The Substance: Body Horror and the Death of the Witch-Bitch

Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 film The Substance is a doozy.

The story, for those who haven’t seen it, is simple: a beautiful, middle-aged Hollywood star named Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) finds out that her aerobics show is going to recast someone younger to take her place. In despair, she takes something called “the substance,” an injectable product that will make her a younger version of herself again. The result of the injection, however, isn’t that Elisabeth gets younger. Instead, it’s that Elisabeth splits into two selves—her older self and a new younger self (Margaret Qualley), who tears out of the older Elisabeth’s body at her spinal column. The younger self goes by the name Sue. At any one time, one of the selves has Elisabeth’s intact consciousness, and the other self is a shell, kind of paralyzed on the bathroom floor and receiving intravenous nutrition. In theory, each body should have consciousness for a week at a time, and then switch off again. One week Sue, one week Elisabeth; one week Sue, one week Elisabeth. Needless to say, this eventually goes badly awry, because the consciousness vastly prefers to be in the younger body of Sue.

I have a particular take on this film and how it fits into the very long history of monstrous women, but before I do that, I want to spotlight a very important aspect of the film that—as far as I can tell—has been entirely overlooked by viewers and critics.

It’s a remake.

I mean, it’s a very good remake, and a very subtle one, so much so that you might not recognize the ultimate source unless you had seen it fairly recently. But grasping that it’s a remake is very important in anchoring the film’s larger stakes and claims, so let’s get it all out on the table.

The Substance is a remake of Wasp-Woman from 1958. (I’ve heard people compare the film also to The Fly, but the debt there is far less pronounced and important.)

In Wasp-Woman (which I featured in a prior post, a few months ago), we meet a beautiful, femal, middle-aged cosmetics industry president, named Janice Starlin. Starlin’s name—invoking light, shine, glamour, and Hollywood stardom—is uncoincidentally similar to Elisabeth Sparkle’s in The Substance.

Starlin finds out from her company members that sales of her cosmetics have dropped off because she’s become too old to continue to be the advertising face of the company. Devastated, Starlin comes to learn that there’s a substance—distilled from bee royal jelly—that she can inject into herself in order to turn younger again. Like Elisabeth Sparkle, she opts in, despite there being zero reason for her to trust either the safety or efficacy of this substance. Like Elisabeth Sparkle, Janice Starlin is a powerful middle-aged woman, eager to regain her physical youth. LIke Elisabeth Sparkle, Janice Starlin is desperate.

So Janice starts shooting the wasp substance. And lo: it works.

Everyone loves the new Ms. Starlin, until she begins injecting too much, abusing the bee-substance, trying to make herself more and more enduringly beautiful. Just as does Elisabeth Sparkle’s younger self, Sue. The abuse of the bee-substance eventually causes a spectacular body horror—spectacular for the 1950s, anyway—in which Ms. Starlin transforms into a Wasp-Woman, with gross bug eyes, horrible leathery bulges over her body, and a pronounced desire to murder people in bloody ways. If you’ve seen The Substance, now you know what I mean when I say it was a remake.

Director Fargeat very slyly signals her film’s affiliation with the earlier film.  If you notice, Elisabeth Sparkle almost always runs around dressed in a bright yellow jacket, with her long, black hair draping behind her. She is, literally, a yellowjacket. When we see her outside in the sun, tromping around in her needlessly heavy yellow jacket, she is usually also wearing outsized dark black sunglasses, which look very much like bee eyes. In addition, there are numerous scenes in a long hallway in the filming studio in The Substance, in which we see either Elisabeth or her younger self, Sue, walking along a carpet with a repeating honeycomb design on it. There are recurring close-ups of flies or other insects, usually a black insect on a yellow background, that run throughout the film. Wasps, wasps, everywhere. On top of that, the mysterious company that sends Elisabeth her supplies of “the substance” sends her envelopes that are all black, but with a tiny yellow insignia on it, that looks very much like the abdomen and thorax of a bee. And, it must be noted, a significant proportion of the shots in the film are made with a wide-angle lens, giving a wall-eye or bee’s eye feel to much of the film.

I see you, Ms. Fargeat, and I am into you.

In the original film, female vanity is lambasted in concert with the cosmetics industry; the message is dually to critique female vanity and to critique an industry entirely built around catering to that vanity. In The Substance, it’s clearly the film and television industry that are most sharply critiqued, along with female vanity again. Both films have in common a rather wrenching emphasis on the idea that women have what Amy Shumer, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Patricia Arquette, and Tiny Fey call a “last fuckable day,” a day that comes when a woman turns 50, and spontaneously ages out of her eligibility to participate in media as a beautiful woman. Indeed, Elisabeth Sparkle’s fiftieth birthday coincides with the first day of the film, and with her discovery that she will no longer be invited to host her aerobics show, because she’s too old. Both films grapple with the idea that women will become invisible as they age. Socially irrelevant. Sexually irrelevant. Professionally irrelevant.

Janice Starlin didn’t want that in 1958, so she started shooting bee jelly. Elisabeth Sparkle didn’t want it in 2024, so she started shooting “the substance.” Hell, let’s be honest: nobody wants that, which is why there are dozens of ways to introduce exogenous estrogen into your body as you approach menopause, and dozens of ways to surgically alter your body at any old age, including of course the fad for injecting one’s face with Botox or Juvaderm. We live in a cultural moment in which women are apoplectically afraid of aging, and in which the pharmaceutical industry is in a position to tell us that, maybe, we don’t have to.

