If you’re afraid to watch ‘The Substance,’ read this

“The Substance” is a gory film that could win Demi Moore her first Oscar. But the film’s gross-out moments come from a place of emotional truth, director Coralie Fargeat has said.

“The Substance” is decidedly not a film for the squeamish. The gross-out fairy tale is one of the few horror flicks to be recognized by the Academy Awards in categories beyond makeup (though it was deservedly nominated there, too). The excessive gore, much of which occurs while its actresses are nude, may have dissuaded some viewers from checking out the film that could win first-time nominee Demi Moore an Oscar for best actress. The splatter of “The Substance” is cartoonish and over-the-top. But its grossest scenes don’t register the same as a brutal kill in a typical scary movie because the violence here is so heightened — and has something to say, director Coralie Fargeat hopes. There are heaps of physical and psychic violence inflicted upon women in this film. The women commit the physical harm against each other, but it’s the emotional damage done by an ageist, misogynistic society that drives our protagonist(s) to harm themselves, Fargeat has said. “The movie is about women’s bodies, and to me, I couldn’t find a better way than body horror to show the violence that we can do to ourselves,” Fargeat said in an interview with IndieWire. The penetrating self-hatred that Moore’s protagonist Elisabeth Sparkle feels throughout the film was inspired by Fargeat’s own damaging self-talk as she aged.