body horror

Touch Me (2026)

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Touch Me had its Shudder premiere this week, and I went into it completely blind, which I recommend for anyone who is interested. This is a color-soaked fever dream of a movie, an erotic thriller wrapped in a science fiction plot that doesn’t shy away from turning a titillating moment into one of pure body horror, then following that up with a joke that underlines the tone without undercutting it. It’s fresh, fun, and something decidedly new, although it’s obviously not going to be for everyone. 

The film opens on a therapy session with Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) detailing an experience she had with a charismatic man five years earlier. She ran into him at two separate events wearing an out-of-place track suit, and mockingly (and correctly) dismissed him as an alien. When he revealed that this was true and that he came from another world devastated by climate change to save the earth from falling victim to the same fate, she allowed him to share his psychic touch with her, which had a euphoric effect that effectively combatted her psychological issues. She hasn’t seen him since a sexual encounter between the two of them turned into an assault when he wouldn’t stop despite her asking him to, running straight to the home of her gay best friend Craig (Jordan Gavaris), where she has remained ever since. For reasons that are revealed later, the two are able to live comfortably in Craig’s home, despite neither having a job, but when an unexpected and costly plumbing emergency occurs, Joey starts looking for work. This brings her back into contact with Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci), her alien ex, and she ultimately accepts his invitation for her and Craig to spend some time in his modern mansion in the hills. There’s some friction between the two and Brian’s human assistant Laura (Marlene Forte), but after a few sessions of alien group therapy, things are going well, until they suddenly aren’t. 

One of the barriers that I think some viewers will have with this one will come down to its playful zaniness. Touch Me isn’t trying to be taken at face value and as such calls attention to its filmic and fictional nature constantly. After Joey witnesses video evidence that there’s something more sinister going on than she’s been led to believe, the film shows us the backstory of the person she’s just seen die in a black and white segment; the victim was lured in via hookup app, with the telltale sounds of Grindr notifications going off but those messages appearing on screen like silent picture intertitles. It’s quirky, but not overly so. When Joey considers applying to work at the coffee shop she frequents, the “help wanted” sign on the counter appears and reappears in multiple floating bubbles that frame her face. It’s cartoonish, and the tone of the film supports it, but I can see a lot of the film-going audience growing frustrated with Touch Me because of this visual playfulness in a film that spends much of its time dealing with sexual assault and its psychological impacts. Those scenes are never played for laughs and are treated with appropriate weight, and we’re never subjected to it and only witness the victims recount them in therapeutic sessions, both legitimate and manipulative. That tonal whiplash is part of what makes the film special, however, and I don’t think that I would have it any other way.

Brian turns out to want “cross-species intercourse” with both of his hot young houseguests (and as many others as possible), and the film is very good at capturing what makes him both desirable and uncannily, repulsively inhuman. Pucci is an attractive man who has clearly put a lot of work into maintaining his physique, but he also has very impressive control over his facial muscles in a way that, in combination with his unnatural dark hair, allows him to look eerie and not entirely trustworthy. When characters are aroused by him, either through psychic manipulation or basic human lust, the film communicates this through erotic, almost pornographic close ups of his bouncing pectoral muscles or undulating abs, but then intersplices this with off-putting close-ups that feature his creepy stare and libido-shriveling Gary-Oldman-in-Bram Stoker’s Dracula grooming. It’s very effective at being both arousing and off-putting, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a film that captures that line so well. Both Taylor Dudley and Gavaris are familiar to me as a viewer who soaked up a lot of 2010s Vancouver-based genre television; the former portrayed divisive character Alice in The Magicians and the latter was the universally beloved Felix on Orphan Black. I was delighted to see both of them in this film, and they not only have great chemistry with one another but are also putting in performances that are so distinct that, despite having spent dozens of hours with them as their familiar-to-me characters, I never found myself slipping into thinking about Alice or Felix at all. Joey’s grief is completely different from Alice’s, as is her expression thereof; Craig is easier to differentiate from Felix since he doesn’t share that character’s accent, but Craig also lacks Felix’s motivation, integrity, and unrelenting self-love. When it comes to Gavaris, his dedication to picking up the weights as he aged out of his Orphan Black era twinkiness was a cause of some concern for me; I started following him on social media some years ago when he led a short-lived comedy series called The Lake in which Julia Stiles played his conniving step-sister, and the way that he would post about his workouts and the way he felt about his body was troubling. One hopes that he’s come to terms with that since then, and that Craig’s body dysmorphia here is him taking some agency over Gavaris’s own, since Craig calls himself “fat” and “hideous” despite being neither. 

