create versions of one’s self that could never exist in reality. While plastic surgery has been the subject of public debate for decades, it feels like there is much more open discussion about the ways in which celebrities craft their bodies into superhuman ideals: Botox, human growth hormone, Ozempic.

In some ways, this is how Hollywood has always worked. Photoshoots would spend tens of thousands of dollars to make stars look more beautiful than a human being could ever look naturally. Now this is the norm. It is expected. Everybody has access to – admittedly cheaper and clumsier – versions of the same tools. So, there is a real tension there. It’s possible for a person to look at an image of themselves – their body – and see something that they do not recognize. What happens when the face that appears on screen is not the face that looks back from the mirror?

Fargeat draws attention to this. When shooting Sue, Fargeat films Qualley as if the young actress is always the center of an expensive photoshoot – always perfectly lit, at just the right angle, with the perfect amount of make-up. The camera leers at Sue, in an only slightly more exaggerated way than the media has always leered at female celebrities. Of course Elisabeth both covets and resents this version of herself, this version that both is her and is “more perfect” than she could ever be.

As much as the final half-hour of The Substance leans hard into grotesque body horror, the film’s most unsettling sequence finds Elisabeth in her white tiled bathroom, preparing for a date with Oliver (Gore Abrams). Elisabeth has prepared to leave the apartment, but returns to the bathroom. Staring at her reflection in the mirror, she sees the face of Demi Moore. Without wanting to seem creepy, Moore is one of the most beautiful people on the planet. But she’s not pretty enough.

Elisabeth tries to tweak her look – different lipstick, more make-up – but the film always comes back to Elisabeth staring at her own face in that mirror. Even with the make-up, that bathroom mirror is a reflection of Elisabeth as she actually is, rather than the filtered or constructed beauty of Sue rendered through a screen. Elisabeth misses her date, and sinks deeper into depression. Everything that happens later in that movie flows from that sequence. In this sense, Sue and Elisabeth are one; they both share a hatred of Elisabeth’s body because it lacks the constructed perfection of Sue’s.

That’s the real body horror of The Substance, the understanding that these constructed ideas of beauty and perfection only serve to render the human body alien and “other.” In doing so, the body doesn’t just become the enemy, it becomes monstrous.