Editorial: Bloodied women’s bodies are once more to the fore in a seasonal crop of hagsploitation films
. Streaming from 31 October, the film stars Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, a fading star who succumbs to the lure of “the substance” – a yellow syringe that promises a return to her younger, more beautiful self. After she writhes in agony, her spine splits open and a younger, entirely different woman emerges.
With shades of Faust, Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , The Substance belongs firmly in the dubious “in 1992, these films reflect and magnify our anxieties about ageing and the female body. The Substance is an updated satirical version of a familiar tale.– a JG Ballard/David Cronenberg mashup in which the heroine has sex with a car. This autumn, Marielle Heller’s adaptation of the novelis released, in which a frazzled new mother turns into a dog.
How liberatory the formula truly is, though, is questionable. These films often revolve around female rivalry. And for all its knowing nods and winks, The Substance delivers plenty of the obligatory scenes of women’s bodies naked, covered in blood and mutilated. They are shown tearing each other apart – leaving the patriarchy intact.
The truth is that it rarely ends well for the hag, who must be punished for the sin of getting old. Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations might have brought the house down, but she went up in flames with it. As Victoria Smith writes in her book, despite decades of effort by feminists, “the wicked witch and the options for perfect womanhood – stay frozen in time, become evil or die – are unchanged”.
Ridiculed, beaten and bloodied, the figure of the hag refuses to disappear. Despite some bold attempts by women at reclaiming the horror genre, its misogynistic conventions are sadly proving durable too.
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