By RICKY J. DUARTE
In the great pantheon of iconic horror characters, one thing is clear: Oftentimes, the villain is the more captivating archetype. The same rings true for classic fairy tales. Perhaps it’s because the squeaky-clean modern versions we know and tell today descend from deeper, more twisted origins, the best-known being those from The Brothers Grimm. Yet even those crazy Grimms got their inspiration from morbid tales told before their own.
Since its first publication in 1619 by French writer Charles Perrault, the story of Cinderella has delighted countless people with its themes of hope, kindness and resilience. Conversely, it has also disgusted and shocked readers with the brutal and gory outcomes bestowed upon its three villainous figures, Cindy’s Wicked Stepmother and her two Ugly Stepsisters. The tale typically sees them undergo pedal and ocular mutilation as punishment for their cruelty. That’s it–no character development, no redeeming qualities and no mercy.
In recent decades, a surge of archetype-bending “other sides of the story” have made their way to literature and film, yet from the multiple incarnations of WICKED to Disney’s CRUELLA, these retellings treat their protagonists as almost entirely new characters, ultimately unrecognizable from the ones we’ve come to know. Suddenly, these relentlessly evil figures are revealed to have been grossly misrepresented and misunderstood in their origin tales. (Call me crazy, but I find it difficult to root for or find sympathy in a character who wants to skin puppies and sew them together in the name of high fashion.)
While fairy tales are obviously fabrications of fantasy, often lending themselves to an unrealistic lesson in virtue, in real life, no one is entirely “good” or “bad.” This moralistic gray area is explored with squeamish aplomb in Emilie Blichfeldt‘s new take, THE UGLY STEPSISTER.
In the film, coming to theaters tomorrow, April 18 from IFC Films and Shudder, sisters Elvira and Alma (Lea Myren and Flo Fagerli) arrive with their mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) at the home of their new stepfather and his daughter Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), a.k.a. the soon-to-be-dubbed Cinderella. Quicker than you can say, “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo,” the women find themselves widowed/orphaned and broke, stirring a rapid shift in dynamic within the household. We all know Cinderella’s side of the story (which Blichfeldt cleverly maintains as a sidelined B-plot) but here we’re introduced to the naïve, hopeful and perfectly average Elvira, who puts herself through hell in the name of unattainable beauty standards.
Utilizing squirm-inducing body horror to represent the aesthetic extremes young women are pressured to achieve, the film also unveils the horrific, tragic truth that, no matter how hard you try, there will always be someone more effortlessly charming, charismatic, popular and beautiful. THE UGLY STEPSISTER tells a side of the story for those of us without a Fairy Godmother. (See our review here.)
RUE MORGUE spoke with Blichfeldt about the horror of fairy tales, the societal expectations placed upon women throughout the ages and the gray areas that lie between the good and the bad.
Congratulations on such a spectacular debut feature. What drew you to this piece?
I had a creative nap and was struck by lightning. I was working on a character, a girl who didn’t fit the beauty ideals–you know, two meters tall, lovely-chubby, but she didn’t know it–that it was lovely. And then in this dream, or dream state, I suddenly thought of her as Cinderella, and that she fit the shoe and rode off with the prince toward the castle. Then suddenly, she looked down and the shoe was full of blood. She realized, of course she was not Cinderella! She was the stepsister who cut off her toes to try to fit the shoe.
And when I woke up from my dream state, I was in shock because I, for the first time, sympathized. I’d been in the stepsister’s shoes–pun intended!–and they fit me. I understood that this was an overlooked, ridiculed character–ridiculed by me as well–but [she] was actually someone I really related to. I have shoe size 11. I’ve lived under the burden of feeling ugly. I’ve struggled a lot with body image, and suddenly I found this character who had been there all along, and she was me, but I had not had sympathy for her before. So that’s how I got the idea, and I just thought that there must be more stepsisters out there, and I have to try to make this movie, so I can–so we can all–get redemption.
“Ugly” is such a harsh and hurtful word. What does it mean to make a movie about looks, beauty, status and body image in 2025?
