By Gwen C. Katz
In The Island of Lost Souls (1932), a transgressive pre-code adaptation of Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, the titular doctor vivisects living, conscious animals in an attempt to turn them into humans, but his attempts result in misshapen monsters sporting fangs, hooves, and tufted ears. They are tormented, torn between the humanity they cannot achieve and the animal nature they are forbidden from returning to. The Sayer of the Law, played by a furry-faced Bela Lugosi, expresses their neither-one-thing-nor-the-other state when he announces “Not men. Not beasts. Part man. Part beast. Things!” Thus liberated from both the law that restrains men and the training that restrains animals, the beast-men hack Dr. Moreau apart with his own surgical tools.
The Island of Lost Souls is part of the Golden Age of Hollywood horror (roughly 1930-1950), when startlingly realistic prosthetics were on the cutting edge of special effects and a major selling point of horror films. In fact, Hollywood was creating a vivid new expression of a very old concept: Grotesquerie.
What Is Grotesquerie?
If you imagine the Platonic ideal of the human body as depicted in the West, you might picture a classical Greek sculpture like the Doryphoros: An ageless, timeless young adult, the emphasis on muscles and the smooth surfaces of the body while deemphasizing or hiding parts like the genitals and the asshole. (If you’re going “What kind of art emphasizes the asshole,” you, my friend, have not read Rabelais.) It’s difficult to imagine him eating, even more difficult to imagine him taking a dump. His body betrays no sign that he was ever born, grew up, went through an awkward puberty, or that he will ever age and die—like so many characters of Greek mythology, he seems to have sprung into being fully-formed.
Grotesquerie is the opposite. It distorts and grows the human body into exaggerated forms, especially half-formed or transitional forms that morph between one thing and another—human and animal, living body and corpse, young and old, one and many. It is always being born and growing, always aging and dying. There’s a heavy focus on orifices and acts like eating, drinking, pissing, shitting, and fucking—the body parts and behaviors that link us to what is not us.
The critical concept of the grotesque body was coined by Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin in 1940. As Bakhtin describes it:
…[I]t is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world…This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body, the link in the chain of genetic development, or more correctly speaking, two links shown at the point where they enter into each other. (Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 26)
The Cinematic Grotesque
While grotesques have appeared in literature and art throughout history, cinema provides a uniquely visceral experience of the grotesque by presenting it on a real, living human body, seen up close. Early filmmakers immediately recognized the potential. The silent era gave us the cadaverous Phantom of the Opera and the rictus-grinned Man Who Laughs. In the 30s and 40s, horror’s Golden Age produced such icons of grotesquerie as Frankenstein and the Wolf-Man, as well as the beast-men of The Island of Lost Souls.
But there is another character in The Island of Lost Souls who has no hooves, fur, or fangs at all. It is Lota, the Panther-Woman, the only female creature among Dr. Moreau’s menagerie. Unlike her male counterparts, she is a conventionally attractive woman distinguished only late in the film, when she begins to revert and grows small claws. While Lota does blur the line between human and animal, she isn’t grotesque.
In fact, there’s an important throughline uniting all the classic examples of cinematic grotesquerie: They’re all male. The majority of Hollywood’s movie monsters are male, but even when female monsters do appear, like Lota, they are portrayed as beautiful women who either have no nonhuman features or very minor features, like glowing eyes, that don’t detract from their attractiveness.
In classic Hollywood, the grotesque was the masculine grotesque. The feminine grotesque was essentially nonexistent. For women, the requirement of beauty superseded the possibility of grotesquerie. But why? Where are the grotesque women?
Caveat Lector
A few important notes before we continue. First, I’ll be focusing on grotesquerie in the United States. Many other parts of the world have thriving traditions of grotesque female monsters, such as the Southeast Asian Krasue, a disembodied woman’s head trailing viscera from its neck, and the feminine grotesque is much more richly represented in world horror cinema—for example, the Tree Demoness with the monstrously large tongue in A Chinese Ghost Story (1987). But a full exploration of the many expressions of grotesquerie worldwide is both outside my expertise and too big a topic for one article. So this article is basically about the grotesque as depicted in Hollywood (with a few exceptions—Cronenberg is Canadian but I’m calling dibs on him anyway).
