This Halloween, it appears, is all concerning the “hag”. Overshadowing the axe-wielding clown in Terrifier 3, a dark-web serial killer in Crimson Rooms and an more and more sinister Hugh Grant in Heretic is among the scariest creatures within the Hollywood creativeness: a fiftysomething lady.
The Substance, written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, gained the prize for finest screenplay at Cannes this 12 months, however has divided critics and audiences. Streaming from 31 October, the movie stars Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, a fading star who succumbs to the lure of “the substance” – a yellow syringe that guarantees a return to her youthful, extra lovely self. After she writhes in agony, her backbone splits open and a youthful, completely completely different lady emerges.
With shades of Faust, Frankenstein, Dorian Grey, and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (all tales about male monsters), The Substance belongs firmly within the doubtful “hagsploitation” style. Horror movies take the demonisation of older ladies and make it flesh, monstrously so – take the hideous crone in room 237 in The Shining. From What Ever Occurred to Child Jane? in 1962 to Dying Turns into Her in 1992, these movies mirror and enlarge our anxieties about ageing and the feminine physique. The Substance is an up to date satirical model of a well-known story.
Fargeat joins different feminine film-makers in shaking up the body-horror method. In 2021 Julia Ducournau, additionally a French director, gained the Palme d’Or at Cannes with Titane – a JG Ballard/David Cronenberg mashup wherein the heroine has intercourse with a automotive. This autumn, Marielle Heller’s adaptation of the novel Nightbitch is launched, wherein a frazzled new mom turns right into a canine. Being pregnant, motherhood, previous age – feminine our bodies are ripe for the body-horror therapy. However are these movies by ladies much less sexist than their predecessors?
For critics, together with Anna Bogutskaya, the reply is sure. Their case is that the style permits a better vary of feminine characters than some others, and locations their interiority centre stage. Considered by means of this optimistic lens, hagsploitation movies will be seen as a celebration of older ladies – of their rage, transgression and energy to encourage concern.
How liberatory the method really is, although, is questionable. These movies usually revolve round feminine rivalry. And for all its understanding nods and winks, The Substance delivers loads of the compulsory scenes of girls’s our bodies bare, lined in blood and mutilated. They’re proven tearing one another aside – leaving the patriarchy intact.
The reality is that it not often ends nicely for the hag, who should be punished for the sin of getting previous. Miss Havisham (who was solely 37) in Charles Dickens’s Nice Expectations may need introduced the home down, however she went up in flames with it. As Victoria Smith writes in her e book Hags, regardless of a long time of effort by feminists, “the depraved witch and the choices for good womanhood – keep frozen in time, turn into evil or die – are unchanged”.
Ridiculed, crushed and bloodied, the determine of the hag refuses to vanish. Regardless of some daring makes an attempt by ladies at reclaiming the horror style, its misogynistic conventions are sadly proving sturdy too.
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