Welcome to Episode #232 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss the earlier works of this year’s Best Director Oscar nominees, starting with Sean Baker’s porn-industry buddy comedy Starlet (2012).
00:00 Apology/Goo 05:03 Kinda Pregnant (2025) 10:19 The Vietnam War (2017) 14:17 The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) 18:35 Rats! (2025)
23:39 Starlet (2012) 41:48 The Childhood of a Leader (2015) 58:30 A Prophet (2009) 1:13:22 Revenge (2017) 1:28:36 Cop Land (1997)
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.
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.
I’ve been hearing high praise for Coralie Fargeat’s hyperviolent gross-out Revenge for months, but have avoided following through on the recommendation out of squeamishness for its chosen genre. This is a rape revenge thriller, my least favorite corner of genre cinema & very much the reason why I’m cautious about approaching any 70s grindhouse titles without first glancing over their plots. The typical rape revenge structure is the male gaze at its most maliciously weaponized, leering at length at the violent sexual assault of a female protagonist and then hurriedly offering her supposed retribution through empowering ultraviolence of her own as an afterthought. I’m always suspicious of the rape revenge thriller, particularly in classic examples of the genre like I Spit on You Grave, for the obvious pleasure & titillation in the assault they later pretend to deplore & counterbalance. Where I find skin-crawling misogyny in the rape revenge thriller, however, some feminist genre fans have found emotional catharsis, which is where Fargeat appears to land on the subject. In its earliest stretch, Revenge shamelessly participates in the worst tropes of its chosen genre. Its teenage protagonist steps onto the scene in full Lolita drag—sunglasses, lollipop, bare skin, and all. The camera drools over her body, lingering on the leggy flesh that peeks out at the edge of her skirt’s high hem. This initial leering is a necessary evil to get to the subversive payoff of the film’s commentary on more nuanced topics like complicity, victim-blaming, and flirtation as obligation. It’s also an early source of tension before the violent fallout that follows. The worst exploitations of sexual assault in genre cinema is when it’s deployed as a cheap, easy motivator or plot catalyst (often for a male associate of the victim) when any other conflict would have done just as well in its place. It’s just as lazy as it is cruel. Revenge corrects this problem not only by rebalancing the weight of its depiction vs. the screen time afforded its fallout, but also by making sure the story is about the power dynamics of the inciting assault, fully engaging with the severity of its subject.
A millionaire playboy and his teenage mistress retreat to a romantic getaway in a remote, desert locale that can only be reached by helicopter. Their secret tryst is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of his slobbish hunting buddies, who shamelessly leer at the outnumbered girl’s body. She meets this increased attention with accommodating flirtation, performing her youthful femininity for all three men’s entertainment as a kind of gracious hostess. This harmless flirtation is misunderstood for consent & invitation by the entitled male party guests, leading directly to her rape & attempted murder. Instead of fixating on the graphic details of the rape itself, Fargeat instead captures to toxic cultural forces that allow it to happen & go on unpunished: flirtation’s entitled misinterpretation as obligation, witnesses’ complicity in silence, victim-blaming, financial bribery, the threat of physical abuse, etc. The conflict established in this first act assault is all too real, even considering the way the protagonist is left for dead, powerless, and without resource. What develops from there is revenge fantasy, where she practically gets her vengeance from beyond the grave. Impaled, choking on her own blood, and eaten alive by ants, she crawls to a secluded place to repair herself in self-surgery, using peyote as an unlikely painkiller. Once that peyote kicks in, Revenge transforms from a damning exploration of the power dynamics of rape culture & masculine entitlement to a frantic, reality-detached bloodbath. There are only three potential victims to the vengeful wrath indicated by the title, but their demise is a prolonged descent into hyperviolent gore that lingers on all the explicit violence avoided in the depiction of the rape that instigated it. “Resolving” rape through gory bloodshed may be a faulty narrative impulse, but the way Revenge filters its all-out gore fest indulgences through psychedelic, sun-rotted fantasy is an especially novel mutation of a genre formula that must evolve to be sustained. The trick is having the patience in watching Fargeat participate in that genre for long enough for her to be able to explode it from the inside.
For all that’s commendable in Revenge’s pointed, angry commentary on complicity & entitlement in rape culture, the movie also excels as an exercise in pure style. The peyote & champagne-driven desert mirage of this film’s extensive indulgences in hyperviolent gore are incredibly stylish & confident, especially for a first-time director. Like last year’s blistering debuts We Are the Flesh & Raw, Revenge feels more like a surreal, distant echo of the New French Extremity movement of the early 00s than it does a subversion of 1970s schlock, at least in it its intensely gory visual cues. At times, the film also feels like as successful version of the rotted pop art sunshine horror attempted in The Bad Batch, especially in its desert-set psychedelic freak-outs. Its overall effect is entirely a vibe of its own design, however, even if it occasionally dips its toes into traditional genre markers like the base pleasures of neon & synths. There’s, of course, a moral self-contradiction in marrying these stylistic pleasures to such a grotesque narrative, a tension felt in almost all genre cinema. Personally, my favorite subversion of the rape-revenge narrative is in the much more muted Felt, where the inciting assault occurs before the movie begins and is only implied through context clues. Revenge at least does its part to match Felt’s focus on the aftermath & surrounding atmosphere of its assault, rather than the details of the event itself. It damns the macho culture that allows it to happen, then pulls out that culture’s guts to rot on public display in the desert sun. I was initially highly skeptical of how far the movie was willing to go in participating in its cursed genre’s worst tropes before launching itself into that sunlit psychedelic revenge fantasy. Once it fully reveals the scope & nuance of its cultural targets and floods the screen with a river of gore, however, I had little choice but to be overpowered by its potency. This might be the choice in genre that requires the most narrative & thematic justification for its continuation into the 2010s, but Revenge easily clears that bar in legitimizing the transgression. It’s an angry, beautiful gross-out of a debut and I’m glad I got over myself enough to give it a chance.
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