Writer-director Coralie Fargeat hit the ground running with her 2017 debut feature film “Revenge,” which felt like if Meir Zarchi’s “I Spit on Your Grave” from 1978 had been filtered through a layer of Zack Snyder’s “Sucker Punch” from 2011.

Far from suffering a sophomore slump, Fargeat has only accelerated with her second feature film, “The Substance,” which feels like a Brundlefly telepod fusion accident between Larry Cohen’s “The Stuff” from 1985 and Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” from a couple of years ago.

Fargeat was born in 1976, only one year later than me, so it’s tempting to attribute her filmmaking proclivities to her growing up with the same scathingly satirical splatstick horror films from the 1980s that I did. She wears the thorny crown of body horror movie-maker David Cronenberg like it was made for her.

Credit is due to my fellow cinephile and online correspondent, Joe Gualtieri, for astutely spotting parallels and shared elements between Fargeat’s “The Substance” and a host of other films, including:

• David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man” from 1980 (the physically deformed John Merrick).

• Paul Verhoeven’s “RoboCop” from 1987 (one could imagine Dennis Quaid’s aggressively crass TV producer “Harvey” bellowing, “I’d buy that for a dollar!”).

• Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” from 1950 (a fading star desperate to reclaim the spotlight).

But more than anything else, what Fargeat captures from her cinematic predecessors is the strain of gratuitously visceral, tangibly gory portrayals of grotesque physical transformation that ran through so many 1980s horror movies.

From Cronenberg’s “Videodrome” in 1983 and “The Fly” in 1986, to the “Alien” films of Ridley Scott in 1979 and James Cameron in 1986, that era showered moviegoers with fake blood and guts to convey what horror fan and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro described as “the betrayal of the flesh.”

Fargeat fully shows her hand with the opening sequences of “The Substance,” which feature not only the erosion by the elements of fictional celebrity Elisabeth Sparkle’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but also Quaid’s “Harvey” — who shares his name with sex predator film producer Harvey Weinstein — transforming the act of eating shellfish into a disgusting ordeal.

I fully welcome Fargeat’s foghorn-volume feminist messaging about the double-standards regarding the aging of male versus female celebrities. She couples it with an equally necessary and unsubtle drug addiction metaphor, that points out how willing our ephemeral culture is to sacrifice our future welfare, just to extend our fleeting pleasures in the present.

But I share my colleague Mr. Gualtieri’s lament that Fargeat doesn’t devote more attention to what motivates either the aging Elisabeth Sparkle (played by Demi Moore) or her artificially youthened alter ego Sue (played by Margaret Qualley, a.k.a. Andie MacDowell’s daughter).

Perhaps Fargeat intended her absence of backstories to serve as an additional comment upon the vapidity of the entertainment industry. It’s established that Elisabeth Sparkle won an Academy Award (for which Moore was nominated this year, for this role, but lost), so she presumably had grander dreams than leading Jane Fonda-style workouts.

For a film that so thoroughly denounces the grossness of the mass-media’s male gaze, Fargeat parodies it by recreating it with an unabashed explicitness, during Sue’s aerobic shows.

Fargeat ensures that any viewers who might be thrilling to Qualley and Moore’s curves and nudity for more prurient reasons will pay the wages for their ogling later on, as the gruesome climatic spectacle of “The Substance” lives up to the standards of special effects legends Stan Winston and Tom Savini.

I cannot offer an unconditional endorsement of “The Substance,” because even as a hardened horror fan, the final-act physical dissolution of both of our protagonist’s dual identities had me recoiling into my theater seat — even as I laughed alongside the younger women at my screening, who found its graphic absurdities hilarious for all the right reasons.

If even I was cringing from the disfigurement and mutation taking place onscreen, then unless you already possess a strong stomach for stuff like zombie hordes and extraterrestrial parasites, take it from me, you should not watch “The Substance.”

The most unrealistic aspect of this film is that Benjamin Kračun’s otherwise masterfully manipulative in-your-face cinematography falls short when it attempts to make me see Demi Moore as a pathetically past-her-prime hag when we first see her onscreen.

Although Kračun’s shots emphasize the occasionally severe angles that Moore’s distinctive facial architecture has always possessed, she looks as good at 62 years old as any number of attractive women look in their 40s.