Body horror and the beauty myth: 6 influences and intertexts for The Substance

In Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, fallen Tinseltown star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) agrees, at age 50, to undergo a back-alley treatment which promises to create a better, rejuvenated version of her. In fact, she painfully births ‘Sue’ (Margaret Qualley), and finds herself time-sharing her life with a younger, more in-demand woman who wants it all, even at the expense of her other, older self. The baroque ‘body horror’ that enSues offers a satirical dissection of the beauty myth (and of Hollywood’s dumbed-down standards), while secondarily exposing the terrible toll of parenthood.

There is a scene near the end of The Substance where the onstage appearance of Sue (or something like her) is accompanied by the familiar strains of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra. This is a clear allusion to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), coinciding, as in Kubrick’s film, with a spectacular moment of human evolution – or at least of monstrous devolution. After all, Fargeat’s film is, like Kubrick’s, similarly fixated on stars at its beginning and end.

Indeed, The Substance is not shy about its filmic sources (or ‘matrices’). For much as it focuses on a kind of human hybridity, where a woman is divided and ultimately redistributed between her younger and older selves, it is also itself reconstituted from the body parts and genetic code of many other, earlier films, all morphing and fusing into its richly horrific, grotesquely piecemeal, ultimately unstable texture.

Here are six films that serve as influences and intertexts for The Substance.

Director: Kurt Neumann

Having admitted to killing – but not murdering – her husband André (David Hedison) in a hydraulic press at his factory, Hélène (Patricia Owens) spins a story to Inspector Charas (Herbert Marshall) and André’s brother François (Vincent Price) about André’s disastrous experiments in his basement laboratory with ‘the disintegrator integrator’. In reducing himself to his constituent atoms, André successfully teleports to the next room, but his particles recombine with those of a housefly that flew into his invention, creating two hybrids: a mute human with giant fly’s head and arm, and a tiny fly with human head and arm. With either one of these monstrous creatures reduced to its physical materiality and at odds with itself, it is hard to know whether Hélène’s assertion that “You’re still a man with a soul,” really holds true.

Like The Substance, Kurt Neumann’s foundational body horror splits one person across two bodies, with bleakly mutant results.

Director: John Frankenheimer

In his early fifties, in a frigid marriage, with his daughter now adult and herself married, dull banking executive Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) signs up for a secretive scheme to get a new lease on life. With his death now faked and his face and body transformed by plastic surgery, he is now a younger, or at least younger-looking, self with a new career as an artist, and a much younger girlfriend (Salome Jens). Yet Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson), as he is now known, still yearns for what he once had, and soon wants to reverse the deal – but breach of contract comes at a price.

Where John Frankenheimer’s woozy monochrome thriller takes a hard look into the middle-aged male psyche of the swinging 60s, Fargeat inverts the gender of this premise, throws in some genetic pseudo-science and hard ick, adds brilliant colour, and turns the satire to Hollywood’s constructions of identity.  

Director: Stanley Kubrick

In the television studio where Elisabeth and then Sue work, the alarming colours of the corridors and bathrooms, and even the patterning on the carpet, are lifted straight from the Overlook in Stanley Kubrick’s hotel-set horror, as though now Hollywood were the haunted house.

There is a sequence in Kubrick’s film where Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) sees a beautiful young woman emerge naked from the bath in Room 237, only for her to transform in his arms – and in the mirror – into a sagging, wasting crone. In a sense The Substance, with its many scenes in bathrooms and in front of mirrors, and with its protagonist’s slippage between feminine youth and ageing, replays that sequence at length – although here it is not a horny, hot-blooded male who is horrified by the transformation, but Elisabeth herself, appalled to see her own messed-up body clock reflected back at her in the looking glass.

Director: Frank Henenlotter

In Frank Henenlotter’s outlandish creature feature, the mysterious thing that Duane Bradley (Kevin VanHentenryck) carries everywhere in a wicker basket during his New York City sojourn is in fact his deformed, conjoined twin Belial, now joined to his brother by the mind rather than at the hip. This Jekyll and Hyde – one a fresh-faced young man, the other a hideous monster – are seeking bloody revenge upon the doctors who surgically separated them as children. Belial is all at once the incarnation of the voices in Duane’s head, the chip on his shoulder and the id in his closet – and their two-day murder spree will also turn into a bizarre love triangle, tearing them apart once more.

Belial looks “like a squashed octopus” with an alarmingly human face – which is exactly what Elisabeth resembles in her final metamorphic stage, as she crawls in the gutter but looks at the stars.

 Director: Yoon Jae-yeon

“I want to throw myself away and be born again as a whole new person,” says Hyo-jeong (K-pop singer Eugene), who has just seen herself replaced by a younger woman on a home-shopping TV show selling women’s lingerie. So Hyo-jeong signs up for an extremely exclusive seven-day intensive yoga course that promises, for one of the five entrants, not just a rare meeting with its reclusive owner, the 1970s film star Kan Mi-hee (Lee Hye-sang), but also a dose of eternal youth and perfect beauty – but only if certain rules are strictly observed.

It is not hard to see the connections between Yoon Jae-yeon’s horror feature and The Substance, as both confront age-conscious TV personalities with the beauty myth, both make women their own worst enemies in a man’s world, and both feature a walkway decorated with pictures of a woman who is not quite herself. Sue too is a yoga fan…

Director: Norbert Keil

Obviously the body horror of David Cronenberg has had a massive influence on The Substance – but perhaps the film that comes closest to it in theme is this more recent riff on Cronenberg. Norbert Keil’s German/Canadian co-production concerns the amnesia-stricken Kira (Rebecca Forsythe) who is suffering a wasting dermatological breakdown and cannot remember her recent past. Her decision to undergo an experimental process at a skincare clinic has transformed her into a vampire-like creature who regularly requires the flayed skin of others to replenish her own. In other words, this is the myth of Countess Elizabeth Báthory, or Cronenberg’s Rabid (1977), updated.

Much as Kira expressly discusses the different ways that ageing men and women are treated by society, Elisabeth in Fargeat’s film is discarded because of her age by a television executive (Dennis Quaid) who is older, and in every respect uglier, than her, but remains at the top.

The Substance is in cinemas, including BFI Southbank, now.