(Warning: This story contains spoilers for Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance).
In the final scenes of The Substance, things get messy.
Coralie Fargeat’s body horror satire follows the descent of former A-lister Elisabeth Sparkle who, in a desperate attempt to recapture her youth and stay relevant in sexist and ageist Hollywood, starts taking a mysterious chemical called The Substance. Things go very, very wrong.
Shortly after injecting the substance, Sparkle (Demi Moore, who just picked up her first-ever Golden Globe for the role) is writhing on her bathroom floor. Her back splits down the spine and Sue, a slimy, younger version of herself (played by Margaret Qualley) crawls out. Initially, the two clones follow the plan, swapping out every seven days. The body in the bathroom is kept alive with a feeding tube, while the other free is free live their life.
But the siren of youth beacons, and soon Sue is starting to extend her stays outside, leaving the caged Elisabeth to wither away. In panic, Elizabeth ignores the single use warning on the substance instruction manual and injects herself with some leftover serum, triggering a transformation into a “Elisasue” aka Monstro, a grotesque hunchbacked creature that’s part Quasimodo, part Edvard Munch’s The Scream. It bears a distorted version of Sue’s face with Elisabeth’s visage howling out of its back.
Fargeat used as few special effects as possible in The Substance, leaning on old-school practical effects, make-up, prosthetics, and puppetry. But once Monstro enters the scene, for the film’s gooey, gaga finale, the on-set work required some VFX support.
“We spent a lot of time discussing the look Coralie wanted for this, because was very attached to that prosthetic look as a homage to the ‘80s, from David Cronenberg to John Carpenter, you know The Thing (1982), The Fly (1986),” says French VFX coordinator Pierre Procoudine-Gorsky. His team at Parisian studio Noid worked with the film’s VFX supervisor Bryan Jones on the digital designs of the two versions of Monstro: The lurching malformed monstrosity Eliasue and, in the film’s final scene, Elisabeth’s detached face, now an oozing blob, that slithers its way onto Sparkle’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, before being scrubbed away.
“We called the first one the monster and the last one was the blob,” says Procoudine-Gorsky. “In both cases, we were working on top of what Coralie was doing on set, with the prosthetic team and the makeup visual effects, trying to match that prosthetic look, not make it feel too digital, too perfect.”
Procoudine-Gorsky, who accepted a European Film Award for best VFX in December on behalf of The Substance team, has worked on creature features before —his team helped design the werewolf for Sean Ellis’ 2021 period horror The Cursed — and he’s racked up hours on VFX work on such French blockbusters as Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom (2023).
“But there’s been nothing close to The Substance, he says. “Recreating the face of a famous actress and making it feel like a physical effect, so it blended perfectly with the puppet was probably the most challenging thing I’ve done.”
‘The Substance’ VFX team built on the practical effects designed for the film, including the sculpture of Elisasue, also known as Monstro.
Courtsey of Mubi
The first digital version of Elisabeth’s face, buried and wailing in Monstro’s back, was clearly recognizable as Moore, but something wasn’t working.
“It didn’t blend with the puppet, with the [dummy Moore head] the prosthetic team had designed,” he said. “Just before shooting on set, the prosthetic guys would always spray a kind of glycerine water over the face to make it look wet but also give it this thickness, this kind of latex look.”
It took weeks to recreate that look on the computer, “to mimic exactly this layered wetness, to recreate the precise properties of that glycerine.”
Procoudine-Gorsky and his team spent “six months, seven months” going back and forth with Fargeat and Jones before they had a digital version that fit.
The Elisabeth face blob posed a different challenge.
“We started with the same procedure, scanning everything that was being done on set, getting a full 3-D scan of the puppet with make-up, etc.,” he says, “but with the blob, we needed more fluidity in it movement. The puppet was cool but it didn’t have the flowing movement Coralie needed.”
In the end, the blob was mainly designed in the computer, done as a “very traditional key-frame animation” before adding the final touches.
“We had the same challenges as with the monster, needing to match the look on set, the blur, the feel of the latex, while still being able to recognize Demi’s face,” he says, “but she’s also doing a lot of facial performance, as she struggles to make it to the star. In the final shot, she’s actually smiling. We decided we couldn’t do it just in animation, we needed to scan Demi doing the performance.”
Time was running out. This was late in 2023. If The Substance were to be ready, as planned, for the Cannes film festival the following May, the team at Noid had to work fast. When the Screen Actors Guild signed its new contract with the studios, ending their nearly four-month walkout, Noid got a window to record Moore, remotely, from Clear Angle Studios, a 3D scanning specialist outfit in L.A.
“We did a volumetric scan of Demi, which is a very technical session, basically shooting multiple cameras around her while she does her performance. Coralie was able to direct her, over Zoom, which was new for us.”
Using the raw data from that scan, Farget started to edit the film’s final scene, sending over her cut to Noid. “We’d have to match exactly the CGI on the edit, which was tricky, working on top of this raw data,” says Procoudine-Gorsky, “but at least we knew exactly what she was going to use so that our version with line up perfectly with her edit.”
By now it was the spring of 2024, and Cannes was closing in fast.
“We got into May, maybe three to four days before the festival and we were still grading the final version of the shot,” he remembers. “It was kind of crazy. We delivered the final version two days before the world premiere in Cannes.”
Fargeat’s practical effects-first approach on The Substance has reignited the physical vs. digital debate among SFX obsessives. But for Procoudine-Gorsky, the film is a testament to how on-set and computer designs can seamlessly collaborate. “We were never there to replace something real, but to match it or to help out when there were practical limitations,” he says, “for me, there was no battle between practical and VFX, between physical and CGI. It was all teamwork.”