Of course, it’s also an equally valid interpretation that Craig doesn’t actually think that he’s either of those things, and that it is instead his way of fishing for compliments from Joey. It’s a sign of their co-dependency; we eventually learn that they were both victims of childhood sexual assault, but that Joey has kept this from Craig, which has allowed for him to weaponize his victimhood against her in a way that she feels she can’t counter without either being forced to relitigate her trauma or risk her living situation. It’s not ideal for either of them, and demonstrates how this betrayal during their vulnerable years has led them to dismiss those traumas flippantly, through dismissive humor, or through total suppression, and this makes them easy prey for Brian. It’s good stuff, and although the film draws attention to its artificiality through overt stylism, it doesn’t feel the need to broadcast that it’s tackling “elevated” horror themes. 

I’ve had mixed feelings about a lot of the horror that’s come out this year. I was personally underwhelmed by Obsession because of the familiarity of its narrative structure, but I was also quite taken with Leviticus despite the fact that it traffics in images and ideas that are not necessarily novel either, just viewed through a new lens. Touch Me is fresh, irreverent, exciting, and sexy, despite also owing major debts in its visual inspiration to Neon Demon, Ex Machina, and Mandy. It won’t be for everyone, but will be thoroughly enjoyed by those for whom it does work. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #248: The Hidden (1987) & Parasites

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Welcome to Episode #248 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of creature features about body-invading parasites, starting with the sci-fi action horror The Hidden (1987), starring Kyle MacLachlan.

0:00 Spooky season
06:16 The Long Walk (2025)
12:12 Robert Altman
16:46 Queens of Drama (2025)

21:07 The Hidden (1987)
36:20 The Tingler (1959)
52:23 Brain Damage (1988)
1:04:15 PussyCake (2021)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Together (2025)

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I remember waiting at the bus stop at Republic Square in Austin in early 2020 when a friend texted me about the controversy surrounding Alison Brie’s Horse Girl, and the alleged plagiarism that the film committed against a smaller indie title, The God Inside My Ear. He said that it looked very bad for Brie, and when I read the list of supposed direct lifts that Horse Girl took from God Inside, it did seem pretty damning. Months later, Brandon nominated Horse Girl as a topic for the podcast, and I mentioned that I had read it was heavily plagiaristic, but when I tried to follow up on it at that time, it seemed like those allegations had been dropped (although I can’t seem to find an article confirming that anymore, since Google is essentially useless now). I remember reading through all of the comments on a message board where people had taken the opportunity to take potshots at Brie and how assured everyone had been that she had definitely stolen some valor, only for a post to come up a year later with screenshots that seemed to disprove every contention that the creator of God Inside had made, and what a turnaround there had been on what people thought she had done. I remember the satisfaction that came with Brie’s vindication, that I could rest assured that she hadn’t done anything wrong. Not my Annie Edison! Not my Trudy Campbell!

I hadn’t heard of Together at all when Brandon mentioned that he was trying to find a screening of it in New Orleans. Coincidentally, a friend in town sent a message in one of our group chats that a friend of his had highly recommended Together and organized an outing, although when we got to the theater he realized that he had spent all of that time confused and thinking about the upcoming Weapons instead. Somehow, I missed all of the marketing for this one, and when I mentioned it to another friend, he said that there was again a plagiarism scandal circling around it. I read the article from The Wrap summarizing the similarities between Together and a 2023 indie script titled Better Half; both texts are about a heterosexual couple who end up beginning to physically merge with one another, featuring “two central couples […] composed of one codependent partner and a commitment-phobic artist,” and the use of the Spice Girls song “2 Become 1.” And that does seem kind of damning, doesn’t it? I’m of two minds about this, because the last time this happened, it became clear that the director of God Inside was grasping at straws and whether they were doing so to get more attention for their film or their efforts were earnest and in good faith, Horse Girl was very much its own bizarre, beautiful thing. Any similarities were superficial at best. 

