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This talk intends to explore the various matricial dimensions of French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat’s sophomore feature film, The Substance (2024), in order to highlight its exploration of monstrous motherhood. Much of the popular and (scant) critical discourse about the film concentrates on the themes of the monstrous feminine and abject femininity but critics have yet to recognize the film as a work of maternal horror. Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging actress, in an effort to preserve her social and sexual appeal, resolves to produce a younger version of herself, Sue, via the titular black market drug. However, unsatisfied with her own decaying appearance, Sue takes it upon herself to produce another version of herself which manifests in the grotesque figure of MonstroElisaSue. Through these figures, Fargeat represents the female body as a matrix of horror to critique the extremes women go to alter their bodies to achieve impossible beauty standards.
In addition to Elisabeth and Sue as monstrous matrices, this presentation will advance the idea of the film itself as a matrix insofar as it operates as a container of several tropes from popular gothic literature such as Jane Eyre (1847), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde(1880), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Dracula (1897). Specifically, the film utilizes the madwoman in the attic, the gothic double, a haunting portrait, and blood transfusions as allusive technologies in order to construct a work of gothic intertextuality that bridges critiques of the Victorian and postmodern female body.
