Written By Sean Martin

Edited By Elizabeth Ferris

Since its theatrical release in September, Coralie Fargeat’s body horror odyssey The Substance (2024) starring Demi Moore (Elisabeth) and Margaret Qualley (Sue) has polarized audiences and critics alike. Its unflinching approach and piercing satire on body norms, cosmetic surgery, the entertainment industry, celebrities, and aging have sparked a horde of conversations praising the film for its bold and explicit allegory on gender relations. Simultaneously, a range of concerns have been voiced concerning The Substance’s themes and depictions of gratuitous sexual and violent exploitation––with the generalizing thesis that the film ultimately contributes to that which it critiques. Amidst these dynamic discussions arises an emerging curiosity and necessity to revisit the extensive catalogue of women-centered horror movies with a careful eye for the patterns in popular portrayals, seeing where and how The Substance diverges from them. Spoilers ahead!

The Substance is an almost fairy-tale-like allegory of female aging. Set in the backdrop of Hollywood, it follows the career and psychological decline of Elisabeth Sparkle—a once flourishing video-acrobatics star. When Elisabeth is fired by her company, she is left riddled with insecurity, shame, and guilt tied to her age, which is no longer deemed acceptable. Her overwhelming chagrin and a series of other unfortunate events lead her to inquire into a strange product called The Substance, marketed as possessing the ability to create “a better version of yourself.” 

The film follows Elisabeth as she takes The Substance and is forced to reckon with its effects—most notably the birth of an alternate version of herself named Sue, who appears as her own being entirely. Sue is everything Elisabeth once was, and everything she desperately wants to cling onto: doe-eyed, thin, sexy, magnetic, and above all, marketable. In theory, The Substance is an exercise in balance; every seven days, Elisabeth and Sue must switch between who gets to be functionally alive. The week-long resting period is integral to the success of the entire process, and both Elisabeth and Sue need it to maintain the prosperity of their ‘system’. The Substance, however, tells the story of an abuse of that balance. When Elisabeth switches into Sue, she becomes so intoxicated with the social privilege and personal satisfaction of being young and beautiful that she quickly spirals into a cycle of overstaying her welcome in Sue’s body. When Elisabeth wakes up after Sue finally gives in (going well over her seven allotted days) she finds her body to be aging and decaying at an impossibly rapid pace. First, her index finger turns to look like that of a ninety-year-old, then an entire leg, before she finally transforms into an elderly person altogether. The cycle continues only because Elisabeth/Sue allows it to, knowing the consequences of her actions but remaining unable to escape the proverbial quicksand she is falling into. When Elisabeth is living in her own body, she spends her days primarily binge eating, reclusively curled up on her couch, and watching television––interviews of Sue in particular. Yes, ever so poetically, Sue has become the world’s hot new fitness star, replacing Elisabeth in the literal sense. In Elisabeth’s personal life, Sue has replaced her too, regarding whose life she values most. Elisabeth eventually covers the entirety of her floor-to-ceiling windows—facing the beautiful Los Angeles landscape she used to feel on top of––with newspaper, shrouding herself in darkness. When Elisabeth switches to Sue, she too has her fair share of gripes with her alter. Sue is disgusted by the piles of food that Elisabeth has accumulated and reduces Elisabeth to being an unworthy glutton. Sue is revolted by Elisabeth entirely, who Sue now views as a separate person altogether, not just a ‘lesser version.’ Sue lives for her body, she relishes it in mirrors and parades it through the street with pride. The world also loves Sue’s body, and it lives to watch her through screens or, by a strike chance of luck, in person. Sue is bombarded with male attention and validation. She finds herself being constantly lusted over and wanted. The world consumes Sue and makes her feel whole. Elisabeth chases fullness too but is always left feeling sick. The final act of the film takes audiences into a realm of unprecedented shock and absurdity. Before discussing this, it is pertinent to evaluate the symbolic feminist overtones of the first two acts while also considering a critique of the film. 

