The SubstanceTrick or Treat? Genre Trouble Jeremi Szaniawski January 2025 Feature Articles Issue 112 (Spoiler alert: lots of spoilers.) Halloween may have come and gone, but in view of all the horror currently unfolding in the world, the time is still ripe to look at one of America’s most consubstantial and enduring cultural products: genre cinema. In particular, I want to look at horror films, which seem to be undergoing a renaissance, after nearly three decades of tedium. Suffice it to consider the recent dominance over the genre of paltry ersatzes: Blumhouse’s lacklustre productions (e.g. Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007), Insidious (James Wan, 2010)), torture porn (the ugly Saw franchise), or vapid fare such as the Conjuring/Warren dossier series and its offshoots.1 Very few auteurs made their mark during those years (Jordan Peele probably the only figure to have been taken seriously by critics), and when they did, it was with questionable results, and usually in a gimmicky or parodic fashion (Rob Zombie, Eli Roth, Alexandre Aja, Ti West, Ari Aster). Meanwhile, the arguable masters of the genre had become old men wallowing in redundant works of abysmal mediocrity (George Romero, John Carpenter, Brian De Palma, Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven…), and no real icons of the genre emerged since the postmodern and derivative ‘Ghost Face’ killer of the Scream franchise.2 Lionsgate made small-to-medium budget films its bread and butter, but that studio’s products chronically suffered from sloppy execution. Major studios remained involved with horror films, producing a series of glossy but pointless remakes of the most profitable 1970s and 1980s’ franchises (A Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Omen, Halloween, Friday 13th, etc.). But gone were the days of spectacular stunts (however truly and astoundingly bad!) of the Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) kind. To the horror fan with any standards of expectations or self-respect, the 2000s were miserable, and the 2010s barely fared better – this critique holds true of vast swaths of the American film industry writ large.3 Only a select few horror titles produced in those years do actually merit attention (Get Out and Us (Jordan Peele, 2017 and 2019), Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018), It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014), Sinister (Scott Derrickson, 2012), The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard, 2011), The House of the Devil (Ti West, 2009), The Devil’s Rejects (Rob Zombie, 2005)). But lo and behold: in the years since the COVID pandemic, the genre is finally experiencing a rebound. And why would we be surprised, in an age of rampant anxiety, growing illiteracy, and short attention spans? Clearly a potent cocktail of real-life horrors and angst since the spring of 2020 have contributed to this, as has the need for film studios to strike back against the success of streaming platforms, to bring audiences back in theatres – pointing to how the phenomenon is intimately entwined with the latest developments of global capitalism. So far, at any rate, this new wave of horror films has reaped reasonably encouraging results, as this more auspicious (or unsettling) context has emboldened the emergence of new refreshing voices in the mainstream, including female and LGBTQX ones. Our inquiry could end here: a celebration of this fall 2024 season, where several of the most successful films at the box office owe a strong debt to the gothic or to horror which they nonetheless lampoon: though asinine, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice features plenty horror tropes, including a pointed homage to Mario Bava’s La maschera del demonio (Black Sunday, Mario Bava, 1962) and Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976), while the deplorable Ghostbusters : Frozen Empire (Gil Kenan, 2024) bears horror film, albeit of a neutered kind and by now several degrees removed, in its DNA. Elsewhere, the derivative Alien: Romulus (Fede Álvarez, 2024) and the fine A Quiet Place: Day One (Michael Sarnoski, 2024) bear more than one nod to the horror/monster genre. As for the year’s biggest global hits, Deadpool & Wolverine (Shawn Levy, 2024) features gore and bodily dismemberment galore, and while it is a stretch to lump Inside Out 2 (Kelsey Mann, 2024) in the horror category, it at least features a character that many younger and less young audience members will relate to freely: Anxiety. And has Anxiety, or anxiety, fared well of late! But more remarkable still is the commercial success of bona fide horror films, including Longlegs (Osgood Perkins, 2024), Smile 2 (Parker Finn, 2024) (which both grossed over a hundred million dollars worldwide) and Terrifier 3 (Damien Leone, 2024), which grossed almost ninety millions against its two million dollar budget), and the critical attention garnered by Strange Darling (J.T. Mollner, 2023), I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoeburn, 2024), and The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024). These confirm a new generation of auteur.es: Coralie Fargeat (whose debut Revenge was invigorating but suffered from weak casting — an issue spectacularly remedied in her sophomore effort!), J.T. Mollner, Parker Finn, Jane Schoebrun, the incorrigible Damien Leone, or even Osgood Perkins.4 More will follow (and Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming feature, Presence (2025) is a horror/thriller, too), not least as horror now has its own streaming platform – Shudder.5 Concurrently, we have seen enough horror films to know that they are one of the best places to investigate mild societal shifts before they occur in full swing in mainstream culture. And this holds true even as