In “The Substance,” the Real Horror Is the Pursuit of Youth

Like many during the pandemic, I let my shit go. I cut my own bangs. I did not pay attention to the softening of my jawline as I enjoyed a more sedentary lifestyle, and I welcomed the incoming silver streaks above my ears. I wore loose linen, I made a lot of bread and witchy soups, and every night to ease my anxiety I listened to a guided meditation that described a nighttime walk through the boreal forest to meet Baba Yaga at her waltzing, chicken-legged hut. 

In this meditation, Baba Yaga (who is oft depicted as a murderous cannibal) beckons me inside for some tea. As we sit and sip, she reminds me that it is okay to be wild and unburdened, to live by what my soul desires. 

In the bubble of my carefully curated, neopagan approach to pandemic life, I fell out of touch with burgeoning trends. I had no idea the lengths that the younger generations were taking to avoid all old lady vibes, that many of them would not find embracing Baba Yaga as an act of comfort but of terror. The sum of every new face filter and #GRWM TikTok touting a pristine, smooth face equaled a conclusion that aging was the worst thing that could happen to anyone – even though it happens to everyone. Forget her alleged fence made of bones – Baba Yaga has far too many wrinkles to take on any other role than that of a monster.  

I considered myself to be above the fear of aging as I looked forward to learning from Baba Yaga every night, but then 2022 arrived, and we stumbled back into being social. My bedtime routine changed, and the Baba Yaga meditation faded away. I started acting on stage again, growing conscious of my body in the public light, my face under the weight of stage makeup. Face masks went away. I was thirty-three, and if I caught my reflection by surprise in the window or a storefront, an insidious voice would whisper: Oh! You look…different. 

I recognize that the mid-thirties is hardly an advanced age, but we live in a time where women begin botox in their early twenties, and where girls as young as eight are beginning anti-aging ‘preventative’ skin care regimes. Our obsession with aging has sharpened so acutely that to exist without receiving anti-aging treatments is a radical act, and every time I notice a new sag or wrinkle, my will to remain untouched weakens. I would like to think about myself as capable of enduring time’s footprint with grace, but I might be too vain. 

Enter Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, a film that hit home in a way I hadn’t expected. Lauded as an instant body horror classic, the film delivered an Oscar-worthy performance from Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, a visceral sound design that stuck to my marrow days later, and a cornucopia of special effects that triggered laughter and nausea simultaneously. It was easy to overlook what The Substance, billed as science-fiction and horror, also embodied: a distorted fairy tale; a cautionary, crone-forward fable that I don’t want to forget, especially as I slip further into my thirties as a childfree, cat-owning woman whose self-esteem is sometimes not strong enough to withstand the rhetoric dictating what type of woman gets to hold value. 

The film kicks off on Elisabeth Sparkle’s 50th birthday. Elisabeth is a stunning woman who possesses a naturally aging body, and because of this, she is promptly fired from the aerobics show which earned her fame. This is a decision made by network T.V. boss Harvey, played by Dennis Quaid. Harvey is never on screen without something screaming red to accompany him – the toilet stall doors in the men’s bathroom, an endless hallway, a pile of ravaged shrimp. He is the demon of the underworld in his snakeskin boots, exhaling puffs of cigarette smoke whose closeups bring to mind a fire-breathing sphincter. Elisabeth is already, unknowingly, in the palm-tree lined jaws of hell, forced to contend with a grim future of isolation. Only a deal with the devil will get her out–or so she thinks. Amid her distress, she learns of the titular Substance, which promises to deliver a better – aka younger – version of herself. 

This central conceit immediately reminded me of the Triple Goddess theory. Simply put, the Triple Goddess is a deity archetype that aligns a woman’s life cycle with three phases: the Maiden (youth), the Mother (middle age), and the Crone (old age). This is an obviously limited framework with the glaring issue of assuming that all women will mother, and that bearing children is essential to womanhood. While Elisabeth Sparkle does not have children, she is the creator of Sue, and is later referred to by Sue as her “sick mother.” So The Substance asks us: what if, instead of progressing out of the Maiden phase, the Mother, staring down her Crone future with dread, could wield the Maiden again? 

Elisabeth does not immediately give in to the temptations offered – she goes out drinking instead. As she drains her fourth dirty martini, she is unaware that the bar’s overhead lights cast cold angles on her exposed back, making it appear sapped of its collagen, bluish and paper-thin. As she shoots a covert, jealous glance at a younger woman, the crone has wrapped its inevitability around her like a cloak.  

Intoxicated and in her apartment some time later, Elisabeth faces her collected awards and accolades with self-loathing etched across her face. She holds up a snow globe, which houses a small figurine of her younger self, flecked by golden snowflakes. The icon’s painted lips and doe eyes beckon to her, mocking. 

And Elisabeth gives in. 

The Substance has no visible customer service. There is only the cryptic representative on the other end of the line bearing the rules of the contract. The Substance, whose far-fetched science is grounded in a totally believable subscription box scheme, delivers clear and concise directions: Elisabeth must revert back to her middle-aged self every seven days, no exceptions. “Remember You Are One” is its core message, not unlike the philosophy behind Triple Goddess – that every woman carries these three selves within her, and they must be embodied with respect in order to live in total harmony. 

But what if being the Maiden is too good to let go? Such writes Elisabeth’s downfall. Like a good fable, The Substance wields the consequences in an unforgettable, timeless way that I hope will shock others into reassessing their relationships with their crone future, as I did with mine.  

