The Gross Truth Behind The Substance: How Food Heightens the Horror
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is an unsettling sci-fi body-horror film that leaves audiences squirming, but what makes it truly grotesque isn’t just the shocking transformations—it’s the unsettling use of food. While viewers might expect the body horror to steal the spotlight, it’s actually the portrayal of food and the way characters consume it that amplifies the film’s disturbing atmosphere. The sound design and visual framing of food cleverly set up the revolting body horror to come, while simultaneously painting humans as greedy, consuming monsters.
Food as Foreshadowing
In The Substance, food serves as an eerie precursor to the monstrous transformations. The opening scene shows an egg yolk injected with the mysterious “substance,” its birth-like split accompanied by squelching sounds that immediately signal the grotesque tone of the film. From there, every piece of food is framed in an uncomfortably close manner, making simple acts like chewing or tearing into a meal feel revolting. The sound design is particularly jarring, heightening the audience’s discomfort as it foreshadows the far more disturbing imagery to come.
As Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) transforms, the same grotesque attention to detail is applied to her body, with her final form producing similar sounds and visuals to the food we see earlier. By tying the body horror to something as relatable as food, Fargeat makes the audience experience disgust on a visceral level, linking the ordinary to the grotesque in a deeply unsettling way.
Characters as Consuming Monsters
The way the characters consume food isn’t just gross—it’s symbolic. Harvey (Dennis Quaid), the toxic and greedy studio head, is shown messily devouring prawns, a visual metaphor for his own gluttony and insatiable hunger for power. The close-ups of his slobbering mouth underscore his depravity, framing him as a figure of monstrous consumption.
Similarly, Sue (Margaret Qualley) drinks her beverages in a way that emphasizes consumption as an unrelenting, almost primal act. The guttural sounds of her sipping from a straw serve as a reminder of how her character is consuming everything around her, including Elisabeth’s identity and life. By the end, the theme of consumption transcends food and becomes about identity, as Sue consumes Elisabeth, leaving her a shell of her former self.
Elisabeth’s Tragic Blindness
In the end, The Substance uses food as a powerful metaphor to heighten Elisabeth’s tragic downfall. Despite seeing the ugliness and flaws in those around her, she is consumed by her own self-hatred, unable to recognize that all humans are flawed. Her focus on her imperfections leads her down a path of destruction, ultimately transforming her into a grotesque figure, consumed by her own image and insecurities.
The Substance is a masterclass in body horror, but it’s the use of food that makes the film truly grotesque, highlighting the human condition as one of endless consumption and self-destruction.