As for the points of comparison between Better Half and Together, I’m not at all convinced that a low angle reverse shot on two actors with their heads tilted toward one another constitutes plagiarizing an image, and if you’re a millennial making a movie about two people merging together (an uncommon but not unique concept) then the use of “2 Become 1” seems like a perfectly natural creative choice for multiple creators from the same generation to make. And why the vague language around “commitment-phobic artist”? Franco’s character is a musician who’s having issues with intimacy because he’s haunted by having discovered his parents’ decomposing bodies and has his doubts about uprooting from a life spent entirely in the city and relocating to a wooded rural area. The “artist” in Better Half could be anything—a painter, a sculptor, a playwright—whose commitment issues could be characterized in a completely different manner. On the other hand … it’s weird that this has happened twice, right? That Wrap article indicates that the producers of Better Half intentionally sought out Franco and Brie’s involvement with their production, which does paint everything in a slightly different light. I’m not really sure what to think at this point, other than to say that I absolutely loved Together. 

The film opens on an homage to The Thing, as two dogs assisting a man in a woodland search for a couple of missing hikers drink from the same underground well and begin behaving strangely, then begin to merge into a single horrifying dogthing that night in their kennel. Elsewhere, Tim (Franco) is rummaging around in some boxes of records when he comes across some photos of his parents, which rattle him. Girlfriend Millie (Brie) has gotten a teaching job in a small town, and she asks him to come back to the going away party that their friends are holding for them, mentioning that people think that it’s cute that the two are in matching outfits; when Tim returns to the party, he’s changed clothes. Millie performs a (not so) mock proposal to Tim at the party which goes poorly, and the air is still thick with tension when they’re settling into their new home, as the change of scenery hasn’t alleviated Tim of the horrifying image of his rotting parents, and Millie’s increased frustration with his resultant impotence, combined with his poor reaction to the proposal, make her doubt their ability to go the distance. The two get caught in a rainstorm on an intended romantic hike and end up collapsing into the same underground space that we saw the dogs exploring in the film’s opening, and the two of them end up reluctantly drinking the water. When they uncouple the next morning, they seem to be sticking together, and things only get worse from there. 

There’s a lot to be grossed out by here, certainly, but it’s not nearly as gross as other recent genre entries like The Substance or The Ugly Stepsister, and, like those films, the “horror” part of the body horror genre is the least important part. Stepsister’s examination of the presumed protagonistic gaze of the fairy tale as a genre is the destination while the lengths to which the title character is physically molded and the resultant revulsion thereof is merely the vessel to take us there. As for The Substance, I have a hard time calling that one “body horror” at all because it’s not a “horror” movie, but a comedy that happens to use self-mutilation, unwashed hands molesting shrimp, and pulsating tumors as comedic beats. Together is the same body horror* with an asterisk because the point here isn’t to make your stomach churn; it’s to tell a love story, with the fact that the way that the characters “come together” is nauseating being much less relevant than the emotional core of Tim and Millie’s relationship. To reach back further for a different example, David Cronenberg’s The Brood was created in the wake of his acrimonious divorce from Margaret Hindson, and that subtext is present in the film in the way that Cronenberg’s marriage is reflected in Frank and Nola Carveth’s, but it never feels like The Brood is about that. The film rushes headlong toward the harrowing body horror images of its final act, with the Carveth family’s dissolution serving as the scaffolding on which the meat of the film, its imagery, hangs. The narrative is merely the means to the film’s haunting visuals’ end. The reverse is true in Together, where the scenes in which Tim nearly chokes to death on Millie’s hair in their sleep or the two wake up to find that their sharing a single forearm are the set dressing that surrounds the primary focus, which is what it really means to take “the plunge” with someone. 

What a lot of people don’t seem to be talking about is just how funny Together is; it got a lot of laughs out of me. In a scene following the first time that Tim’s separation anxiety from Millie is made physically manifest, he sees a doctor who prescribes him valium (“It’s called diazepam now,” the doc says, which Tim repeats later to Millie in one of the film’s many repeated dialogue gags) and tells him about a hiker couple who went missing in the woods near Tim and Millie’s house, calling it “big news” at the time. Tim, snobbishly, asks if it was bigger news than “Local man waters garden”; later, when reading an article on the local newspaper’s website about the missing hikers, the side-pane article on the website has that exact phrase as its headline. (Admittedly, I was the only person in my screening who laughed at this bit.) There’s an insightfulness about relationships and their awkward moments that are cleverly captured in the dialogue and make for some quality humor. That same cleverness carries over into the way that certain lines are repeated between the film’s first and second halves, like “If we don’t split now, it’ll be much harder down the line,” and the changing context of that screenplay symmetry. 

