Female ageing is the ultimate horror story You can't kill the hag inside

Coralie Fargeat’s new satirical body-horror The Substance contains a lot of visual nods to The Shining: corridors with sinister geometric carpet, blood pouring down walls, a bathroom decorated in an upsettingly lurid shade of red. But the most important nod of all is this: it’s a movie about the horror of female ageing, in which the ultimate nightmare is a woman’s body made grotesque by time. This time, though, it’s not a male filmmaker seeing this horror from the outside. It’s a female filmmaker seeing it from the inside. 

The film’s concept is a bit complicated and pretty clever. Elisabeth Sparkle (played by Demi Moore) is an Oscar-winning actress turned fabulously successful aerobics instructor (shades of Jane Fonda), just hitting her 50th birthday — which is the point at which “it stops”, as her repellent producer (Dennis Quaid) tells her. “People always ask for something new.” She loses her show. She loses her celebrity. She loses her purpose. 

Enter the substance — a mysterious black-market medicine that promises to create the best version of you. When Elisabeth injects it, she gives birth to a whole second self through a gory vaginal split in her back. The new her (played by Margaret Qualley) is young, luscious and beautiful, and takes the name Sue. The only snag is that, while Elisabeth and Sue have separate bodies, their existence is shared: one of them can live for seven days while the other lies insensate. Disturb that balance, and you pay a price.

Of course, the characters (character?) can’t simply follow the rules. As Sue steps into Elisabeth’s old life and job, it becomes unbearable to sacrifice herself so the older body can live. “Just one more day,” she whispers to Elisabeth’s prone body, as she draws another dose of serum from the spine. The cost is borne by Elisabeth, who becomes more decrepit with every liberty Sue takes. Unable to coexist, they end up in a battle to survive that neither ultimately will win. Sue will end up savagely kicking a wizened, hunchbacked Elisabeth to death. 

There are more gruesome parts of the film, but for me, this moment of obliterating overkill directed at the despised figure of female age was the most horrible. Sue, of course, is ensuring her own hideous death by murdering Elisabeth. But in that moment, she cares less about her own life than she does about destroying the saggy, sunken portent of her own future. Elisabeth’s body represents everything she fears becoming, and everything that she will be, because Sue is Elisabeth and Elisabeth is Sue. 

The writer Victoria Smith dissects this particular form of ageist misogyny in her book Hags. “From the moment we are born female,” she writes, “we are conditioned to feel ashamed, not just of our appearance, our biology and our desires, but also of other women and our connection to them.” One way to manage this entrenched internalised misogyny, argues Smith, is through “hag hate”, which “provides a means to pacify that fear and shame by directing it onto the older woman.” The enthusiastic way in which some younger women embraced terms of abuse for middle-aged women like “Karen” and “terf”? That’s hag hate. The young woman understands, correctly, that to age as a woman is to become hated; her futile defence is to hate harder than anyone else.

But the self-destruction begins with Elisabeth’s choice to take the substance rather than accept her own decline into maturity. In an interview about the film, Demi Moore has said, astutely, that “it’s not about what’s being done to us [us here being women] — it’s what we do to ourselves. It’s the violence we have against ourselves.” And having worked to Hollywood’s punishing physical standards since she was a teenager, Moore knows a few things about this violence.

Inevitably, as a young woman Moore was told that she wasn’t thin enough (“before I ever even had children”, said Moore, in a phrase which ever so slightly and heartbreakingly suggests she might have accepted some justice in it after having children). She doesn’t, however, see those comments in themselves as the most harmful thing inflicted on her: “those were humiliating experiences, but the true violence was what I was doing to myself, the way in which I tortured myself, did extreme crazy exercise, weighed and measured my food because I was putting all of my value of who I was into how my body was, how it looked, and giving other people’s opinion more power than myself.”

Yet all the while Moore felt inescapably inadequate, her body was the peak of commodifiable perfection as far as the film industry was concerned. In Indecent Proposal (1993) she played a woman so gorgeous that a man would offer a million dollars to sleep with her. For going topless in Striptease (1996) — and for appearing to be fully nude on the poster, which may have been more important for the film’s commercial prospects — she was paid an unprecedented $12.5 million. 

It would have been sensational for any woman to appear naked and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair. But it was Moore who did it, in a 1991 shoot by Annie Leibovitz that drew both feminist praise and moral majority ire. It was talked about by everyone for most of that summer. Moore might never have received much critical recognition for her performances, but her body has always been significant in itself. It stands for the ideal.

Which is why it is shocking to see her naked in the early scenes of The Substance. Her breasts are a little less perky than the last time you probably saw them, her butt a little less perfectly round. In the mercilessly full-screen close ups on her face, you can see that her skin’s plumpness is fading, its texture not so refined. She looks undeniably like an older woman. She does not, however, look her age — which is 61. She doesn’t even look her character’s age of 50. She could pass easily for 40-something. 

And that is partly the point. “Part of what was interesting is that Elisabeth is being rejected, and it’s not that I look that bad,” Moore has said. But it also points to a different kind of horror taking place off-screen. Moore has denied ever having plastic surgery, despite extensive speculation that she had undergone procedures including breast implants, fat transfer and eyelid reduction. Regardless, her body speaks of relentless discipline in diet and exercise: slim, toned and exquisitely proportioned, even if some parts of her are very slightly drooping. 

Keeping the hag inside you at bay requires constant vigilance. While Moore looks 40-ish, stars who are actually in their 40s have begun to look nearer to 20. This month, Dazed declared the advent of the “Undetectable Era” of beauty — the beauty itself is detectable, but the means used to achieve it are not. “We strive for dramatic results,” explained one surgeon. “The undetectable part is that it’s done so well, so beautifully, that to the natural observer it just looks like a person who’s maintained some youth.”

This, of course, is the dream that drives Elisabeth to the substance: to be younger, more beautiful, more perfect. That possibility — of youth stretched into decades — is not dystopian anymore, or at least not dystopian if you have access to the money and expertise that Hollywood success can offer. You can look as poreless and full-lipped at 30 as you were when you were a pre-teen. A beauty that looks born, not made, is there for the purchasing.

No procedure, though, can bargain away time forever. The portrait in the attic (or in the case of The Substance, the unconscious 50-year-old body in the closet) is still there, awaiting revelation. The hag is in her bathtub, waiting to be found. The horror of female ageing is that you can’t kill the crone inside yourself. She is you, and the alternative to reconciliation with her is mutually assured destruction. The only way to live, in the end, is to accept your mortality.

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Sarah Ditum is a columnist, critic and feature writer.

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