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Yesterday Demi Moore received her first Academy Award nomination for her startling turn in writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s “Beauty-and-the-Beast-Are-One” sci-fi tale The Substance. The Brat Packer-turned-megastar, who already won a Best Actress Golden Globe earlier this month, plays Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore), a once-popular film actress who loses her TV exercise series on her 50th birthday when the show’s producer (Dennis Quaid) deems her “too old.” A chance encounter at a hospital leads Elisabeth to a bizarre biomedical procedure that promises to give her “a better version of yourself.” The Substance, as it’s dubbed, does indeed restore her youth and revive her career, but at a terrifying cost she never could have imagined.
Fargeat’s second feature film after 2017’s brutal “woman on the run” actioner Revenge, The Substance manages to blend elements of feminist-tinged satire with body horror and psychological suspense. Its chronicle of Elisabeth’s slow and self-destructive decay as her “new life” begins to overwhelm her features allusions to the films of David Cronenberg and France’s Julia Ducournau. Genre fans will also appreciate a number of tributes to everything from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray to The Manster and The Incredible Melting Man. There is another movie, though, that predated The Substance by some 65 years with its depiction of a middle-aged woman who’ll stop at nothing–and I mean nothing!–to regain her lost beauty: the 1959 drive-in shocker The Wasp Woman.
Produced and directed by B-movie legend Roger Corman, The Wasp Woman stars Susan Cabot as cosmetics company head Janice Starlin. For many years the face of her firm in its advertising, Starlin searches for solutions when sales start to slide because she’s no longer young and attractive (“Not even Janice Starlin can remain a glamour girl forever,” she laments).
Her quest leads her to an eccentric scientist and apiarist (Michael Mark) who’s developed a age-reversing formula derived from the royal jelly of queen wasps. Janice becomes the doctor’s sponsor and begins undergoing treatments. Unhappy with the slow pace of the experiment, she takes multiple doses on her own and finds she now looks half her age. Things so swimmingly as Starlin plans to sell her new “miracle serum” nationwide. But as luck–and low-budget ’50s horror films–would have it, the formula has the deleterious side effect of turning her into a half-human, half-insect creature with a penchant for killing people. Said creature, by the way, in no way resembles the Sphinx-like bug seen on the film’s poster; instead she has a human body and a papier-mâché wasp noggin.
The Wasp Woman, made by Corman’s Filmgroup company to cash in on the success of the previous year’s The Fly, is a horror picture that’s surprisingly light on the horror and a big business drama that skimps on the business. The script, courtesy of veteran film heavy Leo Gordon, merely hints at the obstacles that a female CEO might have faced in the Eisenhower Era corporate world (“Janice Starlin has built her whole life on youth and beauty,” one of her male subordinates mansplains. “Now that she’s losing them, she’s scared to death.”).
Viewers, though, can’t be blamed for feeling sympathy for Janice as–just like Elisabeth in The Substance–those fears drive her to desperate and irrevocable actions. One becomes even more sympathetic now when looking over the sad life story of troubled lead actress Cabot, whose 12-year screen career ended with this film and who struggled with mental illness and other issues before she was killed by her own son in 1986.
A late-night staple for decades thanks to its public domain status, The Wasp Woman went on to have a surprising legacy, heavily influencing the 1988 horror film Rejuvenator and spawning a 1995 remake for Showtime’s Roger Corman Presents series, directed by Jim Wynorski and starring Jennifer Rubin in the title role. Now its sting will be felt–to some degree, anyway–this March 2nd on Hollywood’s biggest night.