When news resurfaced in September 2024 that Ryan Murphy’s long-gestating adaptation of The Beauty was finally moving forward – with a cast announcement landing on September 30 – it immediately invited comparisons to The Substance, which had opened in theatres just ten days earlier. Online discourse did what it always does: it reached for accusations of imitation, opportunism, or creative overlap that felt a little too neat to be accidental.
But that instinct – to assume copying rather than convergence – often misunderstands how culture actually moves.
Murphy optioned the rights to Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley’s comic series The Beauty back in 2016, nearly a decade before The Substance arrived fully formed on the big screen. The timeline alone complicates any narrative of reactionary development. Yet the proximity of their public emergence in 2024 makes them feel like twins separated at birth and reunited by algorithmic fate. Both interrogate beauty as currency, obsession, contagion – both use body transformation as horror, spectacle, and social critique.
What we’re witnessing isn’t plagiarism. It’s simultaneity.
Culture doesn’t progress in a straight line; it pulses. Certain anxieties lie dormant until conditions—technological, political, psychological – make them unavoidable. Right now, beauty is no longer just aesthetic; it’s biometric, monetized, optimized, filtered, injectable, and tracked. The body has become a site of performance and control, and the fear beneath the gloss is finally leaking into mainstream storytelling.
This is how the zeitgeist works. Multiple artists, often unaware of one another, tune into the same frequency because the signal is loud. The question isn’t who said it first? but why is it being said now?
Prince once spoke about this phenomenon when asked about his creative relationship to Michael Jackson. Rather than framing it as rivalry or imitation, he described it as access to the same source – two artists receiving the same creative “downloads” from the ether at the same time. The work may manifest differently, but the origin point is shared. As Prince put it, they were “coming from the same place,” drawing from a common well of inspiration that transcended individual intent.
That idea feels especially apt here.
The Beauty and The Substance are not echoes of each other; they are reflections of us. They emerge from a cultural moment obsessed with self-modification, terrified of aging, and increasingly aware of the violence embedded in perfection. Horror has always been the genre that metabolizes unspoken fears first, and beauty – once aspirational and benign – has become monstrous enough to qualify.
The discomfort some viewers feel when these projects appear side by side may actually be recognition. A sense that the mask is slipping, that multiple storytellers are holding up mirrors at once. When art arrives in clusters, it’s often because reality has become too loud to ignore.
So rather than asking which project is derivative, it’s more revealing to ask what conditions made both inevitable. Why now? Why this fixation? Why this urgency?
Because culture, like creativity, rarely speaks in a single voice. It hums. And every so often, enough artists hear the same note at the same time that it becomes impossible to pretend it isn’t there.
In moments like these, the overlap isn’t the story.
The signal is.