they have vastly abandoned the ghetto of independent production and become reified objects of the film industry in their own right, at least as far as their modes of production and distribution are concerned. So it is that, in the fall of 2024, besides the grotesque spectacle of the US presidential election, which may constitute its darkest comedy, and the wars and invasions unfolding in various corners of the globe, marked by mind-boggling numbers of civilian casualties (unarguably, the most intolerable horror of all) something is afoot. The return of the thriller/horror genre, is at one and the same time some sort of conclusion that yet also constitutes a new beginning. Not that any of these films, taken individually, is exceptional: rather, they coalesce into an interesting whole, and they are, each in their own way, compelling. Strange Darlings Despite being the most regressive and primal, indeed the most ‘immature’ genre, horror is a site from which genuine societal critique can emerge. Horror cinema has also long been a locus of progressive sexual politics, entwined with the exploitation of the anxiety this politics generates (the androgynous final girl trope, the monstrous feminine – see the theses of Carol Clover, Barbara Creed, after Julia Kristeva). Sexual politics have been more in the spotlight than ever since the COVID19 pandemic. In many places, women breaking the shackles of patriarchy, and queer and trans movements, including through greater access of gender affirming care, having gained ground in recognition and rights – prompting nervous reactions, and now backlash, from conservatives. Horror has historically been a niche for women to come of age as filmmakers, and the likes of French directors Julia Ducournau and Coralie Fargeat are surfing at the top of this new wave.6 Leaving Ducournau aside (important though her films may be from a cultural standpoint, I find that they belong to a category distinct from the one at hand), I want to celebrate Fargeat’s deliberate and powerful vision, a fascination with the vast vistas of LA and the Southwest, glanced at through condos with massive windows, whose frames allegorize the filmic screen itself, and behind which grotesque and excessive bloodshed occurs. But these films also constitute important feminist statements, albeit of a revolting kind: this was already clear in Revenge, and it shines in The Substance. In this latter opus, Fargeat on the one hand manages to humanize her dehumanized protagonists, finding a way to make us feel for a wrecked Demi Moore, stripped of her livelihood by her male producer (Dennis Quaid), then stripped of what she has left of beauty and youth by the system, and by her own toying with the “substance.” In well-nigh ‘cronenbergesque’ fashion, the titular product allows her to spawn a younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley). The two must alternate their existence following a strict regimen. But very quickly the young one starts cheating, having a ball with studs and staying out past her bedtime, feeding on the older one’s vital fluids, causing irreversible ageing in Moore. Cinderella meets Baba Yaga… By the end, Moore – now a 90-year-old crone – decides to terminate her younger self, injecting her with another fluid sent by the ‘substance’ manufacturers – as anonymous as Amazon.com, and as sinister as Jeff Bezos. At the very last moment, the old woman cannot in fact kill her young self, and she relents with a painful cry: her narcissistic ego, combined with some form of maternal instinct, surges forth. Although the unbridled Qualley has been shamelessly vampirizing Moore, the old superego cannot self-destruct. Young ego shows no gratitude: resurrected, furious, she beats her old self to death. Her own punishment and demise come shortly thereafter, as her body starts to fall apart right before her grand moment on prime-time television (teeth and nails falling out like Seth Brundle’s in David Cronenberg’s The Fly, 1986). The starlet in pink regalia returns home in a panic and attempts to recreate another self, using what is left of the substance. This time, what emerges from the oddly buxom Qualley is not a young Moore, but a monstrously deformed creature, which will have its bloody minute of fame at the studio, repainting it (and the audience) blood red, before falling to pieces, then dissolving on the Hollywood boulevard star of her progenitor. What has been used on one side, is lost on the other side. Evidently The Substance is about fundamental forms of regression into the self: a collapse of human rapport. Although the film features some heterosexual interactions, they involve mere spornosexual drones. Moore ends up never going on her date with a banal fifty-something who laughably asks her out the day she is fired – her fiftieth birthday. As for the two protagonists’ ‘relationship,’ though tailored after real-life toxic and codependent dynamics, it reminds us of a form of strange mother-daughter jealousy, or perhaps an older/younger roommates dysfunctional situation. But it is also an auto-erotic affair, a female narcissist’s fantasy gone terribly awry (one which will be replayed with less disastrous consequences in another film I shall turn to at the end of this article). More interestingly, Fargeat deconstructs the male gaze by titillating (a superbly alluring Demi Moore in her leotards, an incredibly kinetic Margaret Qualley as her other self) then twisting and tearing it up, as our characters’ contort, clean the mess left by their alter ego, cook disgusting meals, age, decay, and dissolve. The whole thing is a vigorous slap in the face of traditional (patriarchal) storytelling, too: like its protagonist’s body, the film’s script shatters and melts away in the film’s last third, after a rigorous and methodical buildup. Likewise, it