Second, let’s compare the feminine grotesque and the crone. Most European cultures have a cultural tradition of the crone, who may indeed be shown as repulsive and, sometimes, antisemitic. But the crone, fundamentally, simply represents the horror of a woman being old. A character like Gandalf can be old and not particularly attractive, but isn’t considered horrifying. Additionally, the crone isn’t transitional—in fact, many of her manifestations are apparently eternal (as old women often seem to be). So for the most part I won’t be looking at witches and such as examples of grotesquerie. Nor will I be considering nonhuman female monsters like the queen from Alien; the grotesque body must be (at least partly or initially) a human body. The Blob isn’t a grotesque, even though it grows, transforms, and consumes.
Lastly, we’re going to be exploring a lot of 20th century views about gender, and I won’t beat about the proverbial bush: A lot of it’s gonna be real, real cisnormative. In this era, gender-essentialist thinking went essentially unquestioned amongst both the patriarchal old guard and the deconstructive thinkers who opposed them, a mark of how much the conversation has evolved in the past few decades.
Grotesquerie and Body Horror
The grotesque body’s position as neither one thing nor another taps into human anxieties about our fundamental nature and our place in the world. We see the boundary between us and not-us—life and death, human and animal, animate and inanimate—as inherent and inviolable, yet the grotesque body bridges that gap. It is too familiar for us to reject, yet too horrifying for us to accept. This is a very powerful image. It transcends the order of the world and forces us to confront concepts that we might prefer to ignore—that we are animals, for example, or that every one of us is a corpse in the making. Life is fundamentally grotesque because it is itself a transitional state.
The grotesque is closely tied to body horror. In her 1982 treatise Powers of Horror, feminist horror critic Julia Kristeva connects body horror to the “abject,” things like human waste and rotting flesh that the self must reject in order to remain whole and human. The corpse is the ultimate example of abjection:
If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel. “I” is expelled. (Kristeva, Powers of Horror 3-4).
When a work of fiction puts us in contact with the abject, thus blurring the line between self and other, we are disgusted but also fascinated by this violation. Kristeva’s “abject body,” a degraded body that no longer retains its distinctness, is closely related to Bakhtin’s grotesque body.
In Kristeva’s view, the abject is a feminine concept. There’s the obvious: Menstruation, afterbirth. Less obviously, to her mothers are a type of abject—children must reject their mothers in order to become independent people. While men, in this view, can exist (or can believe themselves to exist) in a complete, stable state, women are inherently tied to the generative cycle, that is, of the grotesque. But if that’s the case, shouldn’t all monsters be female?
Not necessarily. It depends on how grotesquerie is being used.
Normative Grotesquerie, Transgressive Grotesquerie
Such a powerful tool can be wielded in many directions. When Bakhtin coined the term “grotesque body,” he was discussing not horror, but comedy. His thesis was on the transgressive Renaissance author Rabelais. In Rabelais’s hands, the grotesque is bawdy, satirical, and very, very funny. The comedic grotesque still exists, especially in cartoons. But onscreen, the grotesque is used vastly more often for horror.
Within horror, there’s further room for play. A movie can rebuke the violation of boundaries and reaffirm the binary, but depending on the subtleties of its tone and presentation, it can also explore and embrace the space outside the binary. And many horror stories move between these two poles.
The former can lead to racism, antisemitism, and other ugly cultural ideas. In the west, the human/animal boundary is closely tied to eugenics and racist narratives. The protagonist in The Island of Lost Souls mistakes the beast-men for the island’s natives, readily accepting that a “lower” race might be hunchbacked, fanged, and covered in fur; the constant fear of reversion draws directly from eugenicist narratives about human degeneration. Meanwhile Christian Europe’s old antisemitic narrative that Jews are interlopers who look like us and live among us but are not us relates closely to grotesquerie’s concern with the boundary between self and other. And horror films sometimes made use of actual deformed people as grotesques.