The Substance is not coy with its messaging. It does not aim to disrupt subtly. Rather, it shoves itself in your face and only lets go of its grasp on you when the credits begin to roll. Coralie Fargeat, the film’s director, expresses that the origins of its narrative have been with her from childhood. From a young age, she says, “I think about how I have to live with my own image, and how I learned to be super violent about it” (Collider Interviews, 2024). The Substance is an overt representation of the violence of patriarchy, manifested and boiled down to a hyper-specific individual situation used as the perfect rhetorical device to convey its message. The film plays like a pitch-black comedy, its satire and commentary play in the domain of the farcical and ludicrous to communicate the extremes of modern patriarchy that are often downplayed. It utilizes body horror to visualize and materialize this. Through gore and violence, The Substance tells the story of an increasingly degrading metamorphosis of the human psyche and body that is continually weighed down by oppressive forces that maintain the status quo. The “birth” of Sue is the first representation of this internalized brutality. Sue’s creation is a harrowing and traumatic experience for Elisabeth. She convulses on the floor, gasping for air and screaming with no one to support her as her back splits open and Sue crawls out. The loneliness of the situation is integral to its effectiveness. Elisabeth cannot speak to anyone about her situation, just as she feels she cannot speak to anyone about the burden of embarrassment that has been thrust upon her. To voice a complaint or feelings of hurt would be an entirely other experience of defeat for Elisabeth; it is one thing to be a victim of misogyny and another to admit it. The sweeping silencing that patriarchy imposes on women is a sustaining characteristic of its system; when one cannot externalize their feelings or experiences, the only direction for them to move is inward. Internalization is inherently divisionary because it requires a disharmony of sorts, which is a disconnection between one’s interior life (which takes place in one’s mind) and exterior life (which one allows to be presented to the world). The severance of these two lives is a violent one because it is natural and healthy that they are connected. It is the vigor of patriarchy that forces women to compartmentalize their displayed reality from their truest one. Sue’s nativity is extremely symbolic here: Elisabeth comes to inhabit only the space of her innermost thoughts, while the very design of Sue’s “life” is to be physically exhibited and exposed. This is why Sue never develops empathy for Elisabeth, because Sue fundamentally exists to be projected and comes to share a value system with oppressive frameworks. Elisabeth increasingly becomes the victim of such frameworks, evolving increasingly into the very thing Sue desperately tries to escape. 

To convey its points plainly and even obtusely, Fargeat crafts her film in a way that plays these power dynamics up, often for comedic value. The sheer disgust and horror of the situations depicted leave audience members so flabbergasted that the knee-jerk reaction of laughter is almost inherent. A merging of comedy with horror is nothing new to either genre—comedies often play horrific situations off for punchlines (take classic children’s animation even, Tom and Jerry, for example), and horror films frequently use comedy as a means of relief. Fargeat transgresses this slightly in that the “comedy” of the film exists as a part of its symbolism; audiences find themselves laughing at the film not because it is funny, but because of how absurdly such an accurate commentary is being depicted. Every time one laughs while watching The Substance they become somewhat forced into further distress because the laughter itself is emerging from discomfort. This is what makes the film’s satire so effective—it embraces the exaggerated, but only to convey paramount truths. Another dimension the film is staunchly on the nose with is in its portrayals of Sue’s sexuality. Sue appears on screen numerous times in full-frontal nudity, glamorizing her body, gracefully running her hands on her naked skin, and finding seemingly every possible angle to gaze at it. The camera lovingly pans up and down her body, showcasing and feasting upon every inch of it. The result of this narrative is somewhat ambiguous—the film is infatuated with Sue’s body as a means to the end of proving a much larger point, but it is infatuated nonetheless. An emanation of TikTok edits that romanticize and idealize Sue in particular reveals why the film’s approach lends itself to creating ultra-meta commentary in the real world. We live in an intrinsically contradictory world where The Substance can subvert standards and challenge societal norms and also create an erotic frenzy around a character who is designed to embody the superficial pitfalls of the mainstream. 2024, after all, is the year of the re-emergence of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show after years of hiatus for accusations of sexism, fatphobia, and overall regressiveness. It too is the year of Ozempic, the popularization of terms like “big back”, and cementing Y2K rebirth. This is important because it highlights the separate and fundamentally antithetical trajectories society as a whole is moving on. The current state of affairs of the world allows for this duplicitous consumption of Sue to exist; one that praises the film and Margaret Qualley for so clearly depicting the grotesqueness of beauty standards and another that glorifies Sue for being skinny and hot. In this respect, it would not be so far-fetched to criticize the film with the claim that it feeds into what it is trying to destroy. Let us honour this criticism and dissect it. 