This was a crowd pleaser, as well as a crowd grosser-outer. All of the group with whom I saw Together were delighted by it, and no one seemed particularly excited about hugging one another as we went our separate ways. Although it has a couple of instances of all out shunting, it’s pretty palatable for anyone who wouldn’t identify themselves as squeamish. If nothing else, I’m making damn certain that I take my LifeStraw with me the next time I go on a romantic hike.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Ugly Stepsister (2025)

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One of the more uninspired trends in recent mainstream filmmaking has been the villain origin story, wherein cinema’s greatest monsters get the chance for the world to see their personal plights from the most empathetic angle possible. Maleficent, Cruella de Vil, Willie Wonka, The Wicked Witch, and the Wizard of Oz have all had their early-years sob stories told over the past decade or so, and now it’s Cinderella’s ugliest, meanest stepsister’s turn. The Ugly Stepsister retells the Cinderella story from the vantage point of the heiress-turned-servant’s cruelest sibling-by-marriage, under the wicked guidance of her stepmother (and the more general wickedness of European beauty standards). First-time director Emile Blichfeldt finds genuine thematic & visual inspiration in the exercise where its far more expensive Hollywood studio equivalents have failed, revising Cinderella to be a woman-on-the-verge story about a teenager driven mad by the never-ending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. While Cinderella’s homeliest stepsister, Elvira, strives to replicate the beauty of her more famous & desired sibling, her own empathetic origin story quickly devolves into feminist body horror of the Substance, Raw, and Teeth variety, delivering something much more visceral & politically impactful than the empty CG spectacle of films like Wicked or Oz, The Great and Powerful.

Like in all variations on the fairy tale, Cinderella and her stepsister are both competing for marriage to the same bachelor prince. However, in this version the prince is a horndog jock who’s only desirable for the wealth that comes with nobility. Naively mistaking his published sex limericks for sincere romantic poetry, Elvira desires the prince’s heart, while the once-pampered, down on her luck Cinderella more shrewdly desires his coin. They start the competition as relative equals, but the matriarch of the household tips the scales in her biological daughter’s favor by banishing Cinderella to a servant’s life while working day & night to pretty up Elvira through cosmetic enhancements. As this is a body horror take on an otherwise familiar story, those cosmetic enhancements manifest as painful methods of torture on the young Elvira: 18th century braces, 18th century nose jobs, 18th century false eyelashes sewn directly to the lid, sans anesthesia. Then, there’s the timeless weight loss tactic of swallowing a Tremors-scale tapeworm to curb her appetite. Each “improvement” makes Elvira more conventionally attractive but also visibly injured & ill. They also make her more conceited & crueller to Cinderella, whom she once looked up to as a role model. It turns out “changing your outside to match your insides” isn’t the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become (literally) monstrous in the process.

The question of empathy is slippery in The Ugly Stepsister, as is the definition of the word “ugly.” We obviously pity poor Elvira at the start of her journey as the most awkward girl at her local Finishing School, where her chubby cheeks and steampunk nose guard make her a target for mean-girl whispers & side eye. Despite her dopey face & even dopier babydoll curls, however, (or maybe even because of them) we find her to be cute. Her main fault is that she’s naively obedient to the older women in her life, who are willing to break her in order to reshape the raw materials into something more presentable for the douchebag Prince. Even those women aren’t the villains of the piece, necessarily, nor is the naturally, effortlessly beautiful Cinderella who drives Elvira insane with jealousy. It’s the larger patriarchal courting ritual and the impossible beauty standards that need to be maintained to participate in it that drive most of the film’s cruelty. Where things get slippery is that Elvira is willing to adopt that cruelty once she claws her way to the top of the social hierarchy, when she gets outright ugly to her now-impoverished stepsister in a way that goes above & beyond obeying her mother’s wicked demands. In most iterations of this story, Cinderella has two ugly stepsisters to deal with in this cutthroat competition for the Prince’s heart, but Elvira’s younger sibling seems to opt out of gender completely as a personal safety measure — hiding their menstruation from their mother and hiding their body from everyone else under increasingly baggy clothes. Given what the cosmetic rituals of femininity does to their sister, who could blame them?