is not only because they are two of the greatest films ever made, and the two master texts against which all subsequent horror films are measured, that Fargeat quotes ad nauseam Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) in The Substance: her film not only aims at offering another unforgettable bathroom scene, she also intends to reclaim the bathroom for the female gaze, cleverly taking on the trope of the vulnerable woman in the shower, and of the young woman turning into a crone, before flushing it all down the drain.7 No wonder this sort of nihilism is not to every feminist’s liking. The Substance Parker Finn also quotes The Shining in his Smile 2: the dressing room of Naomi Scott’s character, Skye Riley, with its tacky mauve and emerald carpet is redolent of room 237, and Jack Nicholson’s son, Ray Nicholson, reprises his father’s grin from Kubrick’s classic. Unlike Fargeat’s film, Smile 2 has male gaze aplenty, with its inordinate number of close-ups on Scott’s expressive and photogenic face. But it too turns the point of view upside down. It does so literally: through circular camera pans or digitally engineered twists, and the actress’s body also rotates 360 degrees in a dance number rehearsal, or her near fatal car crash seen in flashback. Like The Substance (or Longlegs or Terrifier), Finn’s film evacuates romance: our characters might all well be asexual for that matter. I have already mentioned the sexual dynamic in The Substance (what sex Margaret Qualley has might be good or even spectacular, but it is entirely impersonal: the film’s male characters – exactly like those of Revenge, are all awful, inept, and/or disgusting). In another noteworthy item, Strange Darling, the serial killer female character (Willa Fitzgerald) lures men to their death through her sex appeal, a game which the male (Kyle Gallner) partly relishes, and wherein hunter and hunted swap seats. But our female predator has relinquished sex altogether, reducing it merely to a trap, evacuating not only its reproductive function but also its pleasurable dimension: her kick comes from carving with a knife the bodies of males she’s drugged, before ultimately killing them, sans fucking them. Hers is a political agenda (when she kills women, she does so reluctantly, and she usually lets them run away), but so is the filmmaker’s, who will have another minority representative, a Native American woman ranger, shoot our white serial killer dead. In Longlegs the female FBI agent (Maika Monroe), similar to Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling, evolves in a state of sexual isolation (her mommy issues unresolved, lest it is the other way round). In Terrifier, Art the Clow’s nemesis Sienna (a kinetic and wide-eyed Lauren LaVera) may share her virginity with the fabled final girl or the fairy tale’s prepubescent hero, since she too seems asexual (in her case, it’s childlike fantasies and daddy issues that are at fault). As for Smile 2, while Naomi Scott’s character used to be involved in a traumatic and abusive heterosexual relationship filled with drugs and alcohol, it is precisely the trauma she is trying to recover from, and she too appears asexual throughout the film (her boyfriend died in the aforementioned car accident). In all these films, the protagonists are locked in relationships with themselves: in Smile 2, the contamination of the ‘smile demon’ has the protagonist lose her mind and sense of reality before she (and the audience) can realize it, and in The Substance, Demi Moore/Margaret Qualley – supposedly one and the same person – exist in psychotic quasi-isolation, barely communicating on the phone with a male voice providing ominous instructions about the use of the titular panacea, which is a rather transparent critique of consumerism expressed via Amazon.com metaphors. But the films, if only by the fact that horror cinema is exploitative and voyeurist to the bone, are mostly critiques of the spectacularization of the female body, and in the case of The Substance and Smile 2, of the pressures of the industry on the female subject, and of how our dames are to take it all with a smile. Smiles Smile 2 and The Substance, it is understood, have a lot in common. The protagonists in both films are media personalities: a pop singer in search of a comeback after a car crash while under the influence, and an aerobics model who is being phased out as she turns fifty. Both films perform the by-now customary indictment of how the industry ‘chews you and spits you out,’ a trope that we’d recently seen in Jordan Peele’s overambitious, under-controlled Nope (2022) (and which was already at the heart of Get Out, but seen through the prism of race; in Fargeat’s case, again, it is the feminist lens that applies). It is not as though we haven’t seen critiques of what heavy toll the industry extracts of its stars – we’ve known about this at the very least since Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) all the way through Damien Chazelle’s spastic Babylon (2022). What these films contribute is the notion of the dual, split self, now emboldened in the age of online existence, where our time and ‘profiles’ are dualized, existences halved, between ‘real’ and cyber selves. Peele’s Us – one of the most intriguing entries in the genre in the 2010s – had already posed the question of our double. In so doing, it spoke, no doubt, about America’s middle-class idea of itself and its actual reality. But Us also addressed the notion of the avatars, virtual and otherwise, that the internet has generated for us (Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018) – another film to heavily quote The Shining released the same year as Us – did this literally). But the recent horror films under scrutiny are also very clearly about drugs, and ways