Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Substance.
If you’ve already subjected yourself to the grisly new body horror film The Substance, the chances are there are one of a few different scenes you can’t get out of your head.
The sight of a nude Margaret Qualley sewing up Demi Moore’s split-open back after being born from it, perhaps, or their graphic fight to the death as Elisabeth and Sue finally go toe-to-toe?
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Maybe it’s the final sequence of the film, when Monsto Elisasue is born, only to vomit up a human breast, shower an audience with gallon upon gallon of blood and then explode in the street.
It really is quite a film, isn’t it?
Still, believe it or not, leading lady Demi has a very different opinion on the movie’s most disturbing moment.
During an interview with Seth Meyers earlier this month, Demi said: “I will just warn everyone, the scene with Dennis [Quaid] eating the shrimp is by far the most violent scene in the whole movie. He ate, I think, four pounds of shrimp, tearing the heads off with sound effects…”
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The scene in question occurs early on in the film, and sees Dennis, as TV producer Harvey, warning Demi’s character that things go downhill for women “after 50”.
His message kicks off a chain of events that leads to Elisabeth Sparkle taking the titular “substance”, which allows her to create a younger duplicate of herself.
Both Demi and Margaret have spoken candidly about the physical toll that making the “brutal” horror flick took on them, with the latter making no secret of how much she found wearing Monstro Elisasue’s prosthetics to be “torture”.
The Substance is in cinemas now.
