The Substance falls into a camp that is known as “body horror”, defined by fleshly mutations, mutilations and copious amounts of blood. Its popularity is often attributed to the Canadian king of horror David Cronenberg, but in recent years female and non-binary filmmakers like Titane director Julia Ducournau, Rose Glass, Amanda Nell Eu and Laura Moss have pushed the genre in new directions. Body horror has offered these directors opportunities to probe topics such as coming-of-age, female desire and gender fluidity, and, in the case of Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding, to revel in patriarchy-smashing violence. Critic Katie Rife describes the movement as “a nascent wave of aggressive, stylized women genre directors” who deal in “in-your-face feminist metaphor”.
“The Substance is not a subtle film,” Rife tells the. “I personally get a kick out of that kind of aggressive, hyper-stylisation, but I would say that there are people who don’t particularly like being pummelled with excessive style.”
This gruesome surplus – rather than hammering her message home – arguably obscures Fargeat’s meaning. One of the terms and conditions of using the substance is that Elisabeth and Sue must swap places every seven days. When this “balance” begins to go awry is also when the body horror sets in. White explains: “I found that the very credible and very serious issues that it was so effectively satirising in the opening hour all got smothered in this shower of blood and viscera in the final 20 minutes – monstrous body horror prosthetics coming at us from all angles.”
Does it demonise ageing?
Further, the film’s depiction of ageing women has also stoked a decades-old debate about depictions of older women onscreen. There’s a long lineage of films, categorised as “psycho-biddy” or “hagsploitation” cinema, in which women, regarded by Hollywood to be past their prime, are portrayed as grotesque and spiral into madness and murder. Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), in which Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) is a discarded former Hollywood icon driven to violence, provided the archetype, with later horror films like The Nanny (1965) and Strait-Jacket (1964) demonising older women in more obviously lurid ways. Rife believes The Substance’s use of hagsploitation tropes, dramatically transforming Moore’s body with visual effects, is laced with irony. “Here’s a huge tongue-in-cheek element to the whole thing. Something that [Fargeat] said in the Q&A at Toronto International Film Festival was that what she told the actors was, when the characters finally like themselves, is when they become a monster – and I think that is very key to the point of the film.”