It’s likely not fair to compare this film to Disney’s empathetic-villain revisions of its own fairy tale IP. The Ugly Stepsister has a lot less in common with Maleficent & Cruella than it has with other recent low-budget, high-concept horrors of ultra-femininity like Paradise Hills, Lisa Frankenstein, and Hatching. Blichfeldt fights as hard as possible against the camera’s flattened digital textures to find some genuine magic in her grotesque tableaux. She mostly succeeds, leaning into the soft dissolves of Elvira’s romantic daydreams and the oil-painting decay of Cinderella’s visitations with her father’s corpse to reach for an Old World fairy tale feel. Mostly, though, what makes The Ugly Stepsister visually distinct is Blichfeldt’s fearlessness in depicting grotesque bodily detail. The blood, puke, cum, breaks, and bruises of the human body anchor this traditionally magical story to the real world, which helps its political themes of cosmetic self-torture land with forceful, tangible impact. It’s the kind of thoughtful, artful genre film that premieres at prestigious European film festivals (Berlinale in this case) before heading straight to Shudder once it reaches the US, since unsuspecting audiences tend to barf & faint at those fancy premieres. I don’t remember Wonka getting that kind of enthusiastic ovation.

-Brandon Ledet

The SubstAnimator

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Coralie Fargeat’s entertainment-industry body horror The Substance has hung around in theaters for way longer than I expected it to, likely propelled by its eye-catching marketability on social media platforms like TikTok & Instagram.  While I’ve been struggling to catch the blink-and-miss-it local runs for similarly small, artfully grotesque oddities like Guy Maddin’s Rumours & Adam Schimberg’s A Different Man, I still have multiple daily options to rewatch The Substance, which premiered here weeks earlier.  That kind of theatrical longevity is great for a genre film’s long-term reputation (just look what it did for Parasite), but in the short-term it does lead to some pretty annoying naysaying online.  The two most frequently repeated, hack critiques I’ve seen of The Substance as it lingers weeks beyond its expected expiration date is that 1. “It’s not really a horror movie; it’s more of a body horror,” and 2. It’s a shallow movie that believes it’s deep, as indicated by its set-decor’s multiple allusions to Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining.  I’m not entirely sure what to do with the pedantic hairsplitting that makes you believe the body horror subgenre is a separate medium than horror filmmaking at large, but I do believe both of those lines of critique would fall apart if the nitpickers would just . . . lighten up a little.  Yes, Fargeat’s monstrous tale of the self-hatred that results from the unrealistic, misogynistic beauty standards of mass media does carry a lot of heavy emotional & political weight in theme, but in execution the film is functionally a comedy.  Specifically, it is a horror comedy, which I cannot believe I have to clarify still counts as horror.  It’s a grotesque picture with a righteously angry message, but it’s also meant to be a fun time at the movies, which I assume has a lot to do with how long it’s hung around on local marquees.

When The Substance‘s loudest detractors fixate on its background nods to the carpet patterns & bathroom tiles of The Shining, they’re deliberately looking past the large, glowing sign in the foreground pointing to the movie’s entertainment value as an over-the-top goof.  Early festival reviews out of Cannes did Fargeat’s film no favors by likening it to the headier body horror of a Cronenberg or a Ducournau, when it tonally falls much closer to the traditions of body horror’s knucklehead class: Hennenlotter, Yuzna and, most prominently, Stuart Gordon.  Its echoes of Gordon’s work ring loudest, of course, since the titular substance Demi Moore injects into her body to release her younger, better, monstrous self is visually modeled to look exactly like the “re-agent” chemical in Re-Animator.  Both substances are green-glowing liquids injected via a comically oversized syringe, and both are misused to reverse the natural bodily process of aging – the “activator” serum of The Substance by releasing a younger form of the user and the “re-agent” serum of Re-Animator by reanimating the corpses of the recently deceased.  As the attempts to cheat aging (and its kissing cousin Death) escalate in both films, the violence reaches a spectacular practical-effects crescendo, in one case on live television and in the other case at the morgue.  The entire scripting of The Substance might as well have resulted from a writing exercise teasing out what would happen if you injected the re-agent serum of Re-Animator into a still-living person (a question with a much less satisfying answer in Re-Animator‘s own wisely deleted scenes).  Fargeat’s background references to The Shining might have underlined the more somber themes of isolation & self-destruction her film shares with the Kubrick classic, but there’s a bright, glowing signal in the foreground telling the audience the exact kind of horror she was really going for here: blunt, gross, funny, excessive – just like Re-Animator.