Margaret Qualley has spoken about how her body had to change to film The Substance: “for Sue, a lot of it was about a physical transformation … trying to make my body be what Coralie had envisioned … more curvacious and strong” (Collider interviews, 2024). This raises some highly pertinent opportunities for critique and discussion. The Substance is a film that highlights the absolute illogicalness and insanity of women’s beauty standards and how women are taught to cope with aging. How then, can viewers of the film rightfully absorb this rhetoric when Qualley herself had to confine to the set of aesthetic conventions it aims to disrupt? Sue as a character cannot prove the points she makes without mirroring standards of beauty, and Qualley cannot “be” Sue unless she too adheres to them. It is a catch-twenty-two of sorts, where the film cannot accomplish its objective, devaluing and parodying the superficial, without participating in it. Moreover, The Substance ultimately presents Sue (and therefore Qualley) to the world as the beauty standard, and—once released––the film cannot change how audiences sink their claws into her character and worship it. Is such a choice irresponsible on the part of Fargeat? Raising such points is certainly valid. Potentially there is no ultimate answer to how the film ought to have handled such delicate and nuanced matters. However, diving deeper into the catalogue of horror history and the role of women within it proves useful in uncovering why The Substance makes the choices it does in exploring the more significant relationship between sex and violence. 

Horror has a track record of framing women within the boundaries of particular patriarchal archetypes that have become synonymous with the genre altogether. The monster movie craze of the 1930s is ripe with the opportunity to discuss one of the foundational models of women in horror—the damsel. The damsel is no more pertinent in the canon than in 1933’s King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack and starring Robert Armstrong and Fay Wray. Wray’s character, Ann Darrow, embarks on the all-to-familiar journey of being captured by a powerful, dangerous force (Kong) and essentially doing nothing else—except, of course, waiting for the men in her life to come and save her. To double down, the film operates on the base assumption that Kong decides to abduct, but not murder (like he does men), Ann because of her beauty. The film even boasts a now classic final line “It was beauty that killed the beast” (Cooper, Schoedsack, 1933). What is otherwise a thrilling and technologically pioneering film reduces the entirety of its plot to the idea that a giant gorilla could become so besotted with a human woman that he would cause enormous levels of calamity in the film, ultimately resulting in his death. This is where one of the key lines between sexuality and violence in horror is drawn––in the perpetuation of the idea that a woman’s attractiveness or sexuality is sufficient grounds for heinous acts of destruction. Further, the woman’s sexuality becomes her foremost feature; in place of the range of storyline possibilities afforded to men, women are essentialized to being assaulted and/or lusted after. 

Another dominant portrayal is that of the useless woman; she is not involved in the plot of the film in any meaningful way relative to her male counterparts but rather exists to spectate, faint and cry, and motivate men to act on her behalf. In 1932’s The Mummy directed by Karl Freund, Helen, played by Zita Johann, is one of the film’s primary leads yet she has staggeringly little to do and a general lack of agency. In the film, Helen, like countless other characters, is predominantly an object of men’s desire––in this case, of both of the male leads. While her character is integral to the advancement of the plot, and especially to the climax, Helen sidesteps behind her male co-leads, waiting for them to make decisions for her or for one to nullify the decisions of the other in a perpetual game of push and pull. In both possible outcomes of the film, so to speak, Helen is positioned to either “end up” with the Mummy himself, Imhotep, or her archeological beau, Frank. “Call her! Her love for you may bridge the centuries” is one of the final lines of the film that was said to Frank by his boss while Helen lies in his arms, completely depleted of energy after defeating Imhotep (by calling on the powers of the God Isis, of course). Frank calls out for Helen and asks her to come back to him, which she does, the two have a wondrous look at each other, and the film ends. While it is certainly commonplace, especially in the golden age, for a film to be bookended abruptly, The Mummy’s final moments spent centring the character of Frank exist in a longer continuum of disacknowledging Helen’s agency. Further, when Helen does act alone in the film, it primarily happens under the influence of Imhotep’s curse and against the wishes of Frank, which continues this narrative that Helen is caught between the wills of two men instead of having her own. Helen represents something much more prominent in the greater story of women in horror, exemplifying a key pattern in the representation of the non-autonomous, subordinate, and dependent woman. 

