"Remember to take care of yourselves."

The Substance is about self-hatred and the horrors of aging.

*****SPOILERS AHEAD, AND CONTENT WARNING BECAUSE THIS LETTER IS GENERALLY KIND OF GROSS****

On Monday I saw The Substance.

The Substance

Perfect Blue

I’m crazy about body horror. My favorite film of 2023 was Barbarian, and 2024’s might be The Substance. If you’re into the genre, I suggest Videodrome, Teeth, Possession (I threw up in Metrograph during this one), and The Human Centipede.

A friend of mine who lives in Boise saw The Substance over the weekend and said people were walking out of the theater because they were so freaked out, so I decided to go to an afternoon screening on Monday at Nighthawk. I knew I wanted to write about it but I forgot a pad to take notes but as you all know… Nighthawk has those little pieces of paper for writing down orders. Brilliant.

This letter isn’t exactly a review of The Substance, but more of a survey of other body horror that the movie reminded me of. This subject has always been an interest of mine, and if you want to scroll back in the Feed Me archives from 2020/2021, you can read some of my fucked up short stories:

The Secret Ingredient

A Deeper Stretch 🪟

The Female Founder

ANYWAY.

The Substance is about Elisabeth Sparkle, an Oscar-winning Hollywood fitness icon played by Demi Moore, who gets fired on her 50th birthday (this is ridiculous after you see the shots on Moore’s body – she could been in Eric Prydz’s Call On Me music video) which leads her to start taking an experimental anti-aging drug.

The packaging for The Substance reminded me of my favorite beauty packaging ever: Prada's multidose skincare.

The Substance works by doubling your cells – and in this case doubling yourself – when you inject yourself with the solution. A “newer, younger, better version” of Elisabeth Sparkle (in this case Sue, played by Margaret Qualley) births itself out of her body, but in order to maintain her younger self, Elisabeth must pay high physical and emotional costs. What I thought was interesting was that the hunger for youth here wasn’t for a romantic interest – it was for a professional one.

When an anonymous doctor explained how The Substance worked, I thought of the many procedures and treatments women (people, but mostly women) get to strive for youth, that are just normal now:

• PRP (Platelet-Rich Plasma) occurs by drawing a patient's blood, putting that blood into a centrifuge, and then injecting the platelet-rich-plasma (which has a high concentration of growth factors) back into the patient’s face. You can get this procedure for $900 at SkinSpa which has a coupon right now for 35% off.

• Similar to Elisabeth, women all over the country are putting themselves at risk by getting weight-loss drugs on the black market. Many of the online pharmacies dealing out Ozempic are operating illegally.

• People guzzle down colostrum and collagen supplements that are derived from baby animals in hopes of a more youthful, healthy human body.

Although the specifics of this movie are exaggerated and outlandish, the underlying urge to be young around and the massive set of industries that revolve around and prey off of insecurities are very real. They’re a huge part of the American economy.

There’s actually not that much dialogue in the movie. There are a lot of sound effects — frying eggs, shoving needles into puss-filled wounds, throwing up after drinking too much and the bubbling AlkaSeltzer that follows, heels walking on the sidewalk, fingering through bottles in medicine cabinets, and the flick cigarette lighters — and as a woman who spends most of my day alone, they were familiar.

There are a few other works that I think captured America’s obsession with youth and beauty really well. One of my favorite short stories, Regeneration at Mukti by Julia Elliott, is about an island spa that focuses on “regeneration,” through green juices, exfoliation, yoga, and a chrysalis-like medical procedure:

“All week long, Lissa, the lactose-free blonde, has been chattering about the Hell Realm, wondering, as we all are, when our affliction will begin. She’s the kind of person whose head will explode unless she opens her mouth to release every half-formed thought. Her perfume, derived from synthetic compounds, gives me sinus headaches. Just as I suspected, she’s an actress. I’m almost positive she has fake tits…

 According to the orientation materials distributed by Guru Gobind Singh, the Hell Realm is different for everyone, depending on how much hatred and bitterness you have stored in your system. All that negativity, stashed deep in your organic tissues, will come bubbling to the surface of your human form. The psychosomatic filth of a lifetime will hatch, breaking through your skin like a thousand minuscule volcanoes to spit its lava. 