to mitigate or push away pain and the effects of ageing. In this sense, they work also as satires, and of a robust if not particularly subtle kind. They also speak, more allegorically, of that anxiety of being relegated or becoming second-class: the US’s angst of losing to China/BRICS, perhaps, and surely the anxiety of cinema itself in front of streaming platforms. And cinema (or the cinematic) is here back with a bang: it’s no accident that Smile 2 and The Substance are movies made to be seen in the theatre, on the big screen, where their flashy aesthetics, close-ups of faces and glossy surfaces, and many other effects acquire a quasi-somatic, or hallucinatory, quality. While the first Smile was already among the better releases in the genre (with excellent performances by Kevin Bacon’s daughter, Sosie, and Gallner – the 2000s’ ‘scream king’), in this instalment director Parker Finn pushes everything up three notches. Naomi Scott delivers a career-defining masterclass in acting for the camera with her facial expressions of terror and shock and other animal instincts. At least two important ideas carry across here: on the one hand, the multiple instances of facial defilement in these films, like the fear of ageing/decaying in The Substance, speak to the obsession of capitalism with a perpetual present, and the manifold interventions devised to make women (and increasingly men, too) look young(er). Smile 2 spends most of its time in remarkable close-ups and medium shots of Scott, and more precisely, on her skin. Besides the scars she’s sustained in her car accident, and area of her scalp from which she nervously pulls out hair, as far as her face is concerned, it seems immaculate. Yet a tiny zit on her cheek reminds us, or foreshadows, that her face too will end up brutally destroyed in the finale. For Fargeat, all is clearly bound to turn to shit: while the first intervention initially provides auspicious results (Qualley the new Moore, thirty years younger and ready to retake the world of entertainment by storm), the second attempt is disastrous, ushering in the film’s grotesque ending. In very plain metaphorical terms, one could see here, besides the cautionary tale of how one cannot remain at the top forever, a commentary on the repeated injections and surgical procedures which make actresses and actors look good at first, compelling them to reiterate the procedure until they must hide, lest they reveal the truly abject underbelly of a senseless fight against natural processes. All the while, we naturally yearn for plenty: to see these actresses’ faces age, lose teeth, or be brutally destroyed reminds us that we are naturally primed to appreciate fullness and youth. It also reminds us that the horror of Jack Nicholson as the old decaying woman laughs in his face in The Shining had to do with our fear, simply, of death, but also of our awareness of the Real which lies behind the thin layer of ideology. Smile 2 But there is even more to Smile 2 and The Substance: these films, of course, speak of addiction, a common issue for a population so heavily medicated or addicted to substances or various kinds as America’s and Europe’s (oxytocin and now, increasingly, even more addictive drugs such as fentanyl). They also address the notion of contamination, and do so cleverly. Contamination is thematized in many ways: in Smile 2, it appears in the way it spreads, in the way one contracts the curse of the smile demon, from one host to the next. In The Substance, it is expressed by way of intrusiveness and disruption, as in the grotesque patriarchal gaze which admonishes Demi Moore, cancelling her as she reaches her ‘expiration date.’ This echoes mechanisms of capitalism and technology with which their special effects and modes of production are so deeply intertwined. It may all be too on-the-nose (the no-way out, nihilist scenarios, with their ‘countdowns’ to disaster, with the ‘final girls’ now unable to conquer death). But the films also address the question of that phenomenon of celebrity worship, now on steroids, and of which Taylor Swift (or perhaps Donald Trump!) are disturbing exemplars in terms of the morbid fascination and obsessive or totalitarian cult and fandom they generate. From Smile to Smile 2, the action moves from the suburban to the urban environment, and from the medical/psychiatric profession to the backstage travails of the pop star.8 At the end of Smile 2, it is not one, but tens of thousands of witnesses who are made privy to the horrifying demise of the protagonist, as Naomi Scott bashes her face in with her microphone while on stage – smiling (a dying/dissolving Demi Moore also smiles in the final shot of The Substance). It will be interesting to see how Parker Finn will handle the third episode, now that the chain of contamination has reached pandemic proportion. And it is indeed a pandemic that we are dealing with: not one of coronavirus, but of a stew of mental disorders that have taken the world by storm, and which, yes, often are correlates of addiction. Chief and most common among those pathologies is narcissism, that was always nestled at the heart of the entertainment industry, and that has spread like wildfire among youths with the introduction of social media and smartphones. Thematized in all these films, narcissism connects with capitalism by way of neoliberalism’s cult of the entrepreneur, of the endless quest for self-promotion, all the more insidious in that it has become normalized. Narcissism in these films reaches a form of logical and terminal conclusion, a brutal wake-up call, when the previously glorified self-love or ego-grooming suddenly becomes reviled, and delusional stance shatters against the Real, with faces violently disfigured and bodies torn asunder. Palimpsests, fragments, and a bloody sense