From heartbreaking tragedies like Carrie to oddball grotesqueries like The Fly, there are a ton of great horror movies that pair perfectly with The Substance on a double feature. Coralie Fargeat’s gonzo satirical thriller is a rarity in the horror genre. It’s as bonkers and uncompromising and sickeningly gruesome as horror movies come, but it’s been sweeping awards season. It’s been nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Demi Moore, and it’s received nods from the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs. It’s been a long time since a horror film was this highly acclaimed.
In many ways, The Substance is a totally unique movie — its darkly comedic takedown of the cosmetic industry and its unrealistic standards of beauty is both timely and fiercely original — but it owes a lot of its execution to previous horror films. Pierre Olivier Persin’s mind-blowing makeup effects pay homage to the iconic body horror works of David Cronenberg. Elisabeth Sparkle’s envious rivalry with Sue calls back to psycho-biddy thrillers like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. A lot of these movies would make a great pairing with The Substance on a double feature.
10
Society
The Substance uses gruesome horror imagery to satirize the glamorous social elite and the lengths they’ll go to hold onto their wealth and influence. This harks back to Brian Yuzna’s hugely influential horror gem Society. Billy Warlock stars as a teenager in Beverly Hills, who suspects that his rich parents belong to a sadistic cult of one-percenters. As he investigates further, he’s shocked to learn that this cult is a shapeshifting entity that feeds on the lower classes.
Society takes a much weirder, but just as poignant approach to the political themes of paranoid sci-fi thrillers like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Yuzna came up with a truly unique and terrifying way to visualize the ways that affluent people exploit the 99%. Society doesn’t get as wild as The Substance until its third act, but it’s a delightfully disturbing payoff.
9
Revenge
The Substance would make a great double bill with Fargeat’s first feature, Revenge. Revenge brings a modern, feminist perspective to the problematic rape-and-revenge genre. Matilda Lutz stars as a wealthy businessman’s mistress, who is sexually assaulted by his colleague and left for dead in the middle of the desert. As she recovers from her injuries and arms herself, she stalks the men across the wasteland and exacts vengeance against them one by one.
Throughout the movie, Jen transforms from a derogatory archetype into a more empowering one. At the beginning of the movie, she’s a typical damsel in distress. But by the end of it, she’s a badass lone-wolf warrior similar to John Rambo or Max Rockatansky. There are several parallels that make Revenge a perfect pairing with Fargeat’s other movie: it’s a satirical commentary on women’s portrayal in the media, and it culminates in a shocking bloodbath.
8
Carrie
The big finale of The Substance, in which Monstro Elisasue takes the stage at the New Year’s Eve show and her adoring fans turn to vicious hecklers, pays homage to the climactic sequence from Brian De Palma’s Carrie. Carrie was the first of dozens of Stephen King movie adaptations, and it’s still one of the very best. Sissy Spacek stars as Carrie White, a troubled teenager tormented by her abusive mother and bullied by her cruel classmates, who discovers she has strange telekinetic powers. When she’s pushed to the edge, Carrie uses those abilities to fight back.
Carrie and The Substance share more than just a blood-soaked finale. They’re both sobering, character-driven dramas disguised as horror movies. They’re both touching tragedies about a misunderstood antihero who just wants to be accepted. They’d make a great double feature.
7
Re-Animator
As a gonzo horror movie that pushes the boundaries of the R rating, The Substance has a very similar tone to Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator. Based on H.P. Lovecraft’s novelette, Re-Animator stars Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West, a medical student who develops a substance capable of bringing dead bodies back to life. The Substance has a few specific visual parallels with Re-Animator — namely, that the neon-green Activator serum bears a striking resemblance to West’s Re-Agent fluid.
Re-Animator is to Frankenstein what Nosferatu is to Dracula: a wild reimagining of a classic horror story that makes the original look tame by comparison. Much like The Substance, Re-Animator is a rare horror comedy that’s both genuinely frightening and genuinely funny. Neither of its two genres overpowers the other; they complement each other. The Substance and Re-Animator would make for ideal bedfellows in a spooky double feature.
6
Tusk
After Cop Out was panned by critics, Kevin Smith took a break from his usual talky comedies and pivoted to the horror genre. This resulted in two of his greatest films: Red State, a chilling high-octane thriller about an armed standoff with the Westboro Baptist Church, and Tusk, a body horror pic that has since become a notorious cult classic. The latter would fit perfectly onto a double feature with The Substance.
