The Substance Twists Body Horror Back On Itself

Coralie Fargeat uses a misogynist genre to look at misogyny.

Imagine Sunset Boulevard directed by David Cronenberg, and you’d get a general idea of The Substance—with one big caveat. David Cronenberg is a man. Coralie Fargeat, who directed The Substance, is a woman, and that fact is central to the themes and the experience of the film.

The Substance is about aging actor and sex symbol Elisabeth Sparkle—played, in a brilliant bit of stunt casting, by aging actor and sex symbol Demi Moore. Elisabeth has long been the star of an 80s-esque sexy/fun aerobics program, but is fired on her 50^th birthday by scummy, leering producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid.) Desperate to remain hot and relevant, Elisabeth jumps when she’s mysteriously offered a chance to regain her youth via a product called The Substance. When she injects it, she transforms into young, perfect, sexy Sue (Margaret Qualley).

The deal is that Elisabeth can spend a week as Sue, while her old body lies inert and leaking on the bathroom floor. Then she has to change back to Elisabeth for a week.

But of course the temptation to be young forever is hard to resist. Sue starts to remain Sue for longer. Elisabeth’s body starts to decay. Things fall apart, and by the end the body transformation has reached terrifyingly ugly and wretched, and body fluids are spraying and crawling everywhere.

The violation of arbitrary taboos followed by accelerating and acceleratingly grotesque transformations are a familiar staple of body horror films, and in many ways Fargeat follows the tropes. But moving to a female perspective—a female director, a female protagonist—also fundamentally upends the genre.

Body horror is obsessed with and tormented by gender and gendered bodies. And the gendered bodies it is repulsed by are typically repulsive because they are linked to, or evoke, women.

Sometimes, as in David Cronenberg’s Shivers or Videodrome, women’s bodies are terrifying because they are sexual, tempting men to lose their boundaries and autonomy as they flow into, penetrate, or are penetrated by desire and flesh. In other cases, as in The Thing or Alien, the horror is in the idea of male bodies becoming feminized—especially through the terrifying prospect of male birth. Male bodies grow uncomfortable orifices, flow, drip, emit fluids, lose integrity and rigidity. The horror of body horror in many respects is the horror of men imagining themselves turning into (a certain nightmare fantasy of) women.

Fargeat doesn’t exactly reverse that logic; the monstrous bodies in The Substance are still women’s bodies. But monstrous bodies from a women’s perspective look somewhat different.

The most direct difference is that the horror here is not really about sex or turning into a woman, but about aging and the way that bodily decay alienates women—especially but not exlusively women in the public eye—from themselves.

The mysterious customer service contact for the Substance keeps reminding Elisabeth/Sue that Elisabeth/Sue is a single person. She’s herself, just in different bodies/at different points in her life. But the warnings do no good; Sue’s body is so much more valued by her boss, her viewers, and by herself, that both she (and Elisabeth) can’t help but see Elisabeth’s body as (increasingly) alien and monstrous. As women age, they cease to be the bodies that define them as valuable. They become instead the leaking, mottled, cancerous flesh of (feminine) body horror.

Fargeat is careful, though, not to link the horror of the body solely to aging flesh. Early on, for example, the camera lingers in extreme close-ups of Harvey’s lips moving as he speaks or smokes, and of him eating shrimp. Men are appetite and orifice; Harry see Elisabeth as monstrous because he is monstrous himself.

Fargeat also zooms in for numerous fetishistic, obsessed close ups of Sue’s rear and crotch, enclosed in wet-look shiny, skimpy bikini exercise-wear. These images emphasize Qualley’s desirability and sex appeal. But the repetitiveness of the screenfuls of flesh, and the way that Elisabeth stares at that flesh—in person, on television, in photos—quickly becomes uncomfortable, and then disturbing. The stimulus/response of image/desire is a queasily vertiginous exercise in self-torment.

Sue’s body, by symbolizing sex, also symbolizes inadequacy, castration, impotence. That’s in part the impotence of men, like Sue’s neighbor, who knocks on the door to complain about noise and then collapses into a groveling spineless worm (not quite literally) when he opens the door and is confronted with Sue’s half-parted lips and perfect figure. But the impotence, and the castration, is even more that of women themselves, whose bodies and worth are shaped, squeezed, and dissected by the male gaze which Fargeat both parodies and bitterly reproduces.

Fargeat is using the body horror genre to critique the violence of that downgenre trash male gaze which defines softcore reality television and the Hollywood mainstream (where Demi Moore spent most of her career.) She’s also, though, using softcore reality television and the Hollywood mainstream as a way to mirror body horror itself, a genre she loves and perhaps despises, just as Elisabeth loves and despises the monstrous, beautiful, Sue.

Body horror gives Fargeat a way to think about and represent, in all its bulbous bloody disgustingness, the way that men turn women on themselves, hollowing them out until all they are is meat. But body horror is also, historically, a genre in which men assert, over and over, that women are first and foremost bodies, to be desired because they are loathed, and loathed because they are desired.

The Substance is about women actors. But it’s also, I think, about women directors. Fargeat, after all, like Elisabeth, created an image of herself—a double defined by its own appearance as an image. The gaze makes that double glamorous and horrifying, glamorous because it is horrifying, and horrifying because it is glamorous. Scopophilia, body horror insists, is a kind of sadism and a kind of masochism. The Substance is a film about how women, as observers of themselves, become their own tormentors. It’s also, contradictorily, about what women can see when they take the camera, and those oozing, disgusting bodies, away from the men who have traditionally decided how bodies should be viewed.