Grotesquerie also raises the question of what, exactly, qualifies as an inviolable boundary. White Western culture once considered miscegenation to be grotesque, as portrayed in stories like The Dunwich Horror. When Dr. Moreau in The Island of Lost Souls wonders if Lota can bear children, it carries implications of both race-mixing and bestiality (such were the things you could get away with before the Hays Code).
Gender is another boundary that was once considered inviolable, and ignorant people still consider the space outside of the gender binary to be horrific. Movies like Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs treat nonbinary gender expression as a source of horror.
At this point it may seem like we should drop grotesquerie like a hot potato. Not so. All art reflects its own cultural biases; rejecting certain storytelling concepts as tainted falsely suggests that other storytelling concepts are untainted. A lot of “non-problematic” classic material simply sidesteps the portrayal of the other by only depicting culturally-homogeneous members of the dominant group, which is in its own way an equally resounding message about who is and isn’t a real person.
And grotesquerie is not merely a hammer for squashing otherness. Bakhtin’s grotesque body, as seen in Rabelais, is not a negative concept. It’s ugly and disgusting, but it’s also funny, relatable, and deeply human. Grotesquerie buries the subject but also resurrects them, mocks them but also uplifts them, like the king in the Festival of Fools. To Bakhtin, this balance of positive and negative traits was fundamental to grotesquerie.
And if grotesquerie can be normative, it can equally be transgressive. Simply observing the existence of states outside the binary acknowledges the binary’s falsehood, and even while they revel in disgust, grotesque films are also filled with exploration, wonder, and exhilaration. Through the lens of grotesquerie, it’s permissible to speak the unspeakable and depict things that are otherwise never depicted. Horror often trailblazes into controversial territory long before other genres.
Dr. Frank N. Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show demonstrates how the Rabelaisian grotesque, with its balance of positive and negative, can be applied to gender to transgressive effect. To audiences of the 1970s, he was repulsive yet magnetic, villainous yet confident and self-actualized, a creator of life and a dealer of death. Yet today, now that Rocky Horror is a cult classic and a man in lipstick is no longer shocking, Dr. Frank N. Furter doesn’t read as a grotesque anymore, and the film’s grotesquerie is more noticeable in side characters like the Igoresque Riff Raff.
Grotesquerie also carves out a path to acceptance. Like it or not, our physical existence is marked by constant change, often into forms we consider less desirable. By looking these transformations dead in the eye and exaggerating them to extreme proportions, they allow us to come to terms with the truth that this will eventually happen to us all and that we’re just going to have to deal with it—or even embrace it.
The Missing Feminine Grotesque
We can immediately point to several reasons why women missed out on grotesquerie in classic Hollywood. The boundary between self and not-self hinges on the question “Who am I?”. If the presumptive audience (and the typical director) of a classic horror film was male, then it’s unsurprising that the grotesques were male too—the distance between self and other feels less marked, and the abjection reaction is less intense, if the character is already an other. And then there’s the obvious: Hollywood didn’t want its glamorous stars to look ugly.
This explains the sometimes-large difference between cinematic grotesquerie and written grotesquerie with regards to gender. Consider the beast-men again. In Wells’ original novel, there are both men and women, described as equally hideous and disgusting. Moreau experiments on a female puma, but she is a true grotesque who couldn’t be farther from the blushing Lota: “not human, not animal, but hellish, brown, seamed with red branching scars, red drops starting out upon it, the lidless eyes ablaze.” She’s powerful, too: She wrenches her fetter out of the wall, breaks the narrator’s arm, and kills Moreau. None of this made the leap to screen in The Island of Lost Souls.
