There two types of horror films. First is easy entertainment, what I call “popcorn horror.” You get a few friends, make some popcorn, have a scream, and go on with your life.
Then there is horror like “The Substance,” showing tonight at The Eclipse Theater in downtown Breckenridge (4 p.m. and 7:15 p.m.). This winner of Best Screenplay at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival is a grim and oozing example of the “other” horror.
“The Substance,” starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley as two sides of the same fading fitness celebrity, has an agenda. It has a thought in its head, but also bottomless buckets of blood and viscera. It has a fetish for skin and sex, and you can’t look away, until it blatantly disregards your gag reflex and makes you want to trade popcorn for a barf bag. You might even hate it – at first.
But, like the fictional black-market drug of the title, you will be thinking about it and talking about it. The immediate shock of “other” horror eventually wears off. But the discomfort, the queasiness, the itchiness – those linger. And they mean this gruesome fable has done its job.
From the first few minutes “The Substance” announces itself as horror. It manages to make food look grotesque, like a burger splattering to the sidewalk, or prawns devoured in sickening closeup by the nastiest creature in this film, Dennis Quaid’s boorish TV executive, all decked out in velour he stole from drapes at a country estate.
He’s the one who tells Moore’s aging fitness star, Elisabeth Sparkle, that her type of sex doesn’t sell anymore. Sparkle herself hasn’t changed. She can still kick, pump and smile for the camera. But her wrinkles are showing, and her skin isn’t quite as tight anymore. She’s turning 50 today. The camera doesn’t love her the way it once did.
That’s when she hears about The Substance, not from her greasy boss, but from a stranger at the emergency room. This pharmaceutical fountain of youth promises to make her younger. More beautiful. Perfect. It also comes with a warning label, written in bold block print – nothing like the carousel of side effects on a legal drug – reminding her “you are one” with the younger, more perfect Sparkle, named Sue.
You watch these opening scenes and think, “Who would ever shoot up green goo they got from a lockbox in a sketchy alleyway?” But the answer is right there, staring back at Sparkle from her living room: It’s a life-sized portrait of her younger self.
“The Substance” could have been a somber treatise on body image and aging. But director-screenwriter Coralie Fargeat has other ideas. This is horror in the vein of John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, the masters of body horror. It hooks you with an interesting premise and then assaults you with wave after wave of disgusting images with even more disgusting implications.
There are also two types of body horror, legitimate and trained. We are trained, in the U.S. at least, to view aging bodies with distaste, maybe even disgust, and youthful bodies with lust. It’s right there in every cosmetics commercial, which aren’t too different from the leering video shoots with Sue.
Fargeat wisely shoots Sparkle and Sue in similar ways, like extended nude closeups in a frigid white bathroom. The first shot makes you uncomfortable without realizing it. The next makes you uncomfortable because you realize you prefer it.
Who taught us one version of the same body is more “beautiful” than the other? We don’t want to admit it, but it’s the same grimy exec in the velour drapes we hate.
That’s the trained body horror. But you’re not getting off easy – “The Substance” is dripping with legitimate body horror. Hooks in warm flesh. Needles in spinal columns. Chicken bones fished from bellybuttons. A birth scene straight out of “The Thing.”
In its final act “The Substance” veers into outright surrealism. By now you are ready to look away, and Fargeat dares you to try. Some viewers might not make it to the credits. I know I was tempted. And that’s fine. The point has been made. The hooks are buried, brain deep.
When “The Substance” screened at Cannes, Moore and Qualley got a 13-minute standing ovation. It was deserved. They managed to make us care about faces in a fable, and more impressive yet, a HORROR fable.
I’m guessing some of the applause came from viewers who considered them “brave” for baring it all on screen, especially Moore, who is now 62 years old. But brave is the wrong word. Bravery is not confined to one performance. Bravery is Moore’s entire career as a woman in the film industry.
I’d call this performance unafraid. The two are similar, but different, just like Sparkle and Sue. And the difference is what matters.