Culture
How The Substance's Effects Team Pulled Off Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley's Gory Monster Makeovers
Prosthetics and makeup effects designer Pierre-Olivier Persin talks blood fountains, exploding heads, and the nastiest detail director Coralie Fargeat asked for.
By
Rafael Motamayor
September 25, 2024
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The following article contains major spoilers for The Substance.
Coralie Fargeat’s
The Substance is a darkly comic satire about beauty standards, aging, and the entertainment industry—but its gnarly body-horror sequences are where it really excels.
The film follows TV aerobics star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) who, after hitting 50, takes a mysterious drug to reclaim the youth demanded of her by Hollywood. The result is grisly, to say the least: after she injects the titular substance a second, younger woman, portrayed by Margaret Qualley, is birthed out of Sparkle's back, her body gruesomely split open down the spine. (For this effect, a silicone dummy was literally sliced open.)
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that's gross? Sparkle soon learns that one of the rules of taking the substance is that she must spend a week at a time in each body—but the allure of youth and beauty prove too enticing, and soon, she refuses to return to her older shell, which produces horrible side-effects. First, she decays into a mangled creature that was dubbed ‘Gollum’ during production, and later, the two bodies merge and mutate to become a Cronenbergian monster called, fittingly, ‘Monstro’. Yep, it's completely batshit.
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But that's the point—
The Substance is designed to shock us. Fargeat wanted the film's effects to be largely practical, ratcheting up the gross-out factor in a way that CGI can't. Enter prosthetics and makeup effects designer Pierre-Olivier Persin, whose team used everything from plasticine, silicone models and clay, to exploding gelatine heads, puppetry, and full foam latex body suits to create the two best images of the film—the
Gollum and Monstro creatures. “Coralie wanted to use practical effects as [much as] possible,” Persin explains. “I would sometimes suggest we use VFX and she would immediately say no, because she doesn’t like VFX.”
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To become ‘Gollum,’ Moore endured up to 7 hours of makeup, during which the upper half of her body was smothered in prosthetics, from a hunchback to long fingers and sunken-in facial makeup. On screen, it’s a truly grotesque look: veins snake across her skin as if there's poison coursing through them, and as the film progresses, she practically decomposes in front of the audience’s eyes. “Demi was a real trooper, never complaining or even looking bored and getting distracted during the process,” says Persin.
The design of Monstro, played by Qualley, was more complicated. It saw the actor decked in a full-body suit with a random assortment of appendages, adding extra limbs and breasts where Sparkle's face should be—which is, instead, embedded into Monstro's back, locked in a perpetual scream (yes it's as weird as it sounds). “The original designs were very masculine, and Coralie wanted something more feminine than just a rubber monster,” Persin says. “She wanted to have an
Elephant Man sensibility, a tragic quality.” Even so, Fargeat was keen to keep it nasty. “She asked us to put some teeth biting one of the boobs, so we did,” Persin adds. The suit is all practical—except for Moore's screaming face, which was achieved with digital effects.
We get a full view of Monstro in the film's especially insane closing ten minutes, in which the creature appears on stage at a televised New Year's Eve show to the horror of its well-to-do audience. The evening soon turns into a nightmare, as blood shoots from Monstro's every orifice. This effect was achieved with the help of an actual fire hose, rigged with about 30,000 gallons of fake blood. “Because it was hard to move with the suit, the stunt performer was on a little trolley. As soon as they switched the blood rig on for the first time, she went rolling backward down that long
Shining-like hallway,” Persin explains.
The heavy suit proved, unsurprisingly, a challenge on set. The production only had one suit for Qualley’s stunt performer, which was made out of foam latex, and so was essentially a giant sponge. It was resultantly drenched and turned a bloody pink. “We quickly had to dry it, clean it, sew it, and glue it back” for the next day's shoot, Persin says.
And then, of course, there was the final shot of the movie, in which Sparkle's face literally crawls back to her star on the Walk of Fame. For that particular scene, the team took a page out of
Raiders of the Lost Ark, and disintegrated an actual SFX head on set. “We used gelatine skin,” Persin says, “filled with tons of blood bags, and disgusting stuff inside, that we could blow up.” Want to feel really sick to your stomach? Just imagine the cleaning bill.