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SPOILER WARNING: The following article gives away a few important moments from The Substance. So, if you have not seen the movie but cannot CON. TROL. YOUR. SELF! and want to keep reading, proceed with caution.
I highly recommend that any fan of The Substance – easily my pick for the best movie of 2024 – watch the making-of video Mubi recently released online. It made me further appreciate the instant classic horror movie – about a fading Hollywood star (played by 2025 Golden Globe winner Demi Moore) who creates a younger version of herself (played by Margaret Qualley) with an ungodly black market drug – and especially made me a bigger fan of writer and director Coralie Fargeat.
Excluding my recent rant about Hundreds of Beavers’ Golden Globes snub, I rarely try to make a big deal about awards season. However, I will be genuinely pissed if the AMPAS does not, at least, give a Best Director Oscar nomination to the French filmmaker after seeing how she came to fully realize her vision for The Substance. Allow me to point out just a few moments from the behind-the-scenes featurette, which is available on YouTube, that firmly convinced me Fargeat absolutely deserves the honor.
Coralie Fargeat Discusses Designing The Look Of The Substance
Coralie Fargeat made her feature film debut with another great female-directed horror movie from 2018 called Revenge, which I especially admired for its striking aesthetic. The filmmaker also employs a distinct look for The Substance, which, as she explains in the featurette, she crafted way in advance by meticulously writing out exactly how she wanted to film a scene, almost frame by frame, into the script. I believe that a vision such as this is a sign of a master filmmaker.
Coralie Fargeat Champions Practical Effects
Like many moviegoers today, I prefer practical special effects over CGI and I was delighted to see in the featurette that Fargeat agrees. She says she made a conscious decision to use as many practical effects as possible to make the body horror film feel authentic and came up with economically thoughtful tricks for crafting some of the most gruesome sequences, such as keeping in mind the body parts they would need on camera when constructing a fake body double. I am not sure if mindful budgeting is used as criteria for Academy voters but attention to the detail like this should be.
Coralie Fargeat’s Boldly Hands-On Approach To The Production
While a director’s job does not typically require much physically active participation in the production, Fargeat seemed to say “Fuck that, I’m going in head first” for The Substance. The featurette sees her completing tasks crew members would normally handle (such as crafting prosthetics), performing stunts (getting smashed in the face with a fake vase and doubling for Sue’s arm when she injects the Activator serum), and helping guide the hose erupting blood for the nightmarish New Year’s Eve sequence. She seems to really take pleasure in her interactive methods, which I think any filmmaker would and should be inspired by.
Coralie Fargeat Dons A Camera Helmet
Fargeat goes even further with her interactive methods in a way that I imagine must have been pretty uncomfortable but ultimately necessary. For scenes such as when Sue discovers her ear has fallen off in an elevator, the director would wear a helmet with a camera attached to film the most realistic first-person shots possible. What an ingenious way to make sure the camera captures exactly what your vision demands!
While the Academy has rarely been kind to the horror genre (save a few Oscar-winning performances in horror movies and giving the Best Picture Oscar to The Silence of the Lambs), I strongly hope that Coralie Fargeat becomes the next woman nominated for the Best Director Oscar. If you are an Academy voter, go check out the behind-the-scenes featurette for The Substance and, even if horror movies like this do not usually impress you, you may find yourself rooting for Fargeat, too.