of humour Near the end of Longlegs, the titular serial killer, played with no shortage of hammy inventiveness by a resurgent Nicolas Cage, commits suicide by repeatedly smashing his face on a table until his teeth fall out and his nose is obliterated. A variation on this special effect occurs in Smile 2 when Naomi Scott witnesses her drug dealer smashing his face with a dumbbell. Bodily defilement has loomed large in horror films since the 1980s, empowered by generations of inventive special effects: after twenty years of make-up effects with latex and fake blood galore, of which the likes of makeup artists Rob Bottin, Stan Winston, Chris Walas, or Tom Savini were the early masters, there came twenty years of CGI, often critiqued for their ‘uncanny valley’ effect. We are now enjoying some prosthetics and makeup effects revival, more realistic than ever courtesy of 3D printing and other technologies (the future skin of domestic robots, no doubt). No item in the recent slew of horror films takes bodily dismemberment further than the Terrifier series (Savini makes a cameo in the third episode!): a deliberate slap in the face of good taste by some idiot savant, Damien Leone – quite literally, the kind of films a South Park episode would associate with some New York mob’s nerdy nephew’s imagination (meatballs in tomato sauce and all). When in Terrifier 3, children are blown up in a shopping mall by an evil trickster parading as Santa Clause, the ‘prank’ couldn’t have been more ill-timed. Cretinous and vile though Leone’s films may be, his commitment to the abject is so utterly profound that, yes, it must commend a form of admiration mixed with disgust. His grand oeuvre where the slasher genre meets torture porn, satanic possession, and fantasy (echoing precedents such as A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warrior (Chuck Russell, 1987)) is predicated on an unkillable killer, Art the Clown (the first true icon in the horror genre since the 1980s, brilliantly brought to undead life by David Howard Thornton), who gleefully murders people in protracted fashion, pushing sick humour and abjection to the limits. The whole point is to see how far Art will go in the next kill, and how much sadistic creativity the trickster will apply to it. He is beyond good and evil, simply a force of Chaos and arbitrary cruelty.9 Art is a mime, a silent clown (like Michael Myers, or Harpo Marx): he lets his victims do the screaming. Funny, isn’t it, that something that is so utterly bizarre and ‘ironic’ (Art’s sadistic tricks), and that should be taken with more than a pinch of salt, should at one and the same time be so utterly sincere. Terrifier 3 certainly thinks it is funny, for it thematizes the ‘pranks’ of its villain in an almost guileless manner. All the other films under scrutiny here, although not funny, are quite wicked and darkly humorous. If, to this, one adds the undeniably self-aware playfulness that runs through all texts, we have located a form of cinematic entertainment that is rekindling the spirit of grand-guignol. But back to bodily defilement: for a long time, slashers and torture porn films spoke to capitalism’s anxiety concerning private property, and to the reifying mindset that extended the concept of unalienable property to the sphere of the biological. Terrifier 3 is still very much about the trickster’s joy in dismemberment. It replays an old anthem of capitalism, of debt and mortgages, showing how encroaching on private property is intimately connected in capitalism (amplifying the earlier anxiety of the entrapped female subject in gothic literature) with a conception of violating, or defiling of, corporeal integrity. This is emphasized in the scene in Art the Clown’s old house, when the workers who come to demolish it are ‘demolished’ themselves. But the film takes it so far that it becomes unconsciously satirical. These grotesque excesses simply mirror those of corporate greed, and global capitalism’s. The current surge of a manic stock market fosters films such as Terrifier 3, Smile 2, or The Substance. Yet the latter two are about a more subtle anxiety: not that of losing blood or money, but rather about losing time, of having someone literally steal it, and of eventually melting, rather than dying from blood (or capital) loss. Rather than just appealing to the individualistic fear of being murdered, these films propose the more pernicious anxiety of dissolving into some sort of total (or totalitarian) nightmare, of becoming part of a system from which one cannot break free or wake up. Terrifier 3 Time: Her Young Asses Which leads me to perhaps the real, actual horror. Not that of the vile Terrifier’s grand guignol, or the hackneyed possession narrative of Longlegs and its Satanist serial killer, nor even the unstoppable contamination of Smile. No. This autumn saw the concurrent releases of two very different films: The Substance, and a rather wonderfully endearing coming-of-age LGBTQ comedy with a twist, My Old Ass (Megan Park, 2024). A rather heartfelt and highly personal effort by Canadian actress-filmmaker Megan Park, the film answers the question: what would I say to my teenage self – and would I be sexually attracted to them? The strange autoeroticism of younger/older self, which somehow feed off of each other, connects Fargeat’s film with Park’s. Having paired them through their peculiar treatment of auto-erotic self-generation, other connections between My Old Ass and The Substance should stand out, though these may not be as easy to see. On the surface, one film is set on an idyllic farm in Canada, is warm and fuzzy like cinnamon and cloves-infused hot apple cider, a coming-of-age story with a truly winning tomboy-meets-boy formula, wherein heterosexual intercourse is the great source of trepidation and fear (she confesses to him she never had ‘dick sex’ before). Our protagonist, Elliot (Maisy Stella) also learns to become an adult, developing her interactions with her family and… her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza), who appears suddenly and gives her advice after young Elliot consumes hallucinogenic mushrooms. The Substance, meanwhile, is regressive and glacial, like neon-coloured popsicles, allowing for little identification as the protagonists can never interact (and when they finally do, one murders the other!). Since characters barely talk to anyone, we can only feel pity for Demi Moore’s character, and the failure of her vanity project. All this being said, the two stories have more in common than meets the eye – or that their marketing campaigns would have it. Both films are set in deceptively progressive strongholds: My Old Ass in a very liberal and laid-back Canadian family running a cranberry farm and indulging their children’s quirks (Stella’s tomboyish antics and reckless boat riding pales in comparison to her younger brothers’ obsession with the stock market or with Saoirse Ronan – a crypto queer icon if there ever was one!); and The Substance in the Los Angeles entertainment industry. But these liberal havens have a dark underbelly where death and disappearance rule, or where rape and harassment, cancellation, alienation, anomie and solitude are the norm. Layers upon layers of ideology have ended up annihilating the progressive nature or authenticity that might have originally been present in these environments, leaving only an empty shell of performativity. The Substance overtly expresses this perspective, portraying a dehumanized world of cruel chauvinism, friendlessness, obsessive narcissism, as well as sterile artificiality, where substance abuse seems the only available option. But while My Old Ass extols the warmth and importance of human connections (and is charming, moving, and funny throughout), it too features drugs as an important conduit to somehow defuse a form of free-floating anxiety. In a final twist/reveal, the film almost too overtly betrays the apparent (or psychologized) roots of its anxiety: growing up, with its share of loss, death, and even partial bodily defilement (disclaimer: in this case, it’s only just a missing toe, closer to The Big Lebowski’s than Terrifier!). But all this is ultimately very materialistic, and we are erring closer, again, to the stock market, and the glossy imaginarium of self-improvement/self-care books, than we are to metaphysics. This simile-feelgood hipster piece of entertainment ends up being reminiscent, upon scrutiny, of the anomie and alienation of I Saw The TV Glow, promising a vaguely dystopian future (All this eerily reinforced by real-life events). In the ultimate account, My Old Ass is a bit like one of Naomi Scott’s hallucinations in Smile 2: we are not in Maisy Stella’s soon-to-be-lost cranberry-farm and lake skinny dipping paradise, but in Aubrey Plaza’s traumatized mind, having lost her loved one, experiencing a retroactive fantasy, her decidedly disillusioned ‘old ass’ version, and her attempt to return to a happier, prelapsarian past. She, too, turns to PG autoeroticism as the ultimate resort. This is an admission of giving up on life and turning back to the past, as the two women spend the night together during which Stella fantasizes about having sex with her older self – one of the most intriguing and candid takes on nostalgia (or regressively utopian horizon!) ever seen on film. My Old Ass What is truly interesting, then, about The Substance and My Old Ass, beyond the critique of modern life and take on the fear of aging, is how they reinterpret genre cinema. Fredric Jameson taught us that such genre permutations, their retooling, re-partitioning of specialized areas of the symbolic (or the sensible), and generic seepages of various sorts, necessarily had to do with a similar reorganizing of capitalism. And it seems to have to do, again, with the split subject, with a split that is psychic but also markedly physical, material. Accordingly, however different, Fargeat’s and Park’s films have another very interesting and peculiar point in common – the fact that in both, two very different actresses play two versions of the same person. In My Old Ass, Plaza plays a 39-year-old Stella, and the two look even less alike than Moore/Qualley! To my mind, we had never seen this kind of dynamic of the double handled this way (save for a short scene in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) – itself a very distant cry from Guido’s ‘eternal child’ in Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963)). All the while, these films also become the latest variation on that postmodern trope: the time travel movie, with death as some sort of epistemic horizon, deep into the fabric of each film. Time ‘travel’ is also cleverly toyed with in Smile 2, where mental time – Scott’s protracted delirium or hallucination – parades as referential time/the ‘objective’ time of the clock. As a result, the film tricks and dismays all at once, just as Strange Darling does. In Mollner’s film, in Tarantinesque fashion, the order of the sequences (or chapters) is jumbled, leading us to misinterpret cues, assuming that Kyle Gallner is the monster (or ‘The Demon’ as the credits call him) and Fitzgerald (‘The Lady’), his innocent victim – and her protracted agony at the end, as she reclines, suffocating, dying, in a car driving her to the hospital, is as heartbreaking as it is voyeuristic, also because it communicates the sense of loss and yearning that is so poignant in My Old Ass. The films may use fairly hackneyed tricks, but their import goes beyond the mere cinematic sleight of hand. Our dismay stems, I think, not so much from identifying with the tragic