Horror goes back-to-back -- or does it?

If there is anything stranger than a horror movie taking my #1 spot in 2023, it's a second horror movie taking my #1 spot in 2024 -- when no movie with that genre tag had ever accomplished that feat before.

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. 

Cronenberg and Cronenbergesque

Happy Halloween, everyone.

I watched a double feature of David Cronenberg's Videodrome and Ken Russell's Altered States on Saturday night, and I have a question for you:

Do I get more credit for watching these two seminal 1980s horror head trips as a double feature, than I lose credit for having never seen them before?

I was on a podcast back in August where Videodrome came up for discussion, and I had to admit I'd never seen it. I made a mental note to correct that as soon as possible (two-and-a-half months later, it turned out), and when I saw it was available for streaming on Netflix, I added it to our instant queue.

Altered States was not available for streaming, but I'd meant to see it for a lot longer than I'd meant to see Videodrome. So when I was looking for something scary to arrive for Halloween weekend, I bumped it up to the top of the queue without a second thought.

We might not have watched either if the evening had gone as originally planned. My wife and I have been talking about re-watching Poltergeist forever, and I actually borrowed it from the library last weekend as an option to watch on the projector setup. (See here for a fuller discussion of my projector weekend.) I know we'd talked about watching it in conjunction with Halloween, but I considered last weekend to be close enough, as many cinephiles theme their viewings for the entire month of October. But last weeked my wife wasn't into it, and this weekend, she expected we could find it for streaming on Netflix. I think it was once available, but not anymore.

She didn't initially seem interested in Videodrome because she thought she'd already seen it. However, when we were browsing through our instant queue, and she read the description, she decided it was Cronenberg's Scanners she'd already seen. So off we were on our Videodrome journey.

I have to say, I really dug this film. Just a quick plot summary for those of you not familiar with it: James Woods plays a sleazy co-owner of a small cable station that specializes in sex and violence, attempting to carve out a niche market that can keep it in business. He becomes fascinated with a pirated satellite signal of a show called Videodrome, which shows nothing but torture. He can't look away from it -- there's a reason that I won't go into here -- but he believes it to be a very convincing fake. Steadily he starts learning more about this underground property called Videodrome, that it's actually real, and that the sado-masochist he's just started sleeping with (a radio host played by Deborah Harry) wants to be on the show. As he becomes more and more obsessed with Videodrome, he starts hallucinating such things as his television coming alive -- pulsating like a living organism. And he starts getting warned away from the dangers of Videodrome, by a mysterious client, and by a pseudo-scientific organization that's testing the effects of the cathode ray on the human mind, run by a crackpot named Brian O'Blivion who appears only on video, never in person.

My mind feels a little thick this morning, and I'm not entirely happy with that synopsis, but let's proceed.

The movie was a revelation, especially for 1983. It's got incredible makeup effects (Rick Baker is and always has been a genius) and some terrifically trippy scenes of transmogrification. But what amazed me most is how much it seems to have anticipated the world in 2011. Not only does it seem to have a real understanding of the mindset of why people are so fascinated with reality television (a concept that was, at that point, a good decade away), but its handle on what fascinates us about torture seems to anticipate the torture porn subgenre in mainstream movies. (Which may have already run its course, but still qualifies as a "current" media issue.) The movie has a ton of interesting ideas about our inability to distinguish between real life and television imagery, including the idea that a television image may be more "real" than our real lives. (There's a logic behind it that I won't try to explicate here.) It's all founded on the idea that the cathode ray has an effect on our brain that makes our brain unable to differentiate, which certainly sounds plausible to me. Which makes some of the stuff that happens in this film all the more deliciously horrifying.

Also, Videodrome seemed a quintessential Cronenberg film in so many ways, its themes of transmogrification echoing in both films I've seen (Naked Lunch and The Fly) and films I haven't seen but know a bit about (eXistenZ).

