The essay below is drawn from an article I published in 2019 called “The Shock of Aging (Women) in Horror Film.” I’m excerpting (and adapting) part of the article here because the film it’s about, a very much undervalued film by Edward Dein from 1960 called The Leech Woman,[i] is not only a brilliant film but uncannily anticipates Coralie Fargeat’s equally brilliant film, The Substance (2024). You can see the outlines of The Substance in The Leech Woman, both in its structure and its preoccupations – and I’m surprised that more people aren’t talking about this earlier film. If this essay does nothing else, then, I hope it sends more people to The Leech Woman. But, more specifically, I think the arguments I make about The Leech Woman here are really relevant to The Substance.
You can watch The Leech Woman here:
The old woman in horror film
A recurrent figure, filmed with the express intent of shocking the audience, has proliferated in horror film especially since the beginning of the 21st century—not a visible monster but a quite human-looking old woman, typically manipulated for jump scares. There’s James Wan’s Dead Silence (2007) and Insidious (2010), Paranormal Activity 3 (2011), The Woman in Black (2012), The Conjuring (2013), the found-footage horror film, The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014), M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit (2015), The Witch (2015), and (also from Shyamalan) Old (2021). Even before their recent proliferation, old women functioned, albeit more infrequently, as a means of eliciting cinematic shock, as we see in Edward Dein’s 1960 film The Leech Woman – Psycho (1960), The Exorcist (1973), and The Shining (1980).
An aging population
The increasingly common and jolting shot of the old woman in 21st century horror film can be read, on one level, as expressing a collective anxiety about an aging global population. In the US, as the baby boomers age, for instance, they are being positioned as a potential economic burden, threatening the well-being of younger generations. It is estimated that between the years 2000 and 2050 there will be a 135% increase in the number of those over sixty-five and a 350% increase in those over eight-five – compared to only a 33% increase of those aged sixteen to sixty-four. [ii] The media are already writing anxiety-stricken pieces about the dire consequences that will ensue as the numbers of those who are dependent on social services dramatically start to outpace the wage-earners who support them.[iii] And what is being called the “population crash” is not only happening in the US. A 2020 article on BBC News describes a “jaw-dropping” global crash in children being born – and worries about society being completely transformed by an aging population that will overwhelm the young: “Who pays tax in a massively aged world?,” the writer asks. “Who pays for healthcare for the elderly? Who looks after the elderly? Will people still be able to retire from work?”[iv] This escalating, apocalyptic anxiety about the elderly must be a part, at least, of what is driving the increased exploitation of the aging body as shock, as jump-scare, in 21st-century horror films.
But why women in particular? I think the encroaching terrors of an aging population and of the ‘population crash’ are most effectively embodied by women, first, because they live longer, and second (and most importantly) because women’s aging bodies are an especially potent reminder of population decline: their bodies are expressly – visibly – non-reproductive.[v] Old women disrupt the reproductive body and the heterosexual plot that both drive narrative cinema and that are integrally bound up with global demographics: the old woman’s body serves as a source of shock in film, then, in large part because it is reminder of the failure of reproduction and the impending disaster of an expanding aging population, set to crush the young. (It is notable in this regard that in two specific moments in The Substance, the young Sue’s [Margaret Qualley] sexual and romantic exploits are violently disrupted by the demands of the aging Elisabeth Sparkle [Demi Moore].)
The Leech Woman
Perhaps no film better illustrates the use of the elderly woman as visceral shock than the 1960 film, The Leech Woman, a very much under-appreciated film that is all about the horrors of aging. The film opens with Dr. Paul Talbot (Phillip Terry), who is searching for a way to slow the aging process and thus make himself a wealthy man. He also happens to loathe aging women: “Old women always give me the creeps,” he tells his young, attractive assistant early in the film. One day, an elderly Black woman, Malla (Estelle Hemsley), who claims she is 152-years-old, arrives at his office. She tells him a story of a substance that can stave off aging and death, held secret by her tribe in Africa, and so Talbot, predictably, decides to head into the jungle to procure it. He brings along his wife, June (Coleen Gray), who is a decade older than he is and whom he had just persuaded to give him a divorce – before he realized that she could be useful as a test subject for the African anti-aging potion. When they arrive in Africa, Paul and June discover that while Malla’s powder alone will indeed slow the aging process, when it is mixed with fluid from a man’s pineal gland (a process that necessitates that man’s death), it precipitates a dramatic transformation—from age to youth in a moment. Not surprisingly, June’s first victim is her husband, whom she unhesitatingly sacrifices for an instant return to youth and beauty. The transformation is only temporary, however, and June is forced to kill again and again to maintain her youth and beauty and to stave off increasing age.