fate of the protagonists, as it does from the more subliminal message whereby our own lives are being wasted in time, a feeling heightened by the vast humanitarian and ecological catastrophes surrounding us (literally alluded to in My Old Ass). But it connects also, simply, to the ever-depressing grim mode that capitalism has adopted more and more over the past two decades, propelled forward by a stock market by now fully drenched in the blood of warfare, and dampened, then jolted, by one economic crisis after another. Seldom has the expression ‘let their crises (or deaths) be our opportunity’ rung more truthfully! For us sheltered Westerners, the implications are clear: we have moved from a generation of boomers and real estate owners enjoying cushy S&P portfolios, 401Ks and lavish retirement plans, to one of disenfranchised cash-poor childless renters in an age of climate change, with the metaverse and VR helmets as the ‘best possible’ promise to soothe their/our woes, or offer a virtual holiday destination. Our ‘doubled’ (but also ‘halved’) existences waver now between a real world that seems increasingly depopulated or devitalized, and an online sphere of avatar-ness that absorbs our time while developing a parallel existence. Time has become an important, indeed crucial concern again, and it is thematized in most of the films dealt with here, predicated as they are on countdowns, rigid schedules and regimens, and the like. The films under discussion here also suggest that the old divide between two formerly separate spheres may be vanishing, the border between them blurred. We’ve known for a while (at least since Deleuze and Rodowick) that films are time machines, but only some of them are more explicitly about time travel. The Substance and My Old Ass belong to the category of films which are at once evidently engaging with time travel by confronting a younger and an older version of the protagonist in a given (eminently Bergsonian) present. Strange Darling is built like a jigsaw puzzle, its various chapters’ order shuffled. In Smile 2, time is of the essence and deceitful, it never being clear whether Skye is still in a referential time and race against the smile demon, or whether she was trapped in her hallucination all along. This flattening out of temporalities which at the same time brings attention on time itself as a medium and possibly a commodity expresses a new turn in capitalism, much as the spatialization of time was a feature of postmodernism in evidence in the 1980s and 1990s. On the one hand, it is obvious that the films evoke the spectacle of self and the narcissism it has generated – social media first and foremost (all protagonists are seen operating a smartphone at one point or another, and never is that implement associated with any positive valence), which becomes appended to the fetishization of the present time in capitalism, the reification of the past, and the cancelling out of the future. The ‘multiverse’, a concept that is at once amorphous and inscrutable in its endless possibilities or potentialities, has come to replace the less bombastic aspirations to time in modernism. It has come to express a new turn in our very epistemic rapport to reality. But in addition, what this coexistence of two versions of the self, besides the whole ‘multiverse’ imaginary which itself is an expression of this new turn, is, precisely, the coexistence of two capitalisms which somehow are both one and the same, and somehow vie for dominance nonetheless. In The Substance, this dialectic reaches its abject and grotesque conclusion when the third term becomes a monstrous lumping together of the two women—the final straw. In My Old Ass, Gen Z-ers are promised a vaguely dark, somewhat dystopian future. The latter happens to also be our ‘real’, urban present, with its concern with environmental decay and overpopulation finding its counterpart or remedy in an idyllic forest landscape, or in meditation and wellness spa escapes from the urban jungle; and where life and labour on a cranberry farm is expressed as some sort of perpetual holiday. The sense of loss is deeply thematized (the hitherto unrealized death of the male love interest): the dead-ends and pitfalls of the (female) neoliberal subject’s quest for self-reinvention, acknowledgment, and relevance, in short – exactly like The Substance or Smile 2! But these doublings also suggest something else: that after its paranoid, and then schizophrenic utterances, a now global capitalism (along with its geopolitical ‘decoupling’) has seemingly put a new spin on the notion of the split subject, now obscenely narcissistic and psychotic, unable to distinguish reality from fiction. Smile 2 is essentially a compelling representation of psychosis wherein the character is literally unable to distinguish reality from delirium, and The Substance represents a protagonist who embodies the confusion between mother and self (again, a textbook definition of psychosis, at least according to Lacan). But so does My Old Ass.10 Who knows if the new psychotic subject will soon be the only one able to function in a world of actual horror and insanity? This is not a rhetorical question: in the new reality show Scare Tactics (produced by Jordan Peele for the USA network), people are filmed unawares while confronted with imagery from horror films, including evil clowns and zombies – and, for a second, they seem unable to tell reality from fiction, running away from actors in costume like terrified children. The real horror is that of capitalism and what it has done to us, and the horror is directly proportional to the grotesque inflation of capitalism itself, and the ways in which it has penetrated all aspects of life, whereas earlier iterations of horror were about capitalism gradually encroaching on our