When Sue, the Maiden, first emerges from Elisabeth’s back, we revel in the world opening to her. The pulse of the film score quickens, the sun beats iridescent rays on the boulevard. Her glistening youth is intoxicating, and Elisabeth lasts only two cycles of trading between bodies before she pushes the rules of the deal to spend more time as Sue. The first time she pushes the limit, forgoing the trade-off for one night, Elisabeth wakes to find her index finger irreversibility transformed, brown and scaly, a crone’s pointer. 

This kicks off a war between her selves: Sue does not want to return to Elisabeth’s life, which seems meaningless and depressing, and Elisabeth wants Sue to respect the balance, to not allow for any more rapid aging. 

They have forgotten the cardinal rule of the Substance – that they are one. 

Elisabeth tries to make meaning for herself while she’s in her middle-aged body. She agrees to go on a date with a man best described as extremely nice and incredibly average, but in one of the more honestly tragic scenes in the film, she is unable to leave her house, too crippled by self-loathing. If only she gave herself just one more chance to find a friend, join a club, do literally anything other than obsess over the tautness of Sue’s flesh, she may have found a reason to look forward to living in her matured body. 

Elisabeth-as-Sue continues to take beyond the parameters of the deal, and the next time Elisabeth wakes, she is changed completely. We hear the agonized scream as she takes stock of her new form: her hair is gray and coarse, her eyes dull and yellowed, her skin dry and scaly. Powder blue veins creep up her feet to swollen, knobbly knees. With no hope left for reclaiming the matured beauty of her “Mother” self, the Crone – or at least Crone 1.0, as Elisabeth’s transformation is yet to end – has fully emerged. Furious, she yells at the provider of The Substance who tells her she may stop the experience, preventing any more age advancement. But Elisabeth, now stuck in this older body, is unable to give up her tradeoff with Sue. 

She concedes to the deal she made, and passes the time by cooking. 

This is when, as I was watching the film, I recognized my favorite old lady archetype – but she was not the woman of my meditations. Elisabeth flips through a French cookbook, turning on the T.V. to find a late night interview with Sue, and begins to wage a food fight in their kitchen. As we look up at her from the stove’s point of view, we see a crazed face, gleaming with steam and sweat. Crone 1.0 Elisabeth is furious, petty, and bitter, but for the first time, she is something other than defeated. Angry, yes, but also triumphant. Knowing that Sue will wake up in this apartment, Elisabeth ruins it with abandon. As though conjured by dark magic, giant pig’s ears scatter the countertop as she stirs her many pots, frying blood sausage, eviscerating a turkey, finally giving into her rage. This Baba Yaga was tailor-made by Elisabeth’s self-loathing, bursting like a cystic zit forced to the surface. 

When Sue takes stock of the mess Elisabeth made, she rages, pushing the bargain well past its limit until she is forced to trade off again, three months later. When Crone 2.0 emerges as a consequence of Sue’s greed, she’s meant to induce horror as one the film’s monsters, but somehow I saw the wisdom of a no-nonsense grandmother reflected back at me. Crone 2.0, which was dubbed “Gollum” during production, is a prosthetics and makeup marvel that evokes the terror of old age while ironically equipping Elisabeth with more zeal than any of her previous ‘versions.’ She knocks down doors and walks with surprising speed, and she is the only version of Elisabeth who is able to be honest, to finally admit that she needs Sue because she hates herself. Her grotesque, sagging form embodies the nightmare of the age-obsessed young generations; she is the personification of unchecked crow’s feet, the horror of time itself. And she comes for us all.

What The Substance can teach us is that our “crone self” is a product of our own creation. Elisabeth’s Crone was desperate and petty, clinging to the Maiden as the only phase worth living. What would my crone self look like if I went down a path of neck lifts and eyelid surgeries – two things I have spent time seriously considering – to fill a hole where I felt my value was departing? These small procedures may not be the Faustian bargain Elisabeth signed up for, but they say cosmetic surgery is addictive. How do I know what else I will take at the expense of my own self-acceptance?  

Even though I’m long past caring about the male gaze, coveting youth still proves a difficult thing to be rid of. It’s not limited to patriarchal subservience or heteronormativity. It exists, for me, in being an aging lesbian watching the Gen Z-driven sapphic renaissance. As young queer audiences flock to Chappell Roan, Young Miko, Billie Eilish and the rest of them, I’m forced to compare my maturing body with the youthful vibrancy embodied by them and their fans. The drive toward youth is fed to us constantly, even as “aging” stars like Demi Moore are proving their worth on screen by succeeding in these daring roles and shoving Hollywood’s standards back down its throat. But no amount of cognitive awareness prevents the anti-aging meal that is fed to us, which poisons our respect for time itself. It remains a constant effort to alchemize the dread that I feel about aging into acceptance and self-love. 

Elisabeth’s own dread outpaced her acceptance and self-love every step of the way, because she had none; she was stuck in the past, cursed by the need for validation from people who only valued the “Maiden.” Crone wisdom exists as a way of navigating the certainty of death; of managing expectations from the get. You will arrive here, she says – perhaps with grace or perhaps a haggard wreck – but you will arrive here, whether you like it or not. And we don’t need a wicked man in a paisley suit to blow smoke in our face and make us fear her inevitability; as long as we continue to buy into the ever growing standards of what age should look like, we fill in those snakeskin shoes on our own. I may not be strong enough to age radically, but I hope to try – to remember how utterly beautiful the original Elisabeth looked before she caved to society’s will, and learn from her mistakes.