I don’t know if it’s that different actually today than before. We like to think we are very modern, the things we’re doing. The techniques are getting more and more advanced, and also in the sense that we can do more and more non-invasive stuff. But really, women suffering for beauty is not anything new. And that’s why I also wanted to do this old fairy tale and not give it a very modern look or put it in “today.” To remind people that this is a part of the female history. I think that will also change how we view our “free will,” you know? Our “free choices” today are actually things that women have been doing for a long time, and they’ve started doing it during the thousands of years of being objects owned by men, where the only way for us to get power–or, sometimes, the only means to survive–was to make ourselves into even more desirable objects for men. And I think it’s a thing to wonder upon. Today, although we’ve been emancipated in many ways, so many parts of that role are still a very big part of the cultural role we have in society today.
We’re encountering a long-overdue surge of horror films about women that are made by women. What is it about the horror genre that provides a compelling space for female stories?
You know, I think now that more women are really reaching behind the camera, getting there and getting out with the movies–and also with the waves of feminism that have come recently, since the ’90s, and then I was a part of the one that came around 2010… We’re angry. We’ve been hurt. We’ve suffered, and we’re mad about it. And all of that is all horror.
For a lot of us, the role we’ve been given as females has been a horror story, in the sense that we’ve been taught to do self-harm in the name of beauty or to become the woman we “should” become. The whole “project” you’re given–like, I stopped shaving in 2013, and that was really scary because I didn’t know if society, or heterosexual men that I’m interested in–if they would accept my body the way it looks, right? And people were saying that I had started a project and I was like, “No, I just stopped one!”
Also, body horror in particular… I think being a female is such a body experience, you know, for so many reasons–childbirth and all of that, as well. [During the] #MeToo movement, for example, we saw how easy it was to reduce a woman to a body like this. The most powerful woman could be reduced to only her body–to only being an object. And that’s really what I wanted to tackle, and why body horror is so strong.
Anyone who’s familiar with The Brothers Grimm knows where the story is headed for poor Elvira, but the climax is still effective, shocking, deeply upsetting, surprising and well-earned. What was your approach to reaching this inevitable fate for our poor antiheroine?
That was the only thing I knew from the start: This is a film about making someone chopping off their toes relatable to the audience. Which is a big one, but it’s relatable to me. I think it’s such a strong image–her chopping off the toes to try to fit this impossibly small shoe. What makes a person do that? I think that has to do with self-objectification. That your body becomes a project and an object and that you have started objectifying yourself, right? So your value is in the outer. But I don’t think we’re born like that. I think that is something that is put on us by society. So I wanted to give her that journey so people really understand what that means.
She starts as this young girl with big dreams who has no idea how she looks, or what people will think of her. Well, she knows what she looks like, but she just doesn’t know how people regard it. She doesn’t know it’s “wrong” yet, right? Then they start objectifying her, and by the time she gets the tapeworm egg, that’s like my “red pill/blue pill” moment. So it’s like, what kind of world view will she choose? And she chooses to take the pill, which is her actually internalizing that outer gaze on her–the objectification–and she starts self-objectifying from there.
I didn’t think I needed to tell the story from a totally new angle. That was not the point. I didn’t want people to be like, “Oh, she said that this was going to be the Cinderella story, but then she did something else.” You know, I’ve seen some of those movies myself and then I’ve just felt like, “Oh, you didn’t say something true and new to what I knew. You just took something into a totally different direction that has nothing to do with [the source material] anymore.” So I thought if I just used all of the narrative stakes from the Cinderella story, there would still be the stepsister’s story. We will not know what that is because there’s no flesh on that story. So I’d just fill out those moments and then remind the audience again and again that yes, it is the Cinderella story you’re watching, but then give myself that freedom to make the characters three-dimensional, not just two-dimensional. To still keep them within the archetypes, but make sure that they are believable humans within that archetype.
From Elvira’s perspective, Agnes–the film’s Cinderella character–is thoughtfully portrayed as neither good nor bad–she is dealing with her own struggles. Was it difficult to keep her from becoming a villain in this story?
