I find that horror as a genre has the indelible ability to make me feel connected to my body as a woman. For something to be perceived as horror, it would have to feel unusual and strange to the viewer. While horror is certainly gory, grotesque, and visceral, sometimes it’s not all that unfamiliar. I had this realization about horror’s properties when I first watched the 2024 release, The Substance, directed by Coralie Fargeat.
The Substance is a movie about a fading celebrity, Elisabeth Sparkle, who is renowned for her aerobics instructional videos. On her 50th birthday, she is informed that she is being fired. Amid her distress, she is then offered a product called “The Substance,” which will duplicate an enhanced version of herself. This enhanced version will be able to live its own life for seven days before it eventually has to be cycled back into the original self to eliminate the risks that could potentially occur. As Elisabeth becomes more entranced by the new life that her duplicate, named Sue, gets to live, she begins to abuse the seven-day rule until her body begins to pay the price for the loss of balance this evokes.
While still being a horror movie, The Substance manages to tackle a lot of very persistent issues surrounding beauty standards and ageism that inextricably affect everyone. It reaches into the core of the never-ending pursuit of beauty and lays out the visceral aftermath of what that desire does. This resonates with the observation that modern horror frequently addresses societal anxieties, particularly around identity and body image.
I think what I happened to appreciate most about it was in illuminating these very-real struggles of insecurity, body dysmorphia, and ageism, that in the process it remained unafraid of showing the capacities of what these internal battles do to the female form. Unafraid of the haunting contortions and viscera of the body in its bloody and raw existence. Using imagery in an almost extricating manner to convey the ramifications that Elisabeth’s body begins to undergo throughout each stage of the movie. Enterplaying detailed close-up shots of the changes and the deterioration her form takes in the further abuse that is inflicted upon both Elisabeth and Sue. Even if sometimes the detail is so severe, I believe something is empowering about seeing these deep-rooted issues reflected in a way that is honest and raw to what actually like to experience these feelings of insecurity and inferiority as a woman.
A woman’s body more often than not can simply feel like it’s not hers. Not just under a lack of bodily autonomy, but the feeling that it’s slowly getting away from her. Attempting to run from the wandering eyes that are constantly assuming, inspecting, interpreting, and commenting, and then it becomes frightening to show flesh and to be flesh. Recent discussions about horror illuminate this rhetoric by recognizing its ability to channel collective fears into a visceral, yet therapeutic, narrative form.
The presence of what beauty standards do to a woman’s body is not a pretty sight. It is a demoralizing experience to constantly feel like you have to contort your original form into a model that is unrecognizable from what your body originally began as. Using different mechanisms to fit into the simulacra of feminine performance and present yourself as similar to the ideal form of what a woman’s body “should” be. All those burgeoning feelings that live inside all of us can feel like a horror show, and yet the depiction of what that experience is like remains afraid of expressing the gory details of what it’s like to live in that existence.
But within horror, suddenly all those repressed feelings can come alive and be expressed in the form that they truly exist within, despite the bloodiness and brutality of their reality. Horror films, particularly those centering on women’s experiences, have increasingly served as a mirror for confronting and reclaiming autonomy over the body. I admire when those feelings can be conveyed freely in all their messy, beautiful glory, and when, for once, the concern is not on the beauty of the female form but the vicious, raw humanity that living in the body as a woman can implore.