Female monsters in the classics are mostly vampires, possessed humans, or sometimes shifters as long as the transformation isn’t shown. The Bride of Frankenstein edges towards grotesquerie, but compared to her sunken-eyed, square-headed spear counterpart, she only has a couple of noticeable scars on her neck and is otherwise a conventionally pretty woman with an unusually groovy beehive. (She also appears in her own movie for a grand total of three minutes.)
To find proper grotesques in this era, you really need to go digging. There’s forgotten Universal B-movie Captive Wild Women (1943), where a mad scientist transforms a gorilla into a woman with a tendency to “go ape” when horny, but that’s scraping the barrel.
Change Comes to Hollywood
Yet grotesquerie never sits still. In the 1980s, women in monster movies began to change. Depictions of female monsters onscreen began to focus less on beauty and more on horror, and there was finally room for the feminine grotesque to make an ingress.
One of the earliest examples I could find is a brief but pivotal scene from Cronenberg’s early film The Brood (1979). The protagonist’s wife, Nola, is institutionalized for mental illness under the care of a doctor whose controversial methods cause the patients’ neuroses to manifest as physical sores and lesions. In Nola’s case, they have manifested in the form of a brood of short-lived child-monsters who attack and kill anyone Nola is angry at. When the protagonist confronts Nola at the climax, she sweeps open her clothes to reveal a belly and legs covered in tumescent growths, the largest of which is a sort of external womb. With her teeth, she rips open this growth in a gush of blood and pulls out an infant monster, which she licks clean, smearing her face with blood. Nola is a grotesque, willingly trapped in an endless cycle of accelerated, distorted pregnancy, birth, and death.
The shift towards the grotesque is vividly illustrated by a pair of films made 40 years apart, Cat People (1942) and its remake, Cat People (1982). In both films, a woman named Irina transforms into a panther when she has sex. The seminal 1942 film introduced many now-standard horror devices, like “wet footprints that gradually transform” and “the sound of pootsteps suddenly stops.” It also falls cleanly in line with depictions of female monsters in the Hays Code era: Irina is a conventionally attractive woman who shows no physical signs of monstrousness. Her transformation is implicit: Irina’s eyes glow, and then the panther attack is shown through shadows on the wall.
In the 1982 film, however, the transformation becomes a vividly detailed visual sequence featuring crunching bones, sprouting claws, lumpy prosthetics, and finally her human skin splitting open to reveal the hairy panther face underneath. Grotesquerie is on full display, and full nudity emphasizes that this is, specifically, a cisgender female grotesque. In place of the 1942 film’s sexually-charged kiss, there are several explicit sex scenes, in keeping with the grotesque’s focus on orifices and acts that transgress the boundary between self and other—especially since sex is the act that triggers the transformation.
Throughout the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, this space for grotesque women remained. Its most iconic incarnation is Ginger in the feminist horror cult classic Ginger Snaps (2000). The adolescent Ginger gets her first period and is bitten by a werewolf in the same night, plunging her deep into puberty’s entwining worlds of involuntary bodily transformation and burgeoning sexuality. At first lycanthropy turns Ginger into a hot, sexually aggressive party girl, but as her condition progresses, she grows more monstrous, with snouty, wrinkly prosthetics and increasingly erratic behavior. Her final transformation from humanoid into a fleshy animatronic is notably similar to Cat People (1982): sprouting claws, backbone lumps popping up, and skin ripping away.
The grotesquerie continues in Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed (2004), as Ginger’s sister Brigitte slowly develops a creased face, protuberant fangs, muscular clawed hands, and the ubiquitous backbone lumps while she tries in vain to hold back the inevitable transformation. Curiously, Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004) retreats somewhat—there’s a great deal of grotesquerie, but it’s centered on the male characters, while Ginger’s transformation remains mostly in the familiar territory of eye and hair color.
