By: Skyler Loritz
GHOSTS! DEMONS! GRAVEYARDS! DUST BUNNIES!
Did I scare you?
Horror movies stereotypically revolve around spirits, the dead, and all things creaky, rusty, or webbed, creating a prominently antique scene in the genre. The 2024 body horror movie The Substance goes about scaring its watchers differently, though. (This article may contain spoilers, so consider yourself warned.) The film’s main character Elisabeth Sparkle is a TV aerobics instructor who is fired on her 50th birthday solely because of her age, and to “keep the shareholders happy,” as her boss puts it. Devastation takes hold—as it usually does when one’s life’s work has been blotted away without warning or much reason—so Sparkle turns to The Substance, which will create her a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” self. The Substance is a serum that, upon injection, initiates abnormal cellular division that “will release another version of [ones]self,” and it is this self that Elisabeth Sparkle comes to loathe. To be clear, this creates another body for Elisabeth, but both are Elisabeth, and only one can be “used” at a time. The movie continues cyclically with Sue, the other self, abusing her power, Elisabeth aging rapidly and falling into madness, and both hating themselves.
Eventually, Elisabeth’s body is completely alien to the viewer. In just a few months she has aged uncannily, to put it lightly, and wants to avoid the public because of her perceived deformation. All of this is due to Sue’s stealing of Elisabeth’s youth to become more attractive than ever, which continues until the death of Elisabeth’s original body, causing Sue’s to fall apart in response. What might her solution be, to create a new, better version of herself? The Substance, of course! Sue injects her leftover serum, but the resulting self looks like an even less-anthropomorphic version of Frankenstein. The movie ends when this creature dies, and Sue and Elisabeth die with her. The last twenty minutes of the film may be more heartbreaking than disgusting, though, since this creature is finally accepting of her looks (though in delirium) but her audience, bosses, and fellow performers are repulsed by her.
Gore is an obvious human deterrent for survival reasons, but the modernity of The Substance is what pushed its scaring abilities over the top. Trends attempting to invent a “fountain of youth” are bountiful in the 21st century, and with new technology being developed, new gross ventures to gain godlike power over one’s own appearance seem to be just around the corner. As celebrities and others are further driven to this self-mutilation, The Substance grows in potential realism, illustrating the lengths some will go in order to live up to impossible societal standards. But what is so scary about others having work done to themselves? The fact that a person can only escape their own body in death. Elisabeth continually disfigures herself and nothing can be done to return her to her original, human state; in short, the damage is done, and even when Elisabeth attempts to kill the other self and to stop taking the Substance, she realizes that she will be stuck looking 50 years older than she really is. Similarly today, many people have turned to abuse procedures like plastic surgery and botox or drugs like Ozempic in order to maintain certain standards, and after a while they become irreversible. It makes sense that people undergo these surgeries, though, because being trapped inside of a body that one dislikes or hates is detrimental to one’s mental health. Body dysmorphia also goes the other way, though, once these physically-altering procedures are completed and self-recognition is impossible. Ultimately, The Substance shows us what happens when self-alteration goes unchecked and when society stops remedying insecurity in more beneficial and humane ways, which is especially relatable in 2024, The Substance’s year of release.
What’s scarier than skeletons, abandoned houses, and old chapels? The lengths human beings are willing to go to stay young, and the society we have created that pushes them to do so.
Photo Credit: pinterest.com/pin/29695678787495677/