Now, we'd thought Altered States was also David Cronenberg. It's right up his alley in terms of subject matter. However, it turns out that this film was directed by Ken Russell, a guy I know more for his interest in the psychosexual (Crimes of Passion, Whore and in a more genteel respect, Women in Love) than for heady philosophical ambitions related to perception and the capabilities of the human mind.

Altered States was not as satisfying for me, even though it's the film I've heard significantly more about. I should have known it was at least flawed, considering that the great Paddy Chayefsky adapted the screenplay from his own sci-fi novel -- but was disappointed enough in the results that he changed his writing credit to the pseudonym Sidney Aaron.

Altered States concerns a professor of abnormal psychology (William Hurt) who has been performing tests on students in which they are suspended in sensory deprivation tanks, using these experiments to test his theories on schizophrenia. When his curiosity gets the best of him upon hearing some of his subjects' feedback about their perceptual experiences, he tries his own turn in the deprivation tank and experiences a revelatory state of ecstasy. This starts him down a rabbit hole to push the envelope of his own perceptual capacity further and further. On a trip to Mexico, he sits in with a tribe of Indians and trips on their nearly toxic concoction involving hallucinogenic mushrooms (and who knows what else). When he takes this concoction back to his lab and combines it with the sensory deprivation tank, he regresses to a feral mental state that manifests itself in changes to his actual physical body.

This was another film that floored me for what it was capable of doing given the year (1980). The makeup effects by Dick Smith are quite good, but they probably did not strike me the way they would have had I not just watched the master Rick Baker at work in Videodrome (which includes seamless scenes of James Woods reaching inside his own stomach). The visual aspects of Altered States that really impressed me were the nightmarish montages William Hurt (in his first film role!) endures during his altered states of perception. They are like bad-trip music videos, and they are wonderfully creepy. However, I guess I'd say that I find that a bit less impressive than the hallucinations in Videodrome, in terms of their ability to disturb me and in terms of their technical achievements. Whereas the hallucinatory world suffuses the action in Videodrome, such that Woods is interacting with a TV screen that seems to actually be bulging outward into the physical environment, much of the cool visual stuff in Altered States exist within the separate space of montage. That doesn't make it any less frightening -- in fact, I found it quite frightening. But I was a little less impressed, because I'd just seen something that struck me as much harder to pull off in the other movie.

What's really impressive about Altered States is how much it's willing to "go there" in a mainstream film. The ideas in this film can truly be disturbing at times -- in fact, they seem to have disturbed Chayevsky a little too much. Part of the reason he disavowed himself from it, according to wikipedia, had to do with the "intensity of the performances." That could be a jab at Russell for not reigning in his actors, or it could just be that this was his only way to describe how unsettled the film had made him -- so unsettled that he felt he didn't want to be associated with it any more than he already had been.

I'd also guess that my appreciation of Altered States, while still quite high, was affected a little bit by the fact that I couldn't watch the whole thing on Saturday night. Stupidly ambitious, I started watching it at just before midnight (my wife didn't participate because she'd already seen it). I made it about a half-hour before deciding I needed to take one of my patented late-night naps -- you know, sleep for a bit and then continue watching at 2 a.m. or something. It actually worked out, but after another half-hour or so of watching, my son awoke and wouldn't go back to sleep.

So I took him out to the couch and hoped to finish watching while he slept on my stomach. Of course, he was too interested in the moving images to go back to sleep, and I didn't want to scar this kid for life. So when I got sick of trying to position him so his head wouldn't be facing the disturbing images on screen, I decided to just call it for the night and let us both get to sleep. I watched the last 45 minutes the next afternoon while he was napping and I was carving a jack-o-lantern. Tellingly, I was still creeped out -- but this is a movie that should really be watched in the wee hours of the morning to have its greatest effect.

Tonight, with any luck, we will have enough candy to hold a steady stream of trick-or-treaters at bay, and then we'll shut our lights off and watch Poltergeist -- if, that is, I can find it at the library today.

If not, we'll see what other twisted treats Netflix streaming may have in store for us.