The two previously discussed examples illustrate the issue of denying female characters the right to self-determination; now it becomes important to shift focus to films where women are in the driver’s seat completely. Maybe the most famous archetype, the Scream Queen, has evolved to become an absolute staple in horror fare, but with what broader implications? The Scream Queen is perhaps no more recognizable and relevant than in the renaissance of the slasher film in the 1970s and 1980s. The trope of the Scream Queen is built upon the alleged entertainment value seen in exhibiting the violent and oftentimes sexual trauma of (predominantly) women. By the same token, slasher narratives make consistent spectacles of vulnerability––with the deaths of characters representing major beats in the plot. As character by character is killed off, the pool of the remaining living shrinks and shrinks, often resulting in the infamous “final girl.” The most famous final girl may be Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis in the original Halloween. In Essence, Laurie’s journey within the film is the following: becoming paranoid she is being stalked, discovering the murdered bodies of her friends, realizing she is next, and fighting for her life against Michael Myers in the third act. She does all of this while babysitting two children, by the way. Unlike King Kong or The Invisible Man’s female leads, Laurie acts of her own volition. Without an authority figure instructing her decision-making, she is only afforded such a benefit under the confines that her decisions are made out of a necessity for survival. This is the dilemma of the slasher, that women become front-and-center but only under the context of being constantly traumatized and exploited. Films like Halloween significantly desensitize audiences to more than physical horrors; the consistent display of women’s suffering and despair coupled with that of the (most often) male villain persisting in causing carnage tells a certain kind of story. Halloween is also responsible for the perpetuation of another classic trope of horror, the idea that sex equals death. In the film, Laurie is the sole virgin of her friend group—an effort to categorize her separate from her peers. In addition, it is implicitly suggested that Laurie’s abstinence truly saves her. Laurie’s friends, Annie and Linda, are both murdered while attempting to engage in or mention sexual intimacy; what emerges is a sub-plot of sorts that is based on the concept of “punishing feminine sexuality” (Lehmann, 2021). With this in mind, it is not exactly challenging to picture moments of violence in horror films that correspond with a woman’s sexual exposure or desire—from Hitchcock’s famous shower murder of Marion Crane in Psycho to Tina’s now iconic death scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street––which takes place following her having sex with her boyfriend. The bubbling over of the slasher genre reveals something important about the evolution of horror: while directors, producers, and audiences alike were coming to terms with the autonomous woman, that autonomy would have to be under steady threat by a homicidal man. 

But what does all of this have to do with The Substance? This brief study of some key women and tropes in horror has provided the groundwork for understanding the context, so to speak, of Fargeat’s recent release. While its depictions of sexuality exist as a part of a single film, they also exist more broadly within a canon that has, in many ways, made audiences make pre-developed expectations of how a woman ought to look and behave. This is the subversiveness of The Substance. In many ways, it is aesthetically coherent with any oversexualized horror flick—where it deviates is in its employment of convention. 

In the third act of the film, Elisabeth becomes so loathing and regretful that she decides she must terminate Sue’s existence entirely, living permanently in her failing, elderly body. Elisabeth administers a deactivation injection to Sue but injects only halfway before deciding she cannot go through with her plan. Life is not worth living without Sue for Elisabeth, even though Sue’s existence can inevitably only bring her more suffering––suffering is a sacrifice she is willing to make. Elisabeth frantically drops the needle and begins performing CPR on Sue, begging for her to stay alive; Elisabeth’s wishes are granted, but at the cost of her life. Sue does wake up, and when she does it is as though her brain cannot comprehend Elisabeth at all. Sue’s reaction is to meet Elisabeth with sheer violence. Now that the two beings can exist simultaneously, Sue is made up entirely of everything that made her devoid of human-ness; she is a complete reflection of the systemic and corporate constraints imposed on women. 

It is the clear choice to make for Sue to murder Elisabeth because Elisabeth is ‘disgusting’ to look at, an abomination, and a non-valued life, for life is only worthy when it conforms and adheres. Sue quite graphically kills Elisabeth, smearing blood all over the bathroom she was born in only months ago; in some strange way, just like how in King Kong, it is beauty who killed the beast. With Elisabeth dead, Sue quickly rushes to make an appearance she is due to perform at, but any sense of contrived normalcy quickly dissipates. Before her very eyes, Sue’s body begins decaying, and her fingernails and teeth come right out of their sockets. In a state of panic, she runs back to her apartment where Elisabeth’s body lies, remembering the few remaining drops of The Substance Elisabeth never injected. Distraught and enraged, Sue injects herself with The Substance as a last-ditch effort to save her appearance. She wakes up, however, as a malformed, almost shapeless, amalgam of parts and limbs that almost look as though they have been glued together. 

