As demonstrated by the above quote, Coralie Fargeat is interested in exploring—and exploding—the limits of the human body. The visionary French filmmaker directed, wrote, produced and co-edited her second feature, The Substance, earning Best Screenplay at this year’s Cannes Film Festival as well as the Midnight Madness People’s Choice Award at TIFF.

Intentionally provocative and about as subtle as a bedazzled sledgehammer to the skull, the Hollywood-set parable follows Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), an aging actress who, after being fired by sleazy executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid) on her 50th birthday, signs up for an experimental procedure: inject the substance, enjoy a younger version of yourself. Oh, but she’ll be violently birthed through your spine, externalizing your internalized misogyny. This is how Sue (Margaret Qualley) is born. Of course, there are rules to this miracle treatment (namely, that you must switch between the bodies every seven days), and, of course, they are broken.

With an impressive 4.1-out-of-five-star rating on Letterboxd, The Substance is currently one of our community’s highest-rated films of 2024—but that doesn’t mean it’s not polarizing some reviewers. Letterboxd member/body-horror comedienne/Saturday Night Live star Sarah Squirm, however, is not one of them. “never been more jealous of a movie in my entire life!!!!!!” she writes. “me and my friends were cheering in the theater like our favorite sports team was winning!!!!!! standing o from me!!! LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH!!! Coralie… call me…”

According to Katie, Fargeat has conjured a “truly bonkers and utterly brutal beauty horror, and a jaw-dropping celebration of butts n’ guts.” In our following conversation, the director reveals five keys to unlock the mystery of The Substance: cinematic influences, her empathy for the creature she created, intentions for those perpetual butt and breast shots, the power of weaponizing dark comedy… and her interpretation of that moment from the unforgettable grand finale.

In The Substance, satire converges with body-horror to metaphorically metamorphosize into its own beast. Fargeat lists Cronenberg’s The Fly as a definite inspiration for the literal metamorphosis featured in her film, as well as the enduring imagery of the blood tsunami pouring out of the elevator in The Shining, and, of course, the climactic prom scene from Carrie. (While the filmmaker its that she hasn’t yet seen Society, it’s now on her watchlist since so many people have mentioned it after witnessing her penchant for grotesquely organic practical effects).

“All those movies, filmmakers have seen the work of other filmmakers who’ve digested what they’ve seen and what other filmmakers did,” Fargeat says. “I love the fact that there is some kind of common creativity somewhere that each one redigests in its own way, with its own world and its own theme. I truly believe that we are, in the end, the result of what we watch, what we read, what we’re exposed to, and all of this lives with us… We are growing ourselves, feeding ourselves from all those influences, whether they are conscious or unconscious.”

2. Queen of the butt shot

One of the strongest trademarks in Fargeat’s oeuvre: the subversive butt shot. In both her 2017 debut feature Revenge and this sophomore follow-up, her camera fragments the human body into pieces. Throughout The Substance’s 141-minute runtime, viewers are constantly bombarded by close-up frames of Sue’s impeccable posterior (and breasts, achieved through prosthetics. “Perfection” isn’t real!)—but don’t mistake this choice as an acquiescence to male pleasure. Rather, it’s a scopophilic confrontation.

“The ass is a very strong symbol of how our body is not neutral in the public space,” Fargeat explains. “How our body is constantly scrutinized, has been shaped to please the man’s eyes, has been seen as a body part that was objectified, that was detached from the person who was simply bearing it.”

Fargeat recalls growing up on Facebook, recoiling at the number of comments written by men that would joke or drool over women’s bodies, their butts in particular. “It’s crazy insane how free the speech was without anyone noticing that it could be, maybe, unpleasant to speak like that,” she laments. “I strongly felt that I had to be so self-conscious about my body parts, about how perfect or imperfect they were. It was, for me, a major complex.”

Her intention with the copious butt shots was to show two things: the first was to think about “how much it is the focus of so many different gazes that we have to live with, that we have to take into , that we have to endure. That’s something that has defined the way we can inhabit the public space. [That] shapes a lot of our behavior.”

