“The Substance” stars, director explain the film’s beautifully gruesome ending

Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and filmmaker Coralie Fargeat break down the bloody ending of "The Substance."

Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Substance.

If you've made it here, congratulations! You survived all 140 bloody, bonkers, absolutely bats--- minutes of The Substance. Sadly, Demi Moore's Elisabeth Sparkle (and her younger self, Sue, played by Margaret Qualley) did not. But, as Moore, Qualley, and writer-director Coralie Fargeat explain to Entertainment Weekly, the ending of the film means a hell of a lot more than that — and its meaning transcends clear-cut matters of life and death.

Before the makers of the movie break down what the ending of The Substance means, let's recap how their characters got there in the first place. The film, in theaters now, follows Elisabeth as a stable — yet fading — Hollywood star, an Oscar-winning actress on the last legs of her on-camera career as the hostess of a popular line of fitness videos distributed by a heartless executive, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), and the gaggle of suits around him that collectively can Elisabeth from the gig on her 50th birthday. Rejected over her age, Elisabeth crosses paths with the unnamed supplier of the film's titular experimental drug, who tells her it will generate a youthful version of herself, despite a disturbing catch. It's important to remember that Elisabeth receives careful instructions: This new being she "births" will not exist separately from her. Though they are separate bodies, they are the same and can only function in the world while the other is in a state of hibernation. They must switch bodies every seven days, with no exceptions — and with Sue sustaining herself on "stabilizer' fluid extracted from Elisabeth's spine.

Shortly after her birth, Sue quickly lands Elisabeth's old job (Harvey, meanwhile, has no idea the two are the same person). She's successful enough that Sue becomes an A-list superstar, and she's eventually hired to host a massive New Year's Eve gig on live TV. With her star power booming, Sue finds herself staying "out" longer than the week-long period afforded by the Substance — and that extra time Sue selfishly steals has physical effects on Elisabeth's body. At first, it's simply a blackened finger sprouting out of Elisabeth's hand; later, it claims the functionality of her joints, and, after Sue extracts enough serum to survive outside of the Substance's limits for several months leading up to the New Year's Eve show, it leaves Elisabeth's body permanently disfigured.

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Eventually, after depleting her supply of spinal serum, Sue switches back to Elisabeth's body, where the elder of the duo decides to terminate the switch, so the supplier provides a serum intended to kill Sue. Elisabeth decides against murdering Sue, reviving her and consequently prompting a glitch that allows both to wake at the same time. A fight ensues, and Sue kills Elisabeth in a rage, shortly before returning to host the New Year's Eve show just in time for her body to deteriorate backstage.

Sue's body falls apart, bit by bit, though she attempts to revive it by injecting herself with the original activation serum that created her — instead, it triggers a mutation, and Sue eventually takes the stage as a monolithic, towering amalgam of grotesque body parts (including Elisabeth's face on the back of her head) that bear no collective resemblance to the human form. Sue begs her viewers to accept her as she is, declaring her identity to onlookers as they recoil. The audience rebukes her, and Sue's head literally explodes, gushing blood over the studio crowd — including Harvey. Sue then stumbles out of the venue, where she disintegrates into a pile of flesh that's little more than Elisabeth's re-animated face, which pulls itself to its final resting place atop Elisabeth's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, where it melts into the pavement.

Fargeat explains the scene as "finally, it’s the moment where she’s free from her human body and appearance" for the first time since the film began, meaning she's finally free from its trappings, both physically and emotionally. She is no longer tethered by a desire to critique her own body or indulge in feeling like her worth is tied to her star status. She takes the stage because she wants it, and because it's hers — not as an obligation to those who hired her.

"It’s the first moment where she’s able to love herself. It’s the moment she sees herself and it’s not disgust, but in fact it’s as if she’s seeing her true self for the first time," Fargeat continues. "Finally, she doesn’t have to care what she looks like, she doesn’t have to care what people are going to think. For the first time, there’s self-indulgence, tenderness. It’s the first time she looks at herself in the mirror and doesn’t criticize herself. She decides, okay, I’m going to go out there, this is me, I have my right to have my place in the world."

The filmmaker says the creature "represents the monstrous part that we try to hide so much because we feel that we can't adapt or fit" — like Sue concealing her true identity, or Elisabeth resorting to a body-altering fix to soothe age-related rejection.

Moore agrees, adding that she interpreted the scene the same way.

"It becomes the ultimate sense of the soul’s freedom, because she’s finally free of the prison of her own body, and she’s back to the purity in the sense of who she really is, without that. It’s just dissolving back into nothingness, from whence we all came," Moore says. Adds Qualley: "Sue is bereft of a soul through most of the film, and as her body falls apart and she becomes this monster, that’s when she experiences love for the first time and fully accepts herself. When she’s going up on stage, that’s the most pure, heartfelt moment I got to experience in the context of this film, standing there, totally okay with who she is, asking directly for love and declaring who she is."

Sure, it's about self-love in the most abstract way, but the scene doesn't exactly play on the heartstrings in an obvious way. After all, Fargeat painstakingly constructed an entire theater on a soundstage as the backdrop for the New Year's Eve scene, and pumped approximately 36,000 gallons of fake blood onto extras (and Quaid) in the risers — and that, too, has thematic significance for Fargeat.

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"Thematically, to spray that crowd was like, 'Okay, this is what you’re doing to us, so, now, f--- off. Enough.' You’re all complicit in crafting this violence, so this is the violence back. It’s symbolic: Look at the violence, don’t shy away," she says.

Oh, and that blood splatter that hits the camera at one point? She definitely meant to do that.

"All the violence that you project on me, the monster, at some points, it’s projected back on the audience," Fargeat says, "which is all of us."

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.