Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley delve into body horror

Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley delve into body horror

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TORONTO – There are plenty of shocking scenes in the new body horror film “The Substance.” But for star Demi Moore, the most violent material was watching co-star Dennis Quaid gobble down shrimp with reckless abandon.

“Watching that take after take? It’s disgusting,” Moore said with a laugh after a midnight screening of her film (in theaters Sept. 20) on Friday morning at the Toronto International Film Festival.

A vibrant, genre-crushing look at age and beauty, “The Substance” stars Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, a former actress and middle-aged TV fitness guru who’s mocked for her “Jurassic fitness” routine and forced out by her network boss (Quaid) in favor of a younger star. Elisabeth signs up for an underground process known as “The Substance,” which creates one’s most beautiful, perfect self. The result of that experiment is Sue (Margaret Qualley), who gets her own show with a whole lot more twerking and gyrating.

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“I dance, but I don’t dance that way and I never will again,” Qualley joked onstage, joined by Moore and French writer/director Coralie Fargeat.

Things get more and more edgy for both Elisabeth and Sue from there, and Qualley recalls that the script was “so unique and evocative and crazy” when she first read it. Moore’s initial thought was that the film “was either going to be something extraordinary or an absolute disaster,” she said. “That gave it the thrill of being a risk worth taking, because it was also just such an out-of-the-box way to dive into this subject” and explore “the harsh way we criticize ourselves.”

Fargeat last appeared at the Toronto Festival in 2017 with her action thriller “Revenge,” about a woman (Matilda Lutz) who is raped and then hunts down the three men responsible. After that film, “I felt empowered” to “express what I wanted to say about what women have to go through when they’re confronted with violence. And I felt empowered enough to explore the next level,” the filmmaker says. “I was also past 40 and starting to feel the pressure … that I was going to be erased, that I was going to disappear. And I felt like I really wanted to make a big scream, a big cry, that we need to make things different and that we need to try to free ourselves from all that pressure that leads to being willing to express all that violence.”

It was important to Fargeat that “The Substance” presented violence and gore from a female perspective. Horror films “were often very gender-specific when I was a little girl growing up. Those were the kinds of movies for boys, that the boys watched. And when I watched those movies, I felt like I was stepping into a world that I wasn’t supposed to be in, and it was super exciting.

“When I was little, boys were allowed to do so much more than girls,” the director adds. “The idea of ​​being feminine, of laughing, of being naturally devoted and gentle: for me, growing up, those kinds of films were really a way to express myself fully.”