But is The Substance really a horror movie?
Skinamarink was/is, there's no doubt about that. But is it possible for a movie that's discussed by almost everyone as body horror, to not actually be part of the larger genre assignment in which body horror is presumably a subset?
I think it's not only possible, but probable.
Now, we know that at least for the purposes of Golden Globes consideration, The Substance was considered a comedy. I've always thought it was useful that the Globes breaks down its nominees between drama and musical/comedy, since it broadens the number of types of film on which they can shine the light of praise, beyond the five films that might fit into a single category. The Substance almost certainly would not have been recognised if there were only one category.
We can be snooty and cast serious doubt on whether we should grant the Globes any legitimacy whatsoever, but they do provide a useful role in helping us understand how we should think about a movie like The Substance. Although it is not "ha ha" funny in more than a few individual moments -- I think of that great moment where the already gnarled version of Elizabeth Sparkle storms out of her apartment and tells her neighbor to fuck off -- there is no doubt Coralie Fargeat's film is wicked in its intentions, and is a full-on satire even if it not a full-on comedy.
That does leave space for horror, and believe me, IMDB does assign that category to it. In fact, The Substance has a ridiculous number of categories assigned to it, four of which include the word "horror." In order of how they're listed, these are:
Body Horror
Dark Comedy
Monster Horror
Psychological Horror
Drama
Horror
Sci-Fi
We can't necessarily trust whoever assigns the categories in IMDB, but the number of genre assignments alone -- more than I have seen for any other film -- probably indicates why this movie was such a fabulous success for me. After all, I've gone on the record saying I wanted my #1 movie to push the limits of an easy genre association, and The Substance passes that test with flying colors.
And despite the mention of horror four times in those categories, I still wonder if it is actually a horror movie.
Let's consider what makes a movie a horror movie. I'll start with the most obvious two:
1) It attempts to scare you by establishing a sense of dread, a sense of not knowing what might happen but knowing it will be bad.
2) It attempts to then spring that scary thing on you with a suddenness that makes you jump, which is why we call it a jump scare.
These primary two building blocks of a horror more are, I would argue, not even present in The Substance.
Although Fargeat's film establishes a sense of eeriness, supported primarily through the facelessness of the company that provides Elizabeth the drug, nothing about what happens to Elizabeth Sparkle is supposed to be establishing a sense of dread. We might be discomfited by the grossness of it, but there are no things we can't see, hiding in the shadows, that might make the scenario more frightening. In fact, we are directly confronted with the things that happen to Elizabeth in so open a way that it is almost a case of over-sharing, while horror fundamentally relies on under-sharing.
Since there is nothing hiding in the shadows, there is nothing to jump out of those shadows. Therefore, no jump scares either.
Of course, to limit horror to those two basic components is to be rather reductive. I also, however, find it fairly useful in terms of deciding whether something is a horror movie or not. If you can think of any true horror movie that does not contain one or the other of these elements, I'd like to know what it is.
"Body horror," though, is absolutely an appropriate genre classification for The Substance, given how much body horror there is in this movie. Interestingly, this leads us to a distinction between the genre called "body horror" and the use of that phrase to describe something you specifically see within any movie. You can say that a movie contains body horror without actually being part of that genre. As a good example, there is body horror of a sort in the Deadpool movies in that the main character is always having awful things happen to his person. Yet you would not for a moment consider putting that as a genre tag on Deadpool & Wolverine.
And yet if you were to say that The Substance contained body horror and yet was not part of the body horror genre, well that would be incorrect, now wouldn't it? I think it might have to do with the quantity of body horror. The Substance exceeds that standard by a country mile.
Then the question is, can a movie be in the body horror genre without being in the larger horror genre that surrounds it?
I don't know if I have an answer to that, but then I can look back on the evidence of The Substance and how little effort it makes to "scare" us in the conventional ways that a standard horror movie scares us. Being a cautionary tale is not the same thing as being scary.
When it comes to the subject of body horror, you should always come back to David Cronenberg. The grandfather of body horror, the genre, includes body horror, the cinematic component, in almost every one of his films. Even A History of Violence has a knack for body horror -- remember seeing the close-up of that guy's face after Viggo Mortensen stomps it?
Cronenberg's movie Existenz seems like a good example. Although I don't remember a lot of this movie, it is one of the first movies I think of when I think of the concept of body horror in the abstract. My memory of this film, though, is that it uses body horror more for the purposes of science fiction -- like The Matrix did -- than for anything that would truly be categorized as horror. And that provides a good template for what The Substance is, though in this case that primary genre might be satire.
Or it might be science fiction. Or it might be drama. Or it might be dark comedy. These are all possible genre associations for The Substance.
All these questions are to the good of Fargeat's movie. When trying to pick apart why a movie is my #1, our very inability to pigeonhole it is a strong asset in its favor.
The only thing I know for sure -- and the only thing that really matters -- is that a really awesome movie has gone back-to-back with another really awesome movie.
I can't wait to see what awesome movie succeeds it in 2025.
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