The Substance offers up a staunch critique of that idea, and of the practice of forever pursuing youth, at the expense of being one’s own true, authentic self. The unsubtle message is this: if you try to be something you’re not, you will suffer profound regret, and it may kill you. Critique, made!

Of course, every time the camera rolls lecherously across Margaret Qualley’s mostly naked body, that critique falters. And as Elisabeth Sparkle’s body grows rapidly older with Sue’s abuse of the substance, the critique grows weaker: I mean, come on. The camera and costuming are doing their damnedest to make viewers salivate over Qualley, and to look at Moore’s prosthetically aged body with nothing short of revulsion. Critique, unmade!

But no surprise, because if there’s one thing we should have learned about depictions of female monstrosity by now, it’s this: all depictions of female monstrosity are ambivalent. On the one hand, they tend to critique patriarchy, patriarchal values, and the correlative dehumanization of women that accompanies them. On the other hand, however, they tend strongly to fetishize and shore up the very patriarchal categories they try to critique. Here, we’re critiquing the overemphasis on physical beauty embodied by modern patriarchal culture and, in particular, its stranglehold on the entertainment industry. But at the same time, we’re like, really, really, really looking at Margaret Qualley’s body.

Over time, Elisabeth—who, let’s be fair, had already been gorgeous beyond belief as a 50-year-old woman, because she’s Demi F’ing Moore—transforms into an old crone. Her knee becomes so arthritic that she can barely bend it. Her hand is a claw with yellowed, ragged nails. Half of her face is withered, as are one arm and one leg. In a rage at Sue, Elisabeth goes on an insane cooking binge: she cooks whole chickens, turkeys, sauces, stews, you name it. As she does so, she looks increasingly like a crazed caricature of a witch, cackling and making exaggerated facial expressions while bent over a cooking pot, with her grey hair pointing in all directions and becoming increasingly clotted up with oil, grease, and egg. Meanwhile, she throws raw eggs at her massive picture window, and then proceeds to paper over her entire view with newspaper.

Elisabeth is a witch and she is transforming her home into a witch’s den, complete with bowls of animal bones and poisonous substances lying around.

When I realized that Fargeat was going for a modern-day witch narrative, I was intrigued. Fargeat was taking the two most common tropes about witches—on the one hand, that they are old, haggard, wizened, angry bitches that hunch over cooking pots, and on the other, that they are young, hypersexual seductresses who bewitch all the men around them with their lady parts—and suggested that they are two sides of the same person. But in this case, rather than having the old crone witch attack and kill young women (think: Maleficent or the witch from Snow White) or the young seductress kill her male marks (think: Circe or any Roman Witch-Bitch from my prior posts), in this film we have a young seductress who uses DNA-driven chemical “magic” to enslave, drain, and dehumanize another woman, who is also—paradoxically—herself. Indeed, in one particularly brutal scene, Sue beats Elisabeth to death.

She does this without fully grasping that, since they are two sides of the same person, killing one will necessarily entail the other’s death as well. The film makes that symbolic connection very concrete: once Elisabeth is dead, Sue starts rapidly decaying as well.

At this point, I was annoyed. I had hoped that in a contemporary reboot of Wasp-Woman that also wrestled with historical tropes about witches, eventually all the gore and violence would turn on the patriarchy itself. But here we were, watching the two sides of the same tortured woman just obliterate each other.

But lo! Ms. Fargeat delivered. Eventually, Sue takes the substance again, creating a horrific new monstrous birth to emerge from her own body. This new self has many eyes, many faces, many heads, withered arms, corpulent legs, many mouths, and Demi Moore’s entire face emerging from the middle of its back, her mouth stuck open in a perpetual, Tiamat-like scream. This monster, whom the film names “Elisasue,” is gnarly.

But interestingly, she doesn’t see herself that way. She puts on her earrings and her fancy New Year’s Dress, and she hobbles to the studio to shoot the New Year’s celebration spot that Sue had booked. She gets up on stage, in front of a live studio audience. She looks repulsive, and the men in the studio start rushing toward her, screaming “Monster!” and “Freak!” They start attacking her, but as she gets wounded, her body basically explodes with blood rockets. The entire studio audience gets completely sprayed and drenched with thousands of gallons of her blood. It’s not even a little bit realistic, but who cares? We’ve edged over decisively now into the realm of allegory: we’re seeing all the rich, patriarchal TV executives get their hands (and faces, and clothes) bloody from the horrific and unreasonable demands they’ve made on the Elisabeths and the Sues of the world. Gross as hell, but it landed.

But the ending of the movie left me sad, rather than triumphant. Because the monster Elisasue dies a horrible, dehumanizing death. I was sort of hoping that the film would end with some kind of victorious fusion of Elisabeth and Sue in which she was some kind of avenging cougar figure—like the Roman Witch-Bitches of Horace and Apuleius. I was hoping the film would end with us being afraid of rather than for the menopausal women of the world.

But that wasn’t realistic. This isn’t Ancient Rome, the land of cougar witch-bitches! This is twenty-first century America; women who break the rules and humiliate the patriarchy are made to suffer and die.