How Demi Moore's real life inspired the most grotesque film of the year

You won't have seen a film like The Substance ever before. And let's face it, you never will again. It's a fascinating choice of project for Demi Moore who, back in the 1990s, was the highest-paid female star in Hollywood. That doesn't scream gritty horror leading lady.

Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, who is fired from the TV aerobics show that made her a star on the day that she turns 50. This drives her into the arms of an unregulated drug that allows her to spend every other week living in the body of a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of herself, played by Margaret Qualley. In the guise of her younger self, named Sue, she gets her old job back and becomes a megastar once again.

Of course, this is a horror film, so things quite swiftly go awry. The woman behind the camera is Coralie Fargeat, who shocked audiences in 2017 with her unflinching, violent debut feature Revenge. The Substance sees her ensconced within Hollywood and aiming her critical barbs directly at the absurd beauty standards of showbiz.

And this, of course, is something Moore know more about than the average person. She rose to fame as part of the Brat Pack in the 1980s and, by 1995, a string of hits had cemented her as the highest-paid woman in Tinseltown. She was also a subject of tabloid fascination and routinely topped polls of the world's most beautiful women.

Read more: Demi Moore: There didn’t seem to be a place for me in Hollywood in my 40s (PA Media)

But then, things started to go wrong. A year after she was crowned Hollywood's highest-paid female star, she won a Razzie for Worst Actress, shared between her roles in The Juror and Striptease. Several of her movies, including The Juror as well as The Scarlet Letter, bombed hard at the box office.

Moore's on-screen career declined as the 90s came to an end, but her notoriety in the tabloids only became uglier. Her marriages to Bruce Willis and then Ashton Kutcher attracted endless scrutiny from the gossip press, while Moore's trailblazing approach to equal pay for women in Hollywood saw her unfairly branded a diva and dubbed "Gimme Moore" in some reports.

The press was also obsessed with her appearance, speculating frequently about the plastic surgery they claimed she had undergone. This was only amplified by the 15-year age gap between herself and Kutcher. Throughout her career, Moore exercised to excess and struggled with an eating disorder, all in response to the ideals Hollywood required of its leading ladies.

In a recent interview with The Guardian, Moore explained how her own struggles with beauty standards tied in with the body horror approach of The Substance. "What really struck me was the harsh violence against oneself. It’s not what’s being done to you, it’s what we do to ourselves," said the star.

Read more: Demi Moore shocked at how ‘cruel’ humans can be to themselves about their bodies (BANG Showbiz)

Speaking to Today, she added: "I placed a lot of value on what my body looked like, as being a defining marker of whether I belonged or not, whether I could succeed or not, all of those things, which, again, is a big part of the theme in the film."

There are certainly parallels to be drawn between Moore and Elisabeth Sparkle. Both experienced a meteoric rise to fame, only to see the showbiz obsession with beauty push them out of the spotlight. As Fargeat explained to Variety: "I really wanted for the lead [role] to go to a woman who incarnates a myth and a symbol in itself, as Demi does as an actress."

Read more: ‘The Substance’ review: a daring feminist take on the body horror genre (Rolling Stone)

The Substance is certainly a shocking film. Much has been made of the fact that both Moore and Qualley appear in nude scenes in the movie, but the true shock factor comes in the entirely unhinged third act. To say it's gruesome would be the understatement of the century.

It would be a crime to spoil the film's biggest swings — they certainly split the room in two when I saw the film at a large cinema chain's secret screening —but anyone familiar with the heyday of David Cronenberg will have an idea of what's coming. It's part The Fly and part Peter Jackson's Braindead, all given a new slant by its distinctly female gaze.

But the sheer power of The Substance doesn't come from its boundary-pushing journey into the grotesque. Much of its intensity comes from the very real themes underpinning it — women fighting to find a space for themselves in a world that only seems interested in them when they're young and meet conventional standards of beauty.

There's simply no one better to tell that story than Demi Moore. She has spent decades trying to battle exactly that machine of Hollywood, including with her acclaimed 2019 memoir Inside Out, and she's now using The Substance as her latest salvo in that war. This time, she's achieving it by diving headlong into the most subversive and grotesque body horror movie of 2024. It's an obscene joy.

The Substance will be streaming on Mubi from 31 October