In The Substance, Coralie Fargeat’s new body horror film, Demi Moore stars as an aging celebrity who takes a strange drug to generate a younger version of herself. It doesn’t end well. Near the end of the film, a monstrous creature is spawned via Moore’s improper use of the substance – Monstro Elisasue, it’s called, with teeth coming out of its chest, a face bulging out of its bum, and all manner of other icky, scrambled body parts. In front of a stunned crowd, it explodes, spraying gore everywhere. But speaking to GQ, The Substance’s prosthetics designer Pierre-Olivier Persin said that Fargeat wanted this creature to be more than just a “rubber monster” – it needed a “tragic quality”.

In a somewhat spooky coincidence, a new Francis Bacon exhibition, Human Presence, opened yesterday at the National Portrait gallery. It includes 55 portraits, inspired by friends, lovers and (in a recurring riff on a Diego Velázquez painting) Pope Innocent X. His work is filled with visual horror – bodies that collapse in on themselves; screaming popes; hanging animal carcasses – but, as with Monstro Elisasue, there’s always just enough humanity left for us to grasp on to.

Bacon’s work has always had a close relationship to cinema. He never liked painting from models; instead, he scavenged ideas from photographs and film stills. A nurse screaming on the Odessa steps in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin was reproduced in many of his paintings. In an interview with the art critic David Sylvester, he called film a “marvellous medium” and mused that he might have become a filmmaker if he was younger.

Henrietta Moraes, Francis Bacon, 1966Francis Bacon