Women inherited both the empowering and the problematic aspects of grotesquerie. The Witches (1990) features a whole passel of grotesques, headed by Anjelica Huston as the Grand High Witch. At her command, the witches remove shoes, gloves, and wigs to reveal toeless feet, taloned hands, and bald heads covered in lesions, before she herself peels off a latex mask to reveal a warty, sagging face and body, with a bulbous chin, hunchback, and enormous hook nose. Her plan—transforming children into mice in a sequence with lots of rubbery, exaggerated prosthetics—also draws from the grotesque. But, specifically, she is an antisemitic grotesque. Some aspects of this were lost on American child audiences, many of whome are not acquainted with the Hasidic Jewish communities where married women sometimes shave their heads and wear wigs. But every adult viewer should understand the significance of the hook nose, and should be able to identify this film (and the book it’s based on) as a modern descendant of the stories about Jews harming children that have been told in Europe since the Middle Ages.
Women’s Voices Enter the Scene
Why was this the era of the feminine grotesque? In the post-Second Wave era, Hollywood had more room for female characters in dynamic, physical roles that were not centered around appearance, like Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley. Feminist critics like Kristeva were actively shaping film criticism. In 1975, Laura Mulvey wrote her watershed essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which coined the concept of the “male gaze.” Postmodernism and the evolving conversation around auteur theory led to an increasing awareness that the film camera is not an objective presenter of neutral information, but one individual viewpoint, and that there can be value to viewpoints we don’t often see.
In 1993, feminist cinema studies professor Barbara Creed published the groundbreaking book The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. Building on Kristeva’s concept of abjection, this was one of the first academic works to discuss women in horror in the role of the monster—previous feminist analysis had primarily focused on women as victims. Creed’s monstrous-feminine is a broad-reaching category, including witches, vampires, nonhuman monsters, and more, as well as grotesque monsters.
For Creed, the monstrous-feminine was a purely negative concept. Women are abject within the patriarchy, and horror films about women are “a project designed to perpetuate the belief that women’s monstrous nature is inextricably bound up with her difference as man’s sexual other” (Creed 310). She does acknowledge that “the monstrous-feminine challenges the view that femininity, by definition, constitutes passivity” (Creed 558), but only by making women active, rather than passive, expressions of men’s fears. Drawing heavily from Freud, her analysis revolves around cisnormative binary gender biology, especially the penis, as the interpretive key—either men fear women because women are castrated, or because women are castrators.
To a modern reader, this analysis feels both quaint and blinkered. Is the shark from Jaws scary because it evokes man’s primal fear that his mother’s womb will swallow him back up? Well, maybe, but it seems at least as likely that it evokes man’s primal fear of being eaten by a large predator. Creed disagrees with Freud on particulars, but fundamentally replicates him by framing her analysis entirely in terms of cisgender men. What do people without penises get from horror films? Why do we still find them scary? What does a horror film mean to you if you’re trans or nonbinary? Creed has no answer. And Creed’s view doesn’t explain why female monsters were so rare under the Hays Code, when patriarchy had its strongest stranglehold on Hollywood, or why they became more common in the wake of second-wave feminism.
I think Creed is looking at it backwards. Women may be abject, but classic horror cinema forces women into a non-abject mold: The horror heroine is a virginal ingenue completely cut off from birth, sex, death, and all other manifestations of the grotesque body. In this light, the female monsters of later horror read as women’s voices breaking through, placing women’s abject status under the patriarchy front and center where it must be faced—or even embraced. This is what began to happen in the 80s.
The 80s were also a high water mark for horror cinema across the board. Practical effects reached their peak, depicting terrifying monsters, grisly deaths, and disgusting transformations with realism and immediacy. And cinemagoers having well shaken off the prudery of the Hays Code era, filmmakers had new freedom to depict violence, sex, and taboo topics, the bread and butter of grotesquerie. The 70s had sparked off a spate of horror films like Carrie and The Exorcist starring monstrous girls and women. These are not grotesques themselves, but saturated as they are in effluvia, they’re excellent examples of abjection, and they set the paradigm that female monsters could be just as horrifying as male ones.