Funnily enough, Re-Animator needed its own signal to the audience that it’s okay to laugh & have a good time with its morbid, literary mayhem as a Lovecraft adaptation.  That signal arrived in the goofy musical stylings of Richard Band, who has over a hundred credits as a composer under the Full Moon brand run by his brother, Charles.  Gordon might be the only horror auteur outside the Band family that’s made extensive use of Richard Band’s signature carnival music compositions, partly because his Saturday-morning children’s TV melodies are a poor fit for more serious horror movies and partly because his brother keeps him too busy to stray elsewhere.  According to Band’s interviews about the making of Re-Animator, he was the first member of the creative team to suggest that it should be played as a horror comedy instead of a straight horror.  When watching early rushes and trying to come up with a motif to match, he remembers urging Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna to see how silly and over-the-top the movie was, that even if they played it as a super-serious gore fest it would still make the audience laugh.  Band credits himself for highlighting the sillier notes of Re-Animator in both his “quirky” riff on the Psycho score and his music’s influence on the final edit.  Since every project Band, Gordon, and Yuzna have made since their early success with Re-Animator has continued its violently silly tone, it’s a difficult anecdote to believe.  No matter what they tried to make on a script level, it likely would’ve come out goofy on the production end anyway.  That’s just how they are.  Even so, Richard Band’s quirked-up Psycho spoof cuts through as a loud signal to the audience that it’s okay to have fun no matter how thematically dark or viscerally fucked up Re-Animator gets as it escalates.  I wonder if there were grumpy horror-nerd audiences at the time who were pissed about that score’s allusions to a Hitchcock classic, as if it were trying to convey something deep instead of something cartoonishly goofy.  Thankfully, we don’t have to know.

There are two major advantages that Re-Animator has over The Substance, and they both have to do with time.  One is that Re-Animator doesn’t waste a second of its own time, skipping right over the “Sue” segment of The Substance‘s evolution to get to the “Monstro ElisaSue” mayhem of its third act, shaving off an hour of runtime in the process.  That will never change.  The other is that it’s been around for four decades now, so that all of the most annoying bad-faith takes that it was met with in early release have all faded away, drowned out by celebrations of its over-the-top horror comedy delights.  The Substance will eventually get there too, as evidenced by how long audiences have been keeping its theatrical run alive against all odds.

-Brandon Ledet

The Substance (2024)

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What is The Substance? It’s 5% Barbie, 5% Carrie, 5% Requiem for a Dream, 5% The Fly, 10% Akira, 10% just the old lady from Room 237 in The Shining, 25% Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me” music video, 10% Jane Fonda workout tape, 5% Architectural Digest, and 20% sour lemon candy, and it’s all 100% fresh, new, and exciting. Demi Moore is Elisabeth Sparkle, who bears some resemblance to Moore; both found commercial and critical success (including an Oscar) in the early parts of their career, but their star has faded somewhat in the intervening years. Elisabeth now hosts a morning workout program for an unidentified major network, or at least she did until her birthday, when executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid)—wink, wink—unceremoniously lets her go from the show, essentially simply for having turned fifty. A hurt and shocked Elisabeth is distracted while driving by the sight of a billboard of her being taken down and ends up in a horrific collision. Although she’s remarkably unharmed, she’s shaken by the experience, and an almost inhumanly attractive nurse slips something into her coat pocket: a thumb drive printed with a phone number on one side and “The Substance” on the other, along with a note stating simply “It changed my life.” She watches the surreal advertising campaign/pharmaceutical pitch on the drive—a promise that The Substance will create a younger, more idealized version of yourself—and tosses it in the trash, before ultimately caving in on both her curiosity and her wounded self-image and giving it a shot (literally, and it’s for single use and you really, really should dispose of it after). 

Everyone has been talking about how much this movie is a return to form for body horror, but it’s more than just that. Sure, there’s mutating flesh, necrotic digits, and self surgery, but this is a movie that’s gross from the jump, long before people start erupting from each like molting salamanders. It’s mostly the most disgusting images you can imagine intercut with the occasional too-sterile environment or softcore aerobics so chock full of lingering shots of gyrating youthful glutes that they stop looking like flesh altogether. The first shot of the film, which gives us a demonstration of what The Substance does by showing it being injected into the yolk of an egg as it sits in its white on a countertop, before the yolk suddenly duplicates. Not long after, we are treated to an intense, almost fisheye closeup of Harvey’s face while he goes on a screaming, chauvinistic phone tirade while using a urinal before we cut to him grossly and messily slathering prawns in a yellow sauce and stuffing them messily in his face while he gives Elisabeth a series of backhanded compliments while performing the world’s worst exit interview; and we in the audience know he didn’t wash his hands. As Elisabeth leaves the hospital after her accident, an old classmate from before she was a star gives her his number on a piece of paper that’s then dropped into a puddle of some unknown liquid that’s murky and features a couple of floating cigarette butts. By the time the youthful version of Elisabeth, who names herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), is stitching up the wound on Elisabeth’s back from which she just emerged like a hot bloody Pop-Tart, you’re already so full of bile from the general nastiness that the gore is almost a reprieve. Of course, that’s before Sue starts taking more time than the rules of The Substance allow, with her selfishness morphing Elisabeth slowly (and then very quickly) into a witch of the Roald Dahl variety. 

