As of late, I’ve been trying to push myself to write about things I usually don’t engage with, and as someone who won’t touch anything scary with a ten-foot-pole, I’m surprised at just how much I’ve been getting out of horror lately. There’s something that keeps me hooked despite just how unpleasant I find most of it—I have especially vivid memories of being absolutely terrified by 2022’s Talk to Me—and it’s not like that something is necessarily enjoyment, either. I recently saw Obsession, for example, which I wouldn’t say is enjoyable so much as it is impactful, speaking to themes of male entitlement in a viscerally shocking and frustrating way. The discomfort serves a purpose beyond just being merely scary, and as Australian director Natalie Erika James described at a screening of her new film Saccharine at Yarraville’s Sun Theatre, horror is uniquely good at “externalising things that are internal,” taking personal struggles and transforming them into something visceral and terrifying.

Saccharine follows Hana (Midori Francis), a burnt-out medical student (at a fictionalised version of the Parkville campus!) struggling with her body image. Between dissecting cadavers and daydreaming about fitness instructor Alanya, Hana begins using a brand-new weight loss drug called Grey. From the film’s beginning, the all-consuming nature of Hana’s struggle is made apparent. The neon colours of the opening scene, which mixes footage of crushed-up sugary masses of deconstructed food with close-up shots of Alanya exercising as Hana stares from behind a treadmill, already draw parallels to The Substance in all of its bright-pink body horror. The name Saccharine, then, fits the film’s sickeningly sweet sense of discomfort remarkably well.

After much testing and moral dilemma, Hana learns that these pills are made entirely of human ash, a substance that proves very easy to acquire when working with cadavers. Her situation, at first, seems surprisingly easy: sneakily take pieces from the corpse of an unnamed organ donor, “Big Bertha”, turn them into ashes and settle into an easy routine of eating to her heart’s content and gaining none of the weight. After a burst of initial success—Saccharine does a fantastic job at lulling its viewers into a false sense of security—it becomes clear that all the food Hana eats has to be going somewhere. That somewhere just so happens to be “Bertha’s” ghost, a silent, lurking presence that can only be seen through reflective surfaces. The more weight Hana loses and the more of “Bertha” that she consumes, the stronger this ghost grows and the more it begins to consume her life.

As the film progresses, what Hana eats begins to look less and less like real food, progressing from actual meals to nondescript blocks of chocolate and energy bars. What she eats becomes irrelevant, as the ghost simply wants her to consume as much mass as possible, resulting in both comedic and disturbing outcomes. Whilst the typical horror elements are still here, blood and visits from the undead and all, the main source of dread comes in the form of the not-quite-food and the constant, sound of a rumbling stomach—the ghost eating Hana from the inside. 

As this vicious cycle of feeding the ghost continues, the film gets to its emotional core: Hana’s desire to change herself at any cost. Beauty standards and wellness culture reach deep into the film and influence each of the characters in different ways. Towards the end of the second act, Hana goes to high-school friend and fellow Grey user Melissa for help, describing her myriads of ghostly side-effects. Melissa, who herself notes having nightmares, hearing voices and feeling like she’s being watched, merely shrugs it off—they’re both seeing the changes they want to their bodies, after all, so it must be worth it. 

Throughout the film, I was particularly interested in Hana’s own queerness and the ways it played into her overall desire for change. Her relationship with Alanya, which becomes more intimate over the course of a shared fitness program, is plagued with the age-old dilemma of “do I want to be with her or just be her?” and is underscored by Hana’s desire to impress her with the results of her fitness routine. This motivates Hana to continue cannibalising “Bertha’s” corpse and losing drastic amounts of weight, resulting in an extremely unhealthy dynamic and a relationship that, for Alanya, is probably more traumatising than fulfilling. 

However, it would be inaccurate to label Hana’s sexuality responsible for her struggles with self-image. In a Q&A after the screening, and in a brief conversation I had with her afterwards, James described Hana’s deep sense of shame, influenced not just by her queerness, but also by her relationships with her family. Her father’s struggles with food shape her own—she sees him as someone who has neglected his body and failed to take care of himself by allowing himself to gain weight. Yet, in an attempt to distance herself from him and better herself, Hana very quickly falls into a self-destructive spiral at the opposite extreme: obsessing over her body. By refusing to confront this giant, terrifying reminder of her own family trauma lurking in the background of her reflection, Hana is pushed ever further into her toxic obsession.

As James comments, the horror of the film comes “not from size, but shame”, from Hana’s own fear and troubles accepting her own body. The film deftly combines themes of family trauma, the pressure of beauty standards and the internalised shame of queer identity into a spine-tingling tapestry. This desperation for self-improvement is something that I believe we all feel, like Hana, in different and multi-faceted ways—as a trans woman, I’m all too familiar with pills that change the way you look. And it’s clear that it’s easy for this desire for change to become distorted and harmful, be that through our relationship with food, fitness, diet culture, even gender, starting as a hope for self-improvement and ending in whatever “looksmaxxing” is. As James so neatly put it in the Q&A, there’s a “fine line between self-improvement and self-erasure.” Hana’s use of these corpse-pills, whilst obviously a terrible and unethical idea, comes from a place that is ultimately easy to understand.

So how am I feeling now about horror as a genre? Whilst it is, of course, defined by its jumpscares, supernatural imagery and general sense of dread—James described it as the “closest you can get to dying without actually [dying]”—it’s clearly becoming a go-to genre for artists with something to say. Horror is proving incredibly versatile, especially in recent years: the horrors of male entitlement and abuse in Obsession, the fear of repression and neglecting your identity in I Saw the TV Glow, the crushing pressure of beauty standards and the male gaze in The Substance. These films feel defined by a kind of transformation, turning simple fear into a potent tool for social commentary. And with Saccharine, a movie that stands toe-to-toe with these other spectacular horror films of recent years, it’s clear that Australian horror is in very good hands.