You know, some people think she is–some people are pissed at her after seeing the movie. Others have thought she’s really mean to Elvira and all that. I don’t believe that someone is just a villain or someone’s just good. If you make something that’s not very black-and-white, people will maybe have different takeaways from it based on what they come into it with. But for me, it was not that hard. It was actually harder not to write her as this dumb blonde being like, “La-de-da-de-da! Oh, mice! Oh my, you’re so cute.” I thought of doing that because, for me, she was the hardest to empathize with somehow, or to understand, because I’m not that. But then I understood that I needed to find my kind of Cinderella quality because no one’s only good, or only kind–then you’re like, psychotic or something, right?
So I had to find my Cinderella quality, and for me it’s just this natural beauty. I think she’s a “natural” in the sense that she is naturally sexual, she has a natural relationship with her feelings, she has natural grace, all of that. She has had these parents loving her, so she loves herself and she has no shame over her sexuality or her anger. And therefore, for me, she’s still like the Cinderella character, right? Because she’s still kind of an ideal and something that is good and that we should all kind of try to be.
The film masterfully plants fairy-tale logic into a world rooted fairly deeply in plausible reality. What was your approach to achieving that balance?
That was hard, because I didn’t want to end up making a costume drama or seeming like a timely piece, but at the same time I wanted it to have this real feeling, not a plasticky [theatricality] or fake feeling. In a lot of the more modern retellings, you can just smell 2025 all over it, or there’s CGI or whatever. I wanted to have this “Once upon a time” timeless quality. Which is really when it’s a fairy tale–when you don’t know when it’s made, right? And it will never go out of fashion or style.
So I was really inspired by some Eastern European fairy-tale movies from the ’70s, because they had fairly small budgets. They would shoot on real locations and in natural lighting, and the costumes were very costume-y and the effects were very effective. You see that it’s fake, and if they would use artifical lighting it would be red or very strong. So you have this stark contrast between the real and the unreal, and it creates this uncanny fairy-tale feeling, but you still believe that the world is real. In Norwegian fairy tales, you often say that it’s “beyond three mountains” or like “many mountains.” So it’s still in our world, but it’s just far, far beyond. And then also, we obscured all our fashions and tastes through a ’70s lens upon the late 1800s.
That ’70s feel is present in the cinematography, as well. I have to ask, as so many of us were first introduced to the story through this film: Did you feel particularly compelled to include any influence from Disney’s classic 1950 animated CINDERELLA?
I don’t have a strong relationship to that film, because I grew up without movies and my parents didn’t believe in that, and especially not Disney. So I’ve only seen a few clips as a grown-up, since of course it’s been a part of pop culture. I also had this feeling that I wanted to reference different versions of Cinderella, but organically, so only from my memory–somehow from our collective memory. It’s also especially influenced by, of course, The Brothers Grimm, but also this ’70s version we see in Norway every Christmas: a Czech version called THREE WISHES FOR CINDERELLA. So there are extra Easter eggs for those who know that.
But then, the [Disney] one came up with the sewing of the dress because, when I had this idea that the worms would do it, that was like the mice doing it. And then the pumpkin is actually from [Charles] Perrault–it’s not just Disney. I knew people would think of that, but I thought that was fun. I believe there’s a special glee in those moments, where you’re in a movie and then you’re reminded, “Oh yeah, I know that stuff! I’m in on that joke,” somehow.
You mentioned the worms–the film features themes of metamorphosis and change. Alma beginning to menstruate; worms metamorphosize; Cinderella’s gown has a transformation. Where did that come from and what was the intention there?
As a filmmaker, you start obsessing over one thing, and then you see that thing everywhere else–so, you know, the worms just kept coming! So I had her with the tapeworm, and then the father was rotting and of course there were some worms there, and then the silkworms came.
A lot of characters change through the movie, but for the bleeding of Alma, you know, she is not eligible for marriage, and I think for her to really step into her own narrative, she needed that shocker to really start thinking of leaving. And of course, I just love this idea of the thunderstorm, and her bleeding, and Elvira bleeding. I really like to work with those things [because they’re] more things that happen organically.
Originally, there were more scenes with Alma, but we unfortunately had very little to shoot, so some of them went. But I think many people really relate to her, and I love that. I say that she’s the voice of reason, and also my advocate in the movie. She was somehow my speaker to you guys saying, “I know, it’s all crazy.” [Laughs] It’s like she’s the anchor we all can hang onto in the moments of insanity.
