This Halloween, it seems, is all about the “hag”. Overshadowing the axe-wielding clown in Terrifier 3, a dark-web serial killer in Red Rooms and an increasingly sinister Hugh Grant in Heretic is one of the scariest creatures in the Hollywood imagination: a fiftysomething woman.
The Substance, written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, won the prize for best screenplay at Cannes this year, but has divided critics and audiences. 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 (all stories about male monsters), The Substance belongs firmly in the dubious “hagsploitation” genre. Horror films take the demonisation of older women and make it flesh, monstrously so – take the hideous crone in room 237 in The Shining. From What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in 1962 to Death Becomes Her 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.
Fargeat joins other female film-makers in shaking up the body-horror formula. In 2021 Julia Ducournau, also a French director, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes with Titane – a JG Ballard/David Cronenberg mashup in which the heroine has sex with a car. This autumn, Marielle Heller’s adaptation of the novel Nightbitch is released, in which a frazzled new mother turns into a dog. Pregnancy, motherhood, old age – female bodies are ripe for the body-horror treatment. But are these films by women less sexist than their predecessors?
For critics, including Anna Bogutskaya, the answer is yes. Their case is that the genre allows a greater range of female characters than some others, and places their interiority centre stage. Viewed through this optimistic lens, hagsploitation films can be seen as a celebration of older women – of their rage, transgression and power to inspire fear.
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 (who was only 37) 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 Hags, 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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