Her second point: “It represents the way a woman should be totally free and entitled to use her body the way she wants, to show it if she wants, to be as sexy as she wants, to be totally at ease and happy, to be whoever, however, whatever she wants,” Fargeat emphasizes. “To get to this place with real freedom without it being an injunction, without it being something that you reproduce because you feel that it’s your only way to exist… That’s what those shots represent to me.”

It’s New Year’s Eve. Sue is scheduled to perform live, on-air, to a packed audience—it’s her big show-biz break. Except she’s not Sue anymore. After refusing to make the required weekly switch between bodies, Sue and Elisabeth’s DNA have combined to form Monstro Elisasue, a genetic nightmare that’s as far away from Hollywood beauty standards as possible. Nevertheless, the show must go on.

Elisasue steps into the spotlight, eliciting gasps of shock and disgust from the audience. But they ain’t seen nothing yet: the creature proceeds to cough up an entire human breast onto the stage. Essentially, she’s regurgitating the objectifying femininity they crave, mutating it into something that they not only no longer desire but are now repulsed by.

“This one definitely has a very strong meaning for me,” Fargeat says of this pivotal moment. While she didn’t fully analyze the idea at the time of writing (“I don’t rationalize it when I write”), she now understands why it came out of her (and Elisasue) this way. The filmmaker explains that “the monster [exemplifies] comments in general on women’s bodies, whether it is the ass, whether it is the boob, whether it is the smile… It’s the rebellion; we’re going to mix it and digest it and totally explode it.”

“Explode” is an apt term: the production used around 36,000 gallons of fake blood for the over-the-top splatter-fest of a climax in The Substance. Elisasue’s public demise is simultaneously hilarious and tragic, satirical and sincere. Fargeat feels for her: “The fact that she still wants to go on stage and feel that she has her place in the world, it’s this gutsy expression of who she is, which is released,” she muses. “What’s funny is that it’s this thing that [incites] the mob to wake up and to scream and to totally freak out.”

4. Freaks to the front!

“Something that was super important for me when I created the monster was that it was going to be a monstrous appearance, but for which we’re going to have so much empathy,” Fargeat says. “I wanted the design to transmit [that], because the ‘freak’ figure really talks to our humanity, to our fear of not being loved, to our fear of being different, to our fear of being judged. There is this incredibly fragile, tender, soft, genuine soul behind this flesh, you know?”

Fargeat has always been moved by the “freak” archetype, from The Elephant Man to Quasimodo of The Hunchback of Notre Dame to the films of Guillermo del Toro. She’s looking forward to his Frankenstein feature adaptation—surprisingly, that famous monster wasn’t on her mind when she wrote The Substance.

“Of course, it’s one of the major monster figures,” she says, speculating that maybe she didn’t think of it because it was “something that I read and that I didn’t really watch in cinemas or wasn’t practically influenced by the visual. As I’m a very visual person, the ones that had the strongest influence on me were the ones that I saw on-screen, that I really lived with the image.”

“He’s funny in the movie, but he also represents the guy who invades your space, who feels entitled to add to the sexy jokes and hit on you because you’re pretty,” she elaborates. “I’ve dealt with many situations where your neighbor is harassing you by hitting on you repeatedly and all those little behaviors dictate what you have to do… Those little things, which are not little things, are systematic habits. They are cultural influence.”

Fargeat says that women have been socialized to think that this stifling behavior is normal, when it absolutely shouldn’t be. “You’re not used to saying, ‘Hey, stop, this is not okay,’” she correctly observes. “The majority of the time, I still smile and I’m nice because that’s the way I learned to deal with those things.”

Her preferred tool for rebelling against the skin-crawling misogyny that she and hordes of other women encounter every single day? Shoving that discomfort right back into our faces. “Art, films, books, everything around us can have a role to show how the world still is,” she enthuses, saying that she utilizes “the weapon of satire, violence, gore to say, ‘Yes, this is what’s happening. Look how not okay it is!’ Hopefully, it sparks conversations.” Fargeat concludes with the wish that her work will help “people [to] recognize and identify themselves and find ways to deconstruct those problematic behaviors. But it’s a long journey, obviously.”