That general grossness, as a departure from pure body horror, is also represented in the film’s use of yellows throughout, rather than (or at least in addition to) the reds that most flicks of this genre use. It’s omnipresent and I loved it, from the aforementioned yolks to the goldenrod color of Elisabeth’s coat to the neon yellow of The Substance itself and the fluids you may vomit as a result of its use. A ball of yellow clay is halved and reformed into two shapes in the demonstration video for The Substance to represent the “other” being formed from the “matrix.” The eggs reappear later when Elisabeth, in a fit of pique over Sue beginning to push the limits of their connection, starts cooking a large number of disgusting French dishes, which includes combining an ungodly number of eggs in a bowl and then beating them, splashing the yolks all over her. And, in the film’s final moments, a dandelion yellow sidewalk cleaner passes over Elisabeth’s Walk of Fame star, scrubbing up … well, that would be a spoiler. It’s a fun way to add a different kind of a splash of color; I’d go so far as to say yellow is used as effectively here as, say, red in Suspiria, and if you’ve been around here a while you know what high praise that is from me. 

Moore is revelatory here, and it’s great to see her on screen again, especially after such a long absence. She grounds a lot of the more surreal elements that become a larger and larger part of the story as reality becomes more and more detached from what we’re watching. She looks amazing here, which further underlines just how depraved the culture in which she resides is. While Elisabeth is fifty, Moore is a little over a decade older than that, and her body is, pardon my French, fucking phenomenal. That this makes Elisabeth the perfect person for her ongoing aspirational position as the host of Sparkle Your Life is completely lost on Harvey and the vapid executives and shareholders of the network, who salivate like Tex Avery hounds over Sue and the befeathered dancers who are set to perform on a show that Sue is set to host. Moore plays her with a quiet dignity that’s clearly covering a deep loneliness, which is itself exacerbated by the blow to her ego and her self-worth that come as the result of losing her job solely because of ageism. Qualley is also fun here. So far, she has been in one of the worst movies I have seen this year as well as one of the best, but even in the latter she was not among the moving pieces that garnered my esteem. Although a lot of what she’s tasked with here is more about how she looks than about her acting abilities, when she’s called on to perform, she delivers a solid performance that endeared her to me more than anything else I’ve seen her in before. 

Overall, this is one of the most fun movies I’ve seen all year. Gross when it needs to be, surreal when the narrative calls for it, and funny all the way through. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Antiviral (2012)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Brandon Cronenberg’s debut sci-fi horror grossout Antiviral (2012), a dystopian satire about the commodity of celebrity illness.

00:00 Welcome

06:30 Web of Death
08:50 The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)
12:15 Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023)
21:29 Infinity Pool (2023)
28:24 Knock at the Cabin (2023)
36:43 Missing (2023)
42:55 Lost Junction (2003)

44:57 Antiviral (2012)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Podcast #172: Body Parts (1991) & Surgical Horror

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Welcome to the Swampflix Podcast Halloween Special. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of horror movies about evil surgeons, starting with the major studio body horror Body Parts (1991).

0:00 Welcome

01:51 Fascination (1979)
04:20 See for Me (2022)
09:05 Blood Sick Psychosis (2022)
12:40 The Night Porter (1974)

16:44 Body Parts (1991)
33:45 The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959)
46:33 Scalpel (1977)
59:25 The Skin I Live In (2011)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Podcast Crew

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

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I am once again living without a car.  It hasn’t been a traumatic life adjustment or anything, but it has limited how much of the city I can conveniently access without it feeling like an epic journey.  It’s also made me realize, once again, how few legitimate movie theaters are currently operating in New Orleans proper.  Ever since most theatrical screenings were exported to the Metairie movie palaces in the 1990s, there have been precious few cinemas operating in the actual city.  I can only name three currently running, and if you’re biking & bussing around the center of town, only two of those are easily accessible; most nights for me, the original uptown location of The Prytania might as well be on another planet.  So, in these dark days when the ludicrously cheap AMC A-List subscription service is miles of interstate out of reach, I am relying heavily on the programmers at The Broad & The Prytania at Canal Place to keep me air conditioned & entertained.  Thankfully, they do a kickass job.