“Time for my mineral mud bath,” says Red. And now I see what I could not see before: a row of incipient cold sores edging his upper lip, wens forming around the delicate arch of his left nostril, a cluster of protoblisters highlighting each cheekbone like subtle swipes of blusher.”

The story isn’t that far off from reality. If Palm Heights offered face lifts, people would get them. 

Aesthetica by Allie Rowbottom was a book I kept thinking of while watching The Substance. Aesthetica is about an influencer in Hollywood named Anna who undergoes a life-threatening procedure called “Aesthetica” which actually promises to reverse every procedure she’s ever done to her body. What I liked about the book is that Rowbottom reminds the reader of the costs of cosmetic procedures, like the Gift of the Magi:

“Maybe she’s a natural beauty, an untouched beauty. The sales pitch for every powder, cream, procedure. But there’s always a consequence, some side effect that keeps away the promised miracle. Acne from pore-clogging foundation. Asymmetry from filler injected willy-nilly. Body dysmorphia from the asymmetry caused by the filler, which even when dissolved leaves your skin stretched out and floppy. It’s the same with pills: Vicodin cuts the pain, but then you can’t shit.”

The Substance did something similar, an anonymous man on the drug’s hotline frequently reminded users to respect the balance of the drug — how the user treats one version of themself, affects the other version.

I thought about Bravo’s Housewives a lot while watching The Substance. I remember sitting in my living room as a kid and thinking the women on Andy’s reunion couches were so contorted and made up. I recently revisited early seasons of the show’s reunions and those women look like everyone now – they barely touched their faces, compared to what Housewives look like now. I thought about that interview Kim Kardashian did with The New York Times where she said she’d eat shit if it made her look younger. I thought about the Orc birth scenes in The Lord of the Rings (Sue’s grotesque birth scene looked like Sauron’s breeding ground), and Sméagol’s addiction to something shiny that turned him into Gollum (Elisabeth’s self-hatred and obsession with youth turned her into a similar figure). One review I read compared The Substance to Perfect Blue and Black Swan in that it reflects on a woman’s obsession with her profession. Relatable.

Everything about this film was violent: the way Harvey, a garish TV producer played by Dennis Quaid, gluttonously ate a mountain of shrimp while talking over Elisabeth at a glitzy Hollywood restaurant; the way Elisabeth stabbed the olive in her fourth martini at a bar; the party scenes that destroyed Elisabeth/Sue’s apartment in the Hollywood Hills; and the wounds that ensued on both Sue and Elisabeth’s physical bodies and shared consciousness. 

This shrimp scene was what I imagine it would feel like to go to Cervo's on LSD.

The most upsetting scene in the whole film for me was when Elisabeth was getting ready for a date. Every time she did he makeup, she looked outside her sprawling windows to see a billboard of young, perky, smooth Sue. She returned to her bathroom vanity over and over and take off and re-apply her makeup, each time more violent — from adding lip gloss, to panicking while re-applying to concealer, to completely taking a dry tissue to her face and wiping everything so hard you thought her face might rip off.. It was an act I’d witnessed with my friends and mom and sister and myself so many times. I’ve cancelled plans because my hair looked bad, or my makeup wouldn’t lay right, or my face looked tired. At least because I thought it did. Sometimes it’s so bad you do want to rip your face off.

This movie fucked me up a little. I left the theater with my little stack of notes, hugging my own body. There was a lot of humor worked into the story, which I thought was appropriate considering the ridiculousness of the concept of anti-aging.

I went on a deep-dive of Coralie Fargeat, who directed the film, when I got back to my desk. In a recent interview with ELLE, she said, “The violence in the movie was really a way to take out all the violence that I felt within me. I felt the need to express all this regarding how you are seen and what your body looks like. You keep comparing yourself and evaluating your value based on that. And I said, ‘Okay, this is the right time for me to take the horror genre to express this violence.’”

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If you saw the movie, I’d love to discuss it with you in the comments. Would also love more body horror and fucked up plastic surgery book/movie suggestions.

"Eye of the Beholder” episode of The Twilight Zone.