Disrupting the romance plot
The Leech Woman is structed by repeated shocking scenes – three in total – in which June, when the potion wears off, suddenly becomes old again (and she ages more in each transformation – the cost of her brief experience of youth). What June experiences throughout the second half of The Leech Woman, then, is not a gradual process of aging but its repeated sudden and horrific onset. June’s shocking conversions into an old woman shape her as the “monster” in this classic horror plot – one in which a monster disrupts a narrative trajectory predicated on and driven by the attractive young woman, linchpin of heterosexual romance and the reproductive family. Classic horror films of the 1930s through the end of the 1950s are structured by this plot and its anchoring couples: Victor and Elizabeth (Frankenstein, 1931), Mina and Jonathan (Dracula, 1931), John and Ann (King Kong, 1933), Oliver and Alice (Cat People, 1942), David and Kay (The Creature from the Black Lagoon, 1954), and Becky and Miles (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956). The horror of these films inheres in the monster’s interruption (temporary in most cases) of all these possible reproductive futures. The Leech Woman offers up a brilliant twist on this classic plot in featuring a monster that is not external to the couple but part of it. In her twinned function as both young and beautiful woman and monstrous hag, June herself both drives the narrative forward and violently disrupts it.
June’s first reversion to her older self, in the jungle with Bertram
All three of June’s transformations back to an increasingly aged woman in The Leech Woman tellingly occur immediately after moments of intimacy with a man, emphasizing how aging in classic horror (and cinema more broadly) disrupts a heterosexuality that informs the film’s narrative trajectory. The first time, June is still in the jungle with her guide, Bertram (John Van Dreelen), who helped her escape from the Nandos tribe (not least, of course, because she was young and beautiful). Bertram and June immediately develop an intimate relationship (because she’s young and beautiful), but when he wakes up to see that she has become “old,” he is repelled: “Take your hands off me. Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me. Get away from me,” he yells at her in horror. He then wrestles her to the ground and dashes off into the jungle, which holds no more dangerous predators than the “old” woman who’s chasing him.
In the second instance, June pre-emptively wrenches herself away from the young lawyer, Neil Foster (Grant Williams), whom she is seducing and slams the door on him. Her third violent metamorphosis occurs right after Neil has proposed marriage, and she runs upstairs and throws herself out of her bedroom window rather than reveal herself as old. Indeed, it is the shock of June’s aging body specifically in these moments of sexual intimacy – positioned as monstrous disruption of reproductive futurity – that makes The Leech Woman such a powerful horror film.
June’s abrupt aging disrupts her budding love affair with Neil
The experience of aging as shock
This reading doesn’t encompass all that The Leech Woman means, however. Robin Wood has famously argued that “Few horror films have totally unsympathetic Monsters” – adding that, in many, “the Monster is clearly the emotional center” (80). From a different perspective, the old woman as jump scare in horror can also encode, I think, the experience of aging – especially for the female viewer. This tactic of horror represents aging not as a gradual process but as a sudden shock – or a series of repeated shocks, something women in particular feel especially acutely in a culture that continues to over-value female youth and beauty. The Leech Woman evinces this political ambivalence, I think, encouraging not only shock and horror but also sympathy – even identification – with the “monster.”
The first person June shocks is herself
It is crucially important that in each of the three scenes in The Leech Woman in which June reverts back to old age—getting older and older each time—the first witness to her aging is herself. She bears the first shock. In the first instance, when June wakes up in the jungle, Bertram remains sleeping while she looks at her hands and experiences, for herself, the full horror of her sudden aging – before having to endure his horror. Similarly, in both of the other scenes of June’s aging, she sees her own wrinkled hand before the man she’s with has a clue about what’s going on. (It is notable that in The Substance, the first part of Elisabeth Sparkle to age dramatically is her hand.) In the third transformation scene, June rushes upstairs to her room to have the shocking experience described by so many older women: she looks in the mirror and sees, with horror, an old woman. As writer Lori Day has written about aging – “You’ll catch your reflection and your breath at the same time and be abruptly reminded that your exterior no longer matches how you feel inside.”[vi] In these moments when June suddenly ages, she experiences her aged self – as in the mirror scene – as a stranger.