The Backlash Strikes
But despite this fertile ground, you can’t quite call this period a Golden Age of the feminine grotesque. Female grotesques were still outnumbered by both male grotesques and by women in traditional, gender-conforming horror roles. Normative values still held heavy sway in Hollywood, and even slight shifts in the gender landscape could meet with backlash.
This push-pull of gendered ideas can be seen in the notoriously bizarre The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996). Unlike its predecessor, female beast-men do exist in this film and their grotesquerie is sometimes on full display, most notably in a scene where a hyena-woman gives birth, her six breasts and digitigrade legs clearly visible. The beast-men in this version of the story are created genetically, not surgically, bringing pregnancy and childbirth into the picture, as well as the looming specter of bestiality—all aspects of the grotesque tied closely to sex and gender. Yet aside from that lone scene, the female beast-men only appear in the background in group shots, and they have no speaking lines. The only woman with a speaking role is Aissa. Like Lota, she is a cat-woman portrayed as a conventionally attractive woman, and like Lota, her beast nature is only revealed late in the film—in her case, in the form of minimally-visible sharp molars. The feminine grotesque is toyed with, but conventional beauty standards still take center stage.
The real backlash hit in the mid-2000s. Buoyed by the YA boom, the girl-power feminism of the 90s gave way to the broadly regressive view that girls should conform to femininity and traditional gendered behavior. Gender-nonconforming girls were pitied as victims of media brainwashing—never mind that, as we’ve established, the vast majority of women in film had been gender-conforming all along. In such a landscape, there wasn’t much hope for the feminine grotesque. As Elizabeth M. Clark notes in her 2008 thesis Hairy Thuggish Women: Female Werewolves, Gender, and the Hoped-For Monster, the Underworld movies (2003-2016) feature female vampires but not female lycans (werewolves). (Underworld: Blood Wars (2016) does contain a few female lycans, but only in background roles.) In an interview, Kate Beckinsale explains why: “Because that could be really horrifying. Hairy, thuggish women.” There is so much baggage contained in that “horrifying.” Blood drinking and people getting torn apart and sliced in half are fine, but women with body hair are, apparently, too horrifying for horror.
One late grotesque is Coraline (2009). The Other Mother initially appears human except that she has buttons for eyes. (Eyes and eye trauma are a recurring theme, in keeping with the grotesque’s focus on orifices.) But as her true nature is revealed, she transforms into a spindly, insectile creature with needles for fingers. True to grotesquerie’s destruction of the boundary between self and other, she also morphs the scenery around her from familiar homelike settings into a nightmare world of spiky shapes and spiderwebs. Stop motion, long a pillar of practical effects, gives it all a tactile immediacy.
Since then, the feminine grotesque has been thin on the ground. The backlash against gender deviance has gone in lockstep with a puritanical pushback against violence, sex, and graphic content of all kinds, as evinced by the total dominance of the PG-13 blockbuster. This has had major repercussions on horror. So have changes in technique. When realistic CGI was introduced in the early 90s, it rapidly replaced practical creature effects. CG effects can certainly be grotesque, and they allow for complexities like fluid full-figure transformation sequences that surpass the limits of most practical effects. But they lack the solidity and immediacy of practical effects. They might look realistic, but on a visceral level, they feel far less real than the deliberately-artificial stop-motion characters of Coraline.
The Importance of the Feminine Grotesque
The consequences are more than the loss of some fun movies. The feminine grotesque gives a rare voice to women expressing ideas that go against social norms. By replacing the horror ingenue, socially constrained into a role of little more than screaming and fainting, with the abject female monster who faces no such restraints, it liberates women fully from the omnipresent male gaze. There is an immense freedom in these hideous, terrifying visages, for whom the rules of femininity not only can’t be enforced but don’t even make logical sense. Rather, they reshape it into their own image—makeup, pretty dresses, and demure behavior themselves become grotesque when applied to a grotesque. Putting lipstick on the monster doesn’t make it back into a pretty girl—it makes it even more monstrous. In Bakhtin’s terms, womanhood is killed and resurrected in a completely different form.
