The funniest thing Conan O’Brien could do at the Academy Awards this Sunday is re-create the ending of The Substance onstage. Remember how Billy Crystal used to splice himself into clips of the nominated movies, trading quips with Jerry Maguire and Marge Gunderson? Imagine a live version of that shtick that turns the first few rows of the Dolby Theatre into a Gallagher show, all in homage to the literal bloodbath with which Coralie Fargeat’s nightmare satire concludes. The dry-cleaning bills alone might bankrupt ABC, but the viral attention would overshadow even the Slap.
There’s no forgetting that Grand Guignol climax, when Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore)—an aging sex symbol split into two bodies and hideously transformed by a mysterious wonder drug—spews her insides outside, drenching a captive crowd of VIPs. In a way, the nauseating final minutes of The Substance are a microcosm of the experience of watching the whole deranged movie, an outrageous parade of body-horror abominations that treats its audience like a splash guard. Going further, you might even say that the Academy has ensured that life will imitate gloriously goopy art: Any unsuspecting viewer who throws the film on because of its Oscar haul might walk away as disgusted as the tuxedoed revelers that get caught in Elisabeth’s spraying arterial sprinklers.
Without question, The Substance is the gnarliest, most revolting movie ever nominated for Best Picture. Its unlikely inclusion in the race for Hollywood’s most prestigious honor is a practical joke at the expense of tonier tastes, delicate sensibilities, and sensitive stomachs. Every year, the Academy creates awareness campaigns for the films it celebrates; that an Oscar nod all but guarantees a larger audience for a movie is arguably the only reason to care about what a bunch of working professionals consider statuette-worthy. By rallying around The Substance, the Academy has now ensured that a bunch of people who have never so much as flipped through an issue of Fangoria will spend an evening seeing (and never unseeing) a woman spit out her teeth, shed her fingernails, and yank an undigested drumstick out of her belly button.
How did such a transgressive gift to gorehounds take the Oscars by storm? “Not for the squeamish” used to be synonymous with “not for the Academy.” Apparently, the right combination of critical support and audience enthusiasm can now push harsher and weirder oddities into the running. A shot at Best Picture is the culmination of a very good year for The Substance, which premiered last May at the Cannes Film Festival—another place where the well-dressed crowd watching resembled the one getting fire-hosed with bodily fluids in the movie. Great reviews bled into great word of mouth, drawing a surprisingly robust audience into Fargeat’s blackly comic vomitorium.
We’ve had gory Oscar contenders before. Saving Private Ryan’s portrayal of D-Day ushered in a new era of entrails-out explicitness at the multiplex. Likewise, Mel Gibson has earned gold for showing red in grisly combat epics like Braveheart and the aptly titled Hacksaw Ridge. But these were war movies that served up graphic violence with a side of noble, never-forget reflection: One could interpret their surgically realistic eviscerations and mutilations as a matter of historical accuracy. Not so much with The Substance, which offers one anatomical perversion after another with a wicked sneer. Its geysers of viscera are a dark joke, not a memorial.
The film fits into the very limited history of horror movies that overcame genre snobbery for a shot at Best Picture. Sticklers might debate what qualifies, but broadly speaking, The Substance is only the seventh horror film to break into the category, following The Exorcist, Jaws, The Silence of the Lambs, The Sixth Sense, Black Swan, and Get Out. What those films all have in common is a certain crossover respectability. They were critical and box office sensations elevated beyond their proverbial video-store aisles. All of them also arguably dabbled in other, more Oscar-friendly genres: Voters with no respect for horror didn’t need to hold their noses to honor a Catholic fable, a rousing summer blockbuster, a police procedural with literary roots, a supernatural portrait of loneliness, a psychodrama set against the world of ballet, or an allegory about racism.
The Substance isn’t “just” a horror movie either, of course. It’s arguably more of a gross-out comedy about the shallowness of the entertainment industry. But whereas past scary movies that made the Best Picture cut were elegant and tasteful in their terror tactics—which explains their mainstream success—Fargeat’s is rudely unsubtle, even obscene. It’s a true midnight movie, a French barf-bag spectacle uncompromising in its aim to shock and nauseate. The genital crucifix mutilation of The Exorcist and the nightmarishly pulled hangnail of Black Swan look restrained compared to the extreme corporeal abuse visited upon Elisabeth and her messily birthed double, Sue (Margaret Qualley).
The film’s invitation to the Oscar ball is a symbolic victory for the kinds of audacious, squishy genre movies Fargeat is hybridizing and that the Academy usually relegates to Best Makeup, if it acknowledges them at all. The astonishing prosthetics work used to transform Moore into an oozing blob calls back to the practical effects heyday of 1980s and early ’90s splatter-fests: the darkly hilarious flesh orgy of Society, the squelching abominations of The Thing, the farcical carnage Peter Jackson unleashed in Dead Alive before his makeover into the Oscar-winning writer and director of The Lord of the Rings. Meanwhile, Moore’s unexpected rise to Best Actress front-runner is an overdue blow struck for stars doing great work under mounds upon mounds of monster makeup. “This one’s for Jeff Goldblum,” she might consider saying from the podium.
Maybe this is just proof that traditional notions of what is or isn’t an “Oscar movie” have fallen away like diseased limbs. The Substance’s five nominations paint a pretty clear picture of an Academy whose tastes have been in a Sparkle-like state of constant mutation for years now, probably accelerated by the international diversification of the organization’s membership. There’s a touch of the grindhouse grotesque in other recent Oscar favorites—in The Shape of Water, in which a woman screws a fish-man who bites the head off of a cat, and in the zany hotdog-finger absurdities of Everything Everywhere All at Once. Hell, The Substance isn’t even the first messy genre movie indebted to David Cronenberg to break into the Best Picture race. That title probably belongs to District 9 … though nothing there was as eye-widening as the eyeball popping Fargeat subjects viewers to in the closing stretch of her movie.
Are the preferences of the Academy evolving, or is Hollywood’s most esteemed voting bloc simply finding new expressions of what’s always mattered to it? Last year, the Best Picture lineup made room for a much different but every bit as radically unprecedented nominee: The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s damning vision of creature comforts and moral apathy on the periphery of humanity’s most unspeakable atrocity. In both rigid formal design and anti-dramatic narrative, it was unlike any movie that’s ever competed for the top Oscar. It also told a story of the Holocaust, which describes many, many movies that have been nominated for Oscars. When it comes to what Academy members gravitate toward each and every year, form (no matter how extreme) probably matters less than content.
To that end, the appeal of The Substance to industry professionals should be obvious. Look past the supreme yuck factor of this archly Gallic exploitation movie, and you’ll find a resonant lament for a town that chews stars up and spits them out. Fargeat has told a tale as old as Hollywood itself (it’s basically a body-horror cousin to Oscar-fêted classics like Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve) and turned her gaze on the impossible beauty standards of showbiz. That’s why Moore has gone from long shot to favorite: Her all-too-familiar panic and disappointment cut through the film’s stylized unreality like a knife. What actor of a certain age can’t relate to the crucible of self-loathing and career anxiety Elisabeth endures?
The Substance may walk in the gooey footsteps of The Fly and The Thing and Titane and any other horror movie dripping with appalling violations of the flesh. But what it has on its mind, as opposed to its failing, stretching, metamorphosing body, should speak to people who don’t know Rob Bottin from Screaming Mad George. It taps into a disgust much deeper than the kind inspired by detaching appendages and oozing organs. It’s Hollywood and its fickle lechery that can really make the bile rise up in the back of your throat.