In an ever-so allegorical finale, Sue/Elizabeth––now a monster––returns to the event with a picture of Sue taped onto her face. Slowly, the monster walks onto the stage, awaiting the inevitable flash of the spotlight, anticipating the screams … and they come. The audience bursts into a frenzy of terror and runs to escape the horrible creature on stage. Men from the audience reach the monster and push it to the ground, and one finally picks up a microphone stand and decapitates it—but not before the monster literally rears another head and grows it back. This re-emergence is short-lived, however, as the weight of Elisabeth’s disrespect to the balance collapses in, and the monster’s body begins falling apart and spraying blood onto every unwilling spectator in the crowd. The monster runs through the street, coming apart by the second, finally collapsing on the concrete and perishing for good. A face emerges––Elisabeth’s, which had come to be adorned on the monster’s back––peeking through the blood and flesh and inches its way forward. Elisabeth’s face reaches her Hollywood Star of Fame, it has a moment of happiness, and it dies. 

The Substance trespasses on the gendered and sexual conventions of horror and walks all over them. It gives people what they expect: naked women’s bodies, an overall lingering on sexuality, gore and shock, and the brutalization of women. The way it conveys these themes and ideals, however, is fundamentally ironic; the film is, in a sense, one fleshed-out inside joke that is funny because of its consistently clever references to the catalogue of horror it exists within. It is the embodiment of self-awareness, a nightmarish reflection of horror history through a postmodern lens, and a commentary on sex and violence. 

Sue (sexiness, desirability) is only, and can only be created through the brutalization of Elisabeth’s body––a result of her internalized hatred which was born from the forces of systemic powers. Sue’s existence is a manifestation of this hatred, which results only in its acceleration because everything that Elisabeth aimed to change inadvertently becomes more and more concentrated within her. Sue is the lovechild of patriarchy and an individual oppressed by it in that she represents the insecurity of the aging woman and the forces that facilitate and sustain the conditions for such insecurity. When she bathes in the glory of her body, she bathes in the violence she was forged out of, celebrating suppression. Sue shows no empathy or care for Elisabeth’s body; she borrows into her time, allows her to be rapidly depleted of life, and demeans her at every chance she can. 

When Sue eventually slaughters Elisabeth, the much more explicit violence represents the death of Elisabeth’s soul altogether. What remains is a personification of the ruthless ethos of patriarchy and its mechanisms. But such a personification cannot exist independently, without a living being to cling onto, without a mind to corrupt. Sue could only exist at the expense of Elisabeth; she is parasitic in nature and is left without a purpose when Elisabeth dies. Sue begins degrading because she can only live relative to someone else; oppressive systems––by the same coin––only thrive relative to their ability to capture the imagination of the masses. When only Sue is left remaining, her body begins to crumble––and when it does, so does her ideological universe, so to speak. Sue never lived for anything but her body, and she understood the world to live for her body twofold. Without it she is literally nothing. This is why the monster is born after Sue takes The Substance again. 

Sue could only exist through her relation to something fundamentally real––Elisabeth, but Sue intrinsically is an artifice. If the artifice of Sue represents the contrived nature of the logic of domination and bigotry, then her creation, the monster, represents the product of such logic––something so far removed from its origin that it becomes indistinguishable. Something so intensively extrapolated from humanity that people only know how to react to it with fear and violence. The monster is an illustration of sorts of the internalized hatred Elisabeth felt toward herself: it is an illogical and unnatural creation, just as patriarchal logic demands the adoption of preposterous belief systems to regulate itself. The monster is the consequence of external and internal violence. In this way, it is violence, and ought to meet a violent end. 

Bibliography

Nemiroff, Peri. The Substance Interview: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley & Coralie Fargeat, Collider Interviews, 15 Sept. 2024. www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzL2WgK4w0s&ab_channel=ColliderInterviews.  

The Substance. Directed by Coralie Fargeot, Working Title Films, 2024. 

King Kong. Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, RKO Pictures, 1933. 

The Mummy. Directed by Karl Freund, Universal Pictures, 1932. 

Halloween. Directed by John Carpenter, Sony Pictures, 1978. 

Psycho. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount Pictures, 1960. 

A Nightmare on Elm Street. Directed by Wes Craven, New Line Cinema, 1984.