The surprise success of Terrifier 3 in cinemas this month – with stories of underage viewers buying tickets to family fare and sneaking into the low-budget gorefest instead – underlines a constant in the mutable horror genre: people will never lose their morbid fascination with the worst possible things that can happen to our bodies. Or the worst impossible things, which is where body horror cinema comes in: the terror of our natural anatomical order becoming, well, unnaturally disordered.
French film-maker Coralie Fargeat, meanwhile, plays on our fear of natural and unnatural bodily deterioration in her swaggering, supersized horror-comedy The Substance (Mubi), a satire on Hollywood ageism that is as broad as a dual carriageway but has enough blunt-force impact to have kept divided audiences talking since its cinema release last month. It cannily makes its streaming debuton 31 October, conveniently sorting out many a Halloween movie night. I found the film overlong and conceptually thin, but there’s gusto in Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley’s dual performances as chemically warring inhabitants of one has-been star’s body, and in its extravagantly disgusting vision of just how far the ageing process can be simultaneously reversed, accelerated and contorted.
