How 'The Substance' Turned Demi Moore Into a Movie Monster

Moore and Qualley before the substance ruins everything.
Photo Illustration: Vulture; Photos: MUBI/Everett Collection

Spoilers for the end of The substance consequences.

The substance, Coralie Fargeat's flamboyant satire of modern beauty standards is a cautionary tale and the wildest psychological drama of 2024, as Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley slowly transform into a modern-day Frankenstein wonder. When Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore), a 50-year-old actress turned TV fitness trainer, is fired by a network manager who thinks she's too old, she makes a Faustian bargain and injects herself with neon green plasma that gives her a second life week as a sexy, flawless 20-year-old named Sue (Qualley). But every time Sue exceeds her time span, parts of Elisabeth's body age at breakneck speed. She soon becomes Monstro Elisasue, a distorted man-eater who looks like Anjelica Huston The witches, if this movie had been 17 times darker.

Over two years, Fargeat worked to construct a hideous mash-up befitting the carnage of the film's operatic finale. “All the things that are seen from the outside as pieces of flesh – our breasts, our butts, our teeth, our smiles – have been completely deconstructed, pulverized and put into no order,” says the French director. “It’s the way society has been shaped by the way men look at women.” That’s how Elisasue came to be.

Moore's head, sculpted and scanned onto Elisasue's back.
Photo: MUBi

Fargeat always knew her film would end with a monster – a “Picasso of male expectations,” as she calls it. The rejection that motivates Elisabeth to use the substance also fuels Sue's addiction to staying young, which is why Sue resists the order to switch bodies with Elisabeth every seven days. Elisasue is the product of mind and body tracked by external reviews.

Like many great movie monsters, Elisasue just wants to be loved. Fargeat was inspired by The Elephant Man, David Lynch's 1980 tragedy about a deformed 19th-century Englishman who is treated like a freak show spectacle until a sympathetic doctor takes him in. “He's monstrous, but you want to hug him,” says Fargeat, and the same goes for Elisasue. Fargeat created mood boards using stills from Lynch's film as well as various human-animal sculptures she found online and the works of Colombian artist Fernando Botero, whose sculptures often feature women with exaggerated proportions. In her eyes, that’s what Elisasue is there for The substance what Quasimodo is to Victor Hugo The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

In the script, Fargeat tried to portray Elisasue as vividly as possible, particularly her mismatched body parts – a crooked head, teeth sticking out of her chest, arms askew, Elisabeth's stunned face bulging out of her bottom, lots of folds and creases and aberrations . “I wanted the monster to be heavy, which is such a contrast to the dancer's figure that we dream of being delicate and thin-waisted – kind of like Princess Ariel,” says Fargeat. “I wanted her to struggle and limp.” But describing a monster on the page is one thing; Putting an actress in a functioning foam latex bodysuit with all these oddities built into it is another matter.

Fargeat puts Qualley in Elisasue's body.
Photo: Christine Tamalet/MUBI

I want to use the practical effects that defined horror hits of the 80s An American werewolf in London And The fly Fargeat was so emotional that she initially met with prosthetic artists who had difficulty conjuring her vision. “I've seen designs made by very, very talented people, but they were very masculine,” says Pierre-Olivier Persin, a prosthetics expert whose credits include game of Thrones And Athena. Persin got the job thanks to a small model figure he sculpted. He and Fargeat then created the full-scale Elisasue using a mix of prosthetics, puppetry and digital renderings. On set, Fargeat and her team had five heads (including a special head with a cavity that splits open to give birth to a breast attached to an umbilical cord), two full body suits, two partial body suits, and a mold of Moore's head. The work was so meticulous that Persin jokingly refers to it as “months of suffering.”

Qualley spent six claustrophobic hours in the makeup chair becoming Elisasue. The actress found the character's complexity “rewarding” after spending so much time embodying Sue's soullessness. But the physical demands were a different story. “That was painful,” Qualley says. “A real challenge. But we did it.”

Monstro Elisasue models by Pierre-Olivier Persin.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist and MUBI

In the end, everyone carries a little bit of Elisasue.
Photo: Christine Tamalet/MUBI

After Sue kills Elisabeth and returns to the television studio to headline a New Year's Eve show, Sue's body begins to fail. So she abuses the substance again, which leads to the surprising emergence of a third self. When Elisasue sees her repulsive reflection, she feels a sense of victory. In Fargeat's eyes, she can no longer see herself through a prescribed standard of beauty. Only then will she find peace. Fargeat says: “She stops fighting with herself because all the parts merge into a single being,” says the director. Moore and Fargeat view Elisasue as a tender response to Elisabeth's self-hatred. “It represents a reckoning and the liberation of the physical body,” Moore says.

At the New Year's event, Elisasue's body mutates in real time. After hobbling onto the stage and spitting her chest out of her head, to the horror of the crowd demanding her execution, her body explodes, unleashing a tsunami of blood that took two weeks to shoot. Fargeat operated the fire hose herself using a camera attached to her helmet. The sequence required stunt performers, 30,000 gallons of fake blood and a technical setup that the director likens to “navigating the world.” Titanic.“They only had one chance to capture a wide shot of the splattered audience. In The substanceIn the final minutes, the last recognizable part of Elisabeth – her face, which now has Medusa-like tentacles – crawls to Elisabeth's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame to die.

“I knew from the start that I wanted to end with a liberating climax – something that goes very far and is a hugely cathartic gesture where you let the excess explode,” says Fargeat. “For me, the audience represents society. I portrayed Elisabeth's true dream, which is to be loved by people for who she really is. This explosion of blood and guts was a way to externalize the violence that all these looks and this pressure of beauty felt on us. It was a way for me to splash it in the audience's face and say, 'Look at what you're creating. You're responsible for this explosion.'”

The kit was soaked in 30,000 gallons of fake blood.
Photo: Christine Tamalet/MUBI

Dennis Quaid, who plays a TV executive, behind the scenes at Fargeat.
Photo: Christine Tamalet/MUBI