Strictures of behavior are violated even more freely. This is another important distinction between feminine grotesques and non-grotesque female monsters like vampires—the latter may kill and destroy, but can also behave femininely and are often portrayed at dances, banquets, and other settings that highlight social niceties. For grotesques, all bets are off. Notice the difference in behavior in the two Cat People heroines: 1942 Irina is a demure lady right up until she kills a guy, while 1982 Irina snarls, growls, and tears the sheets. And as with appearance, ladylike behavior simply can’t be enforced on a grotesque—trying to make it dance or curtsy only makes it all the more grotesque. It catapults women’s behavior into a whole new framework where no expectations—morality, decency, even physical practicality—can possibly apply. Plus it’s a blast for the actresses, who don’t get to do a lot of yowling and stomping around in a typical film shoot.
This is what was lost when the still-nascent feminine grotesque was smothered in the crib. It was a loss of freedom, a loss of perspective, and a loss of a vast world of rich storytelling potential. As long as misogyny exists, as long as
But in grotesquerie, nothing is ever truly dead—burying it physically or socially is only a prelude to resurrection in a new form. And so with the feminine grotesque.
The Return of the Grotesque?
This brings us to the present and to last year’s explosive body horror hit, The Substance (2024). Has-been film star Elisabeth Sparkle takes an experimental drug that creates a younger, hotter version of herself, dubbed Sue. But she must diligently switch bodies every seven days or else both forms will degrade and suffer. Yet the constant temptation—and social pressure—to remain in her younger form causes her to disrupt this balance again and again, with inevitably tragic (and disgusting) results.
This movie nails every trait of grotesquerie with laserlike precision. Sue erupts Athena-like from a rupture in Elizabeth’s back in a gooey delivery that leaves Elisabeth’s still-living body as an inert husk on the floor, a vivid portrayal of grotesquerie’s ties to death and rebirth. As Sue nibbles away at Elisabeth’s time, Elisabeth’s body decays in a piecemeal, exaggerated fashion, developing one gnarled, taloned finger or leg at a time. This state of flux between middle-aged and ancient echoes her recurring shift between her young body and her old body.
Next to Sue’s nubile youth, Elisabeth becomes abject. As Sue, she is disgusted by Elisabeth’s body, hiding it from sight, interring it in a dungeon-like secret room, and growing ever more reluctant to return to it at the appointed time. As Elisabeth, she imprisons herself in her apartment. While Sue shakes her ass on an aerobics show, Elisabeth—her increasing decrepitude freeing her from any concern about health or weight—makes and ravenously consumes an impossible volume of repulsively rich meat dishes, an action that should not affect Sue but somehow does in a bizarre scene where she pulls a chicken drumstick out of her navel. There’s that Rabelaisian sense of food violating the boundary between self and other. In the end, Sue and Elisabeth fuse into the ultimate feminine grotesque, a bulbous amalgam sprouting misplaced arms, breasts, and teeth who unselfconsciously dons Sue’s gown and earrings and flaunts her transgressive new form of femininity on live TV before coming to pieces with blood pouring out of every opening.
Multiple selves that divide and reunite, orifices entered and exited, a fluid journey along the spectrum of old to young, beautiful to hideous, and a whole stageful of abjection delivered with classic latex and silicone prostheses. This is transgressive grotesquerie at its peak. And, written and directed by French director Coralie Fargeat, it is a woman’s story told by woman—the story of how the patriarchy forces women into a simulacrum of eternal youth and reviles them when they can’t maintain it. A story that could only be truly told through grotesquerie.
These are the voices and ideas we unleash when we embrace grotesquerie. Perhaps we’re not witnessing the death of the Hollywood feminine grotesque, but its birth.
But, after all, aren’t they one and the same?