Justin Long stars as a podcaster who travels to the isolated mansion of a retired seaman, played by Michael Parks, who turns out to have a sinister plan to turn him into a walrus. Like The Substance, Tusk gets really dark laughs out of its absurd premise. Just when it seems like it’s gotten as crazy as it’s going to get, it somehow gets even crazier.
5
Raw
Just one year before Fargeat burst onto the scene as one of the most exciting new voices in horror cinema, Julia Ducournau did the same thing. Ducournau’s debut feature, Raw, revolves around a first-year veterinary student and lifelong vegetarian, played by Garance Marillier. Following a particularly dark hazing ritual, she develops a craving for human flesh. Where The Substance mixes horror into the story of a character entering her twilight years, Raw mixes horror into a coming-of-age story about a young woman finding herself.
The critical response to Raw was similar to The Substance. It was widely praised for its poignant performances, timely themes, and unique style, but it was also met with controversy for its shockingly graphic content. Raw and The Substance are both body horror character studies; they’d make an awesome double bill.
4
What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?
The Substance is a modern-day reimagining of Robert Aldrich’s classic psychological thriller What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the forerunner of the psycho-biddy subgenre. Bette Davis stars as former child star “Baby Jane” Hudson, who deeply resents her sister Blanche, played by Joan Crawford, who became a much bigger name in Hollywood while Jane fell by the wayside. Now, Blanche is paraplegic, and a resentful Jane spends every day terrorizing her.
The bitter rivalry between Elisabeth and Sue in The Substance is like a sci-fi version of the rivalry between Baby Jane and Blanche. Elisabeth, like Jane, despises her beloved counterpart for being more popular and successful than her, and like Jane, that resentment builds and builds until she dedicates all her time to tormenting her rival. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? would make a great lead-in to The Substance.
3
Evil Dead II
From Elisabeth and Sue’s wuxia-style fight across the apartment to Monstro Elisasue’s blood-soaked final performance, The Substance often veers into cartoonish territory. The horror cartoon aesthetic was originally pioneered by Sam Raimi with his classic sequel Evil Dead II. Evil Dead II essentially remakes the original indie masterpiece — Bruce Campbell’s Ash Williams goes to a cursed cabin in the woods and contends with evil demonic spirits — but this time, Raimi tells the story with a healthy dose of pitch-black humor and slapstick comedy.
If the Marx Brothers ever made a Texas Chainsaw movie, it would probably look something like Evil Dead II. In Evil Dead II, the demons themselves have a twisted sense of humor. They enjoy messing with Ash’s head and playing mind games. This gives Evil Dead II the same mix of horror and hilarity that made The Substance so much fun.
2
Death Becomes Her
At its core, The Substance uses a morbid horror story to satirize the absurdity of using cosmetic enhancements to cling to youth and halt the natural aging process. Robert Zemeckis did the same thing in a slightly less gory but just as surreal manner in Death Becomes Her. Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn star as two women competing for the affections of the same man: a renowned plastic surgeon, played by Bruce Willis. In order to catch his eye, they each take a magical potion promising eternal youth — and, much like Elisabeth, face horrifying consequences.
Although it was met with mixed reviews on its initial release, Death Becomes Her has since been rightly reappraised as a beloved cult classic. It shares The Substance’s camp tone and gleeful one-upmanship. In its first half, it might not seem quite as wild as The Substance, but around the midpoint, it takes a really crazy turn.
1
The Fly
With its grotesque prosthetics and its protagonist’s increasingly unsettling mutations, The Substance is a classic example of body horror. But it uses that body horror to dig deep into the human condition with a commentary on society’s unfair expectations of women’s bodies. The Substance is really a tragedy about an aging woman who just wants to be appreciated for who she is, but only ever gets recognized for her physical attributes — exemplified perfectly in The Substance’s heart-wrenching bathroom mirror scene.
This blend of body horror and human tragedy was originally perfected by David Cronenberg in his classic sci-fi thriller The Fly. Jeff Goldblum’s Seth Brundle is transformed into a disgusting human-fly hybrid when a housefly gets into his teleportation machine. Much like The Substance, The Fly has all the fun of a creature feature, but it’s also a deeply affecting character drama.