Aging and the ‘accident’
In its visual representation of women’s aging as shock (both to others and self), The Leech Woman glosses Catherine Malabou’s argument in Ontology of the Accident that aging can alienate the self almost as fully and suddenly as a catastrophic brain injury. Her book explores how the threat of an “accident” always threatens to make the self permanently other to itself – always threatens to effect, she writes, “a radical personality change” (33). Most importantly, for my purposes, Malabou suggests that “ageing [sic] itself may be thought of as a lesion. In the end it may be that for each one of us, ageing arises all of a sudden, in an instant, like a trauma, and that it suddenly transforms us, without warning, into an unknown subject” (49).[vii] She continues that “old age remains fundamentally a rupture; it breaks being at an unlocatable point, forcing it to change direction, leading it to become other” (52). For Malabou, then, the “accident” can be mapped onto an experience of aging that “arises all of a sudden” (91). Horror films, for all their problematic exploitation of the old woman as shocking spectacle, can thus capture what aging is – and what it can feel like – especially for women: it can arise all of a sudden, like a trauma, a profound rupture of identity, transforming us into someone else, into a stranger.
The double standard of aging for women
Bringing The Leech Woman directly into conversation with The Substance (although the similarities should be evident in everything I’ve written above), The Leech Woman contains at its middle a striking indictment of the gendered double standard that makes aging catastrophic to women while offering men other options. Malla overtly voices this feminist message:
“For a man, old age has rewards. If he is wise, his gray hairs bring dignity and he is treated with honor and respect. But for the aged woman, there is nothing. At best she’s pitied. More often, her lot is of contempt and neglect.”
Coralie Fargeat dramatizes this message throughout The Substance: protagonist Elisabeth Sparkle is shut out of her profession when she reaches the age of fifty, but the film is replete with men who are clearly that age and much older, all still firmly entrenched in the industry. Indeed, the replacement of Elisabeth by Sue is done not least to cater to the desires of those old men. “For a man, old age has rewards,” indeed.
From Elder Horror: Essays on Film’s Frightening Images of Aging © 2019 Edited by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. www.mcfarlandbooks.com.
Notes
[i] Vivian Sobchak has written extensively on The Leech Woman in “The Leech Woman’s Revenge,” “Revenge of The Leech Woman” and Carnal Thoughts.
[ii] Wiener and Tilly, “Population Ageing,” 776.
[iii] See, for example, Casselman, “What Baby Boomers’ Retirement Means,” and Tankersley, “Baby Boomers.”
[iv] Gallagher, “Fertility Rate.”
[v] Erin Harrington notes that old women are “abject barren bodies” that refuse to “‘behave’ in a culturally-sanctioned manner or to sit within the social categories that are made available to and that therefore construct the female body” (225).
[vi] Lori Day, “Aging While Female.”
[vii] In a chapter that touches briefly on The Leech Woman, Sobchack calls old age an “injury.” Carnal Thoughts, 36.
Works Cited
Casselman, Ben. “What Baby Boomers’ Retirement Means for the U.S. Economy.” FiveThirtyEight, May 7, 2014.
Day, Lori. “Aging While Female Is Not Your Worst Nightmare.” Feminist Current, March 10, 2015.
Gallagher, James. “Fertility Rate: ‘Jaw-dropping’ Global Crash in Children Being Born.” BBC News, 15 July 2020.
Harrington, Erin. Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror. Routledge, 2018.
Keetley, Dawn. “The Shock of Aging (Women) in Horror Film.” In Elder Horror: Essays on Film’s Frightening Images of Aging, edited by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, 58-69. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019.
Malabou, Catherine. Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity. Trans. Carolyn Shread. Polity Press, 2012.
Sobchack, Vivian C. “The Leech Woman’s Revenge, or a Case for Misrepresentation.” Journal of Popular Film 4.3 (1975): 236-57.
—. “Revenge of The Leech Woman: On the Dread of Aging in a Low-Budget Horror Film.” In The Horror Reader, edited by Ken Gelder, 336-45. New York: Routledge, 2000.
—. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Tankersley, Jim. “Baby Boomers Are What’s Wrong with America’s Economy.” The Chicago Tribune, November 7, 2015.
Wiener, Joshua M., and Jane Tilly. “Population Ageing in the United States of America: Implications for Public Programmes.” International Journal of Epidemiology 31.4 (2002): 776-781.
Wood, Robin. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” in Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (ed.), The Monster Theory Reader (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), pp. 108-35.