lives. * Is there any hope, here? Only if we can somehow conceive of a collapse or significant decrease of capitalism’s effects in and on our lives (one that, of course, would not be accompanied by the emergence or surge forth of equally disturbing ideologies or systems), one which would indeed be expressed by the system’s sheer trepidation, which may, too, account for such vibrant expressions of horror. An escapist hope that is, at best. While not featuring anything particularly scary in and of itself (at least to an adult audience), the recent resurgence of the horror genre has brought its share of satire, fun rides, and relevant social commentary back to the theatres. The genre performs its true social function at long last: not to scare us, but to mediate the real horror of our world, be it mundane or tragic and revolting. The latter these films attempt to make not only palatable and processable, but also perversely enjoyable. These recent films address a Western subject who has been tricked and treated, and for that one rare and fine moment, has found a fine way to numb or anesthetize their political nerve, to forget not the toil of an underpaid turn of the 20th century working class, but the obscene abundance of processed food and trash of the early 21st century vanishing middle-class. And as we forget, by a strange dialectical logic, as we look away from our abject quotidian, we remember that elsewhere in the world, in real life, in real time, real and actual horror is in full swing. And for the most part, the alienated Western subjects seem more concerned about real estate prices and inflation than about war and ethnic cleansing, and would rather have their GMO popcorn and eat it too. Endnotes As for the Final Destination franchise, which I find interesting and relevant for a variety of reasons, it was nothing if not a belated iteration of the 1990s franchise logic: Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer… coupled with the entertainment value of early cinema’s of so-called “attractions”: set pieces detached from any real narrative relevance, existing for the sake of spectacle and thrills alone. ↩ The Saw franchise merchandizing teams tried to advance the Jigsaw character and elevate it to a horror icon, but somehow it never really stuck. ↩ I hurry to add that East Asian cinemas, and the New French (and francophone) Extremity, delivered their slices of bloody and scary excellence in the 21st century. ↩ It is unclear whether Perkins is committed to the genre, or a clever pasticheur surfing on some kind of ‘hipster smug’ attitude that feels redolent of the early 2000s… Longlegs combines the 1970s horror Satanic possession film (The Exorcist, The Omen) with the 1990s serial killer thriller (Silence of the Lambs, Seven), and throws in more references to the genre for good measure: The Shining (loon wails, a figure crouching on an ochre carpet, a killer with an axe), The Ring US version (the whole Northwest setting)… Yet despite the heavy and deadpan atmosphere of the film, it all feels a bit like a series of SNL parody skits strung together – including Nicolas Cage’s stylish histrionics. At least Perkins’ contribution to the genre serves as a reminder that horror and comedy are close cousins. ↩ Shudder, like Netflix or Mubi (the latter distributed The Substance), produces original content: the only recent film in the Shudder originals catalogue I would consider upsetting is the rather excellent Speak No Evil (2022). Comparing this Danish film to its American remake (2024), with its entirely different ending (a happy one, almost bereft of trauma–harking back to the early 1990s thrillers and their affirmation of the family cell!), would merit a short article in its own right. ↩ They are scarcely alone: see, for instance, the recent and remarkably atmospheric I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoebrun, 2024), or earnest if failed efforts such as, among others, Lisa Frankenstein (Zelda Williams, 2024) or Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass, 2024). ↩ Yes, the film also quotes many other texts: Goethe’s Faust I of course, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but also Zemeckis’s Death Becomes Her (1992), Stuart Gordon’s organic theater – Reanimator (1985), From Beyond (1986) –, Gordon’s acolyte Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989) and even Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000), with its quasi-structuralist-cinema obsessiveness and purulent injection points into which dirty needles are thrust. ↩ At times, we feel like we are rewatching the underappreciated Vox Lux (2018) – hopefully soon revisited after Brady Corbet’s recent triumph, The Brutalist (2024). ↩ Which has led the intrepid Earl Jackson to correlate the recent surge of filmic clowns – Joker, Pennywise, and Art – to the figure of Donald Trump in an October 25th, 2024 social media post on Facebook, worth of reproduction in toto: “Genre films often reflect the specific anxieties of their sociohistorical conditions. The dominance of psychopathic clowns: Pennywise, the Joker, and Art the Clown clearly warn of the catastrophe of the Trump menace. It’s hard to maintain hope for a nation in which millions of its voters are backing this fascist monstrosity.” ↩ Alexandre Aja’s latest film, Never Let Go (2024), toys with a similar concept, with the psychotic mother (Halle Berry) dragging her children into a disturbing survivalist fantasy, which we suspect all along is merely a figment of her sick mind. However, in its final scene and reveal, the film collapses, seeming to concede, or being contaminated by its own characters’ psychosis: a seepage of hallucination/delirium into the diegetic referential/indexical, by means of the polaroid as a form of ‘revelator’ of demons otherwise invisible. ↩