Fountain of Youth: The Substance and the Film’s Obsession with Fictional Drugs | Movie

Cinema is a damn drug. For movie lovers, a trip to the cinema is simply a two-hour (and increasingly six-hour) psychoactive escape from the gray outside world. Soaring highs, crushing lows, kaleidoscopic lights, bombastic sounds; and that’s just Pearl & Dean. But while cinema is also full of drugs – from China’s Opium Den in 1894 to, ahem, Cocaine Bear in 2023 – filmmakers invent fictional drugs (unavailable in the real world) to change the narrative and change the characters’ personalities and take away the audience on a journey to new worlds without the need for stupid superpowers, complicated procedures and catchy magic.

Ironically, fake pharmaceuticals used in cinema are used to highlight what is happening in the real world, while filmmakers play on our fears about Big Pharma and synthetic drugs. Take The Substance, a new body horror film from Coralie Fargeat, revolves around a drug of the same name that draws on the latest magic weight loss formulas and seems to have anticipated the Ozempic craze. Half Dorian Gray, half David Cronenberg begins with fading starlet and TV aerobics host Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) being fired by sleazy executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid) for being too old. Giving in to temptation, he orders a batch of Substance from a shady company and injects himself with the liquid (appropriately green Brat) in an oddly empty bathroom. Suddenly, a mature maple opens her shoulder blades and crawls out of her spine. Meet Sue (Margaret Qualley): Sparkle’s better, prettier half. Of course there is a catch; must switch between bodies every week; take a “stabilizing” injection every day to prevent getting sick; and continue to feed her second body. There are side effects, too: namely, headaches, tinnitus, and, oh, transformation into a grotesque ogre with an amorphous body fusion that would make Gollum grimace.

“I think fictional drugs appeal to both our imagination and our strong human nature, which since the beginning of time has (wanted) to escape reality and have new experiences,” Fargeat tells the Guardian. So it’s no surprise that the film was branded with the slogan “#TrySubstance” to tempt viewers to buy a ticket. “Cinema itself is a kind of drug that allows us to escape reality,” adds Fargeat. “I remember when I was younger, I preferred living in movies than in reality. So in a way, fictional drugs in movies give you an escape…x2!”

Stanislas Reydellet, production designer on Substance, says: “Coralie initially really wanted to associate Substance with a highly addictive hard drug like heroin. Something that once you start, you can’t stop.” But these new types of high aren’t all that new. Harry Shapiro, one of Britain’s leading drug consultants and author of Shooting Stars: Drugs, Hollywood and the Movies, traces the fictional drug film back to the earliest adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “He swallows an unknown potion that brings out the demonic side of his nature in an interesting way,” says Shapiro. It shows the duality that drug use catalyzes. “This plays into the guilt of addiction,” he adds.

However, the psychotropic trope really came to prominence in 1972 with Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, based on the cult novel by Anthony Burgess. Alex and his friends took all kinds of drugs, including the fortified milk drink Milk-Plus. More than a decade later, David Lynch’s Dune brought to life the melange, or “Spice” (not the artificial “Spice” that devastates poorer communities, but its fictional counterpart), an inhaler that provides the user with foresight. Earlier this year, a continuation of the story was released in Dune: Part Two. “Spice is power,” the film begins. Unfortunately, it’s wildly addictive and can only be harvested on the corrosive desert planet Arrakis, guarded by giant sandworms. Good luck! Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, many fictional drugs entered the collective cinematic consciousness, including black meat (a powder taken from the entrails of giant Brazilian centipedes in “Naked Lunch”). Adrenochrome (a human-derived stimulant in the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas); neuroin (inhaled opioid described in Minority Report); Beijing Cocktail (Crank’s deadly adrenaline blocker); and POS-51 (a drug in the 51st state, supposedly 51 times stronger than other drugs, but in fact it is spoiler alertplacebo).

Sometimes these synthesized substances met reality. In 2010, mephedrone was sold in some drug stores as “A Clockwork Orange” – with packaging inspired by posters. Adrenochrome has been hijacked by the QAnon conspiracy movement, which claims it is an actual anti-aging compound taken from children by the global elite.

With the distribution of designer drugs in the real world now at an all-time high, expect a new wave of filmmakers to explore what will happen in the near future. As Naked Lunch’s William Lee grimly observes, there are “addicts to yet-to-be-synthesized drugs” waiting to be discovered in fiction, taking us on new journeys in the comfort of our cinema; and leaving us wondering what the hell was in our popcorn.