In particular, I’ve been loving the repertory programming at The Canal Place Prytania in recent months.  The Rene Brunet Classic Movie series at their uptown location is the closest thing this city has to a solid rep scene, so it’s been cool to see that NOLA TCM energy flow downriver to their new outpost.  If anything, the downtown location has been much hipper in its curation, including the Wildwood series—a “weekly celebration of daring cinema”—and, more recently, a month-long program of anime classics branded “Anime Theatre.”  I had just caught up with Akira and Cowboy Bebop: The Movie in the few months before the Anime Theatre series started running, and I very much wish I had held out to catch them for the first time on the big screen.  I just never would have assumed the opportunity would present itself so conveniently (except maybe as a glitchy Fathom Events stream out in the suburbs).  Luckily, though, there was still one major blind spot that series could fill for me: the 1995 cyberpunk classic Ghost in the Shell, which was a real treat to see projected big & loud with a fired-up audience of downtown weirdos.

It’s a stain on my honor that I watched the live-action Scarlett Johansson remake of Ghost in the Shell years before seeking out its animated ancestor.  Worse yet, I apparently enjoyed that remake at the time, faintly praising it as “Blade Runner-runoff eye candy” with “a deliriously vapid sci-fi action plot.”  In retrospect, I’m surprised to see how much of that Blade Runner DNA flows through the original film’s synthetic veins.  I assumed the live-action version borrowed a lot of Ridley Scott’s neon-noir imagery as lazy shorthand, but it turns out the anime version of Ghost in the Shell sets a lot of its own moody, “What is humanity anyway?” introspection on the same neon-lit, rain-slicked streets of future-Tokyo.  There’s plenty of RoboCop influence at play here too, not only in the ultraviolence exacted by Ghost in the Shell‘s cyborg law enforcement leads, but also in the first-person POV framing of those cyborgs booting up in a cold, blue world.  The movie was plenty influential in its own time too, to the point where you could argue that The Matrix was actually its first live-action remake – right down to its green towers of binary code.  Watching Ghost in the Shell for the first time felt like finding a crucial, missing piece of a larger genre puzzle.  It helped contextualize other genre works I already love by fitting them into an infinite continuum of sci-fi visual language.

It’s also just gorgeous.  This is brain-hacking cinema of the highest order, much more low-key & philosophical than I expected based on its most lurid imagery.  Yes, these badass cyborg women strip down into flesh-tone body suits before digitally cloaking themselves in reflective pixels, but they look amazing doing it, blurring humanity & technology in the medium itself.  Ghost in the Shell was at the forefront of mixing digital animation with traditional hand-drawn cells, conjuring a new, glitchy spectacle out of their interplay where most future productions would only see cost-saving measures.  It’s through those digi animation experiments where the film manages to feel like its own weird thing despite all the convenient comparisons swirling around it.  The future-world body horror of seemingly human parts opening in segments to reveal the fabricated machinery inside is mirrored in the human/machine hybrid of the film’s animation.  It’s a tension in technique still echoed in contemporary anime, whether thoughtfully in films like Belle or lazily in films like Fireworks.

If I’m not spending much time recapping the themes or plot details of Ghost in the Shell, it’s because I assume most cinema obsessives have already seen it.  This was a behind-the-times educational experience for me, which is pretty much how I always feel when watching classic anime.  The only relatively unique aspect of my Ghost in the Shell experience was the opportunity to see it projected big & loud, thanks to the downtown Prytania.  It was the closing film in their Anime Theatre series, but their kickass repertory programming is marching on into spooky season with their upcoming line-up of Kill-O-Rama double-features, pictured below. In a city with a relatively small cinema exhibition scene, that kind of thoughtful, adventurous curation is invaluable.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Brandon and Boomer discuss the farcical, anti-capitalist body horror How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989), starring Richard E. Grant.

00:00 Welcome

01:00 Miller’s Crossing (1990) & Barton Fink (1991)
12:00 Murder, She Wrote: South by Southwest (1997)
15:45 The Conjuring 2 & 3 (2016, 2021)
26:00 Morbius (2022)
32:40 After Yang (2022)
36:50 Gagarine (2022)
43:15 Neptune Frost (2022)

48:18 How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew