How The Ugly Stepsister Found Beauty In The Grotesque

Warning! Spoilers ahead for The Ugly Stepsister.

The story of Cinderella is one of opportunity, luck, and fantasy, at least for the eponymous princess. Everything works out for her good, from the glass slipper that fits only her foot to the woodland animals who guide her path. But woe befalls anyone who dares to stand between Cinderella and her destiny, like her ugly stepsisters. In the Brothers Grimm’s original version of the tale, they cut off their own toes to fit her slipper and woo the charming prince, only to get their eyes plucked out for their presumption. And they fare even worse in Emilie Blichfeldt’s genre-bending take on the fairy tale, though The Ugly Stepsister goes to great lengths to show us that these women are all victims of the patriarchy.

“I have myself lived under the burden of feeling ugly under the tyranny of beauty,” Blichfeldt tells Inverse. The more she “tried and failed to fit in,” the more she found herself relating to the desperation driving Cinderella’s stepsisters.

Blickfeldt poured that feeling into her unconventional, tragic heroine, Elvira (Lea Myren), who goes to bonkers lengths to win the prince’s affections. The Ugly Stepsister channels Cronenbergian body horror and Scandinavian provocateurs like Lars Von Trier in depicting Elvira’s descent. Its seamless mix of heady fantasy and black humor naturally entranced audiences when The Ugly Stepsister debuted at Sundance earlier this year. As it makes its way to Shudder, Blichfeldt sits down with Inverse to explore her influences, the tragic irony of Cinderella, and the film’s secret weapon: tapeworms.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

When did you first fall in love with film?

I grew up in some of the most picture-perfect places in Norway, a place called the Lofoten Islands. It’s a very beautiful place, but it’s very remote. I grew up in these very remote, small, small, small, small villages where the road ends and there’s just ocean and mountains and the horizon. My parents didn’t believe in movies, but they believed in books and art. We grew up without VHS or DVD. We had one or two TV channels. So I discovered movies when I was 13, because that’s when we finally nagged our parents to get a VHS and DVD player, two in one. That’s when I started watching films.

There was no Blockbuster around or any video store, so I would go to the library that had these rotating shelves of mostly new movies. I found Amélie, and I totally fell in love with it. Later on I found, through Nicole Kidman, Dogville by Lars Von Trier. And I was blown away. I was 16. And then I watched everything Lars Von Trier. It was like someone took life seriously somehow.

Are there any directors who inspired the way you shot The Ugly Stepsister?

Absolutely. There’s a few obscure films from the ’70s, Eastern European fairy tale films like Beauty and the Beast by Juraj Herz, and a film called Three Wishes for Cinderella. Those were very influential on me. I also watched Picnic at Hanging Rock again, which has this eerie, uncanny, totally feminine, beautiful-but-scary feeling to it.

I also discovered Walerian Borowczyk, this Polish filmmaker that made erotic films in the ’70s. It was a bit surprising to me that he would influence me that much. But it’s just all about the love for the real body. He shoots young and old and all these different girls. The body he’s interested in is just this natural, beautiful body. And he shoots it so beautifully. He also has this cheeky, sexy grotesqueness as well, which is fun. And also, for the gore and body horror, it’s [David] Cronenberg and [Dario] Argento all the way. And also a little bit [Lucio] Fulci. That’s the last. [Laughs]

What were your first memories of the story of Cinderella?

Since my parents didn’t believe in movies, and we didn’t have a movie theater around where I grew up, I never really saw Cinderella. I guess I’ve seen drips and bits and pieces through cultural history here and there. It’s been in the conversation. But I grew up with a small Pixi Book of the Brothers Grimm’s version. I was a keen reader. And I remember the whole shebang of the stepsisters cutting off the toes. And also the way they were drawn. I still have all these images, they have never left me. I was struck by all of that.

When did you decide to adapt it?

I was working with another character for my exam thesis for the Norwegian National Film School. She was yet another woman that was struggling to fit within the beauty ideal. Luckily for her, she has a talking vulva that tells her that she is lonely... but anyway, I was working with her, and then I had a creative nap. I was just thinking loosely about her as a character and what I could do. And suddenly I envisaged her as Cinderella. This guy she was in love with came riding in on the horse [with her glass slipper]. And she fit the shoe. And she was [easily] lifted up on the horse; she weighed nothing. And as they rode off to the castle, suddenly a talking dog came and said, “Your shoe is full of blood.” And they both looked down, and she was so sad because she suddenly realized: “Of course I’m not Cinderella, how stupid am I? I’m the stepsister. I cut off my toes to fit this shoe.”

For the first time I put myself in the stepsister shoes, pun intended, and I totally felt with her. And when the prince then rejected her, I could totally feel her shame and her sorrow from the times I’ve tried and failed to fit in. I have myself lived under the burden of feeling ugly under the tyranny of beauty and all of that. When I woke up, I was in shock because I had related to this character — this overlooked, ridiculed character that I myself had ridiculed — and suddenly I understood I was her. It wasn’t me thinking, “Oh, which fairytale can I redo?” or being all clever about it. It was just like this lightning. And then I couldn’t turn away: the stepsister had chosen me.

What was the process of casting Elvira as your ugly stepsister?

I had this idea that I wanted someone who wasn’t a big name or anything. And I wanted someone who had this youngness to them. So actually I saw 500 girls who were amateurs. And then I was like, “No, I’m not finding gold within all of these normal people.” Then I opened it for a little bit older, and started seeing some of the girls who’d done a little bit more in Norway. And then I invited Lea Myren to come. I thought she’d been typecast a little bit for a TV series called Kids in Crime. She came in and just from the first audition she did, I was like floored: “Are you kidding me? Who sent this girl from heaven?” Without her there’s no movie.

I love how you position her as this very naive, lovestruck girl here, because we’ve all been that kid reading fairy tales and thinking, “One day, the prince is going to come get me, and we’re going to get married and it’s going to be amazing” — just to get a rude awakening later.

I really wanted to make it believable, and I thought that she should have a relationship to the prince before the invitation to the ball. I thought there was a truth in that. A lot of girls see these fairy tale movies. But also with all this idolizing of the teenage boys, like Justin Bieber, I thought, “Oh my God, what if the prince is like Justin Bieber of this universe, and she’s a Belieber?”

It’s so timeless, because that’s just what girls are encouraged to do.

Exactly. That’s supposed to be her dream. That’s the end goal, girls: Getting that guy!

It’s even better that you introduce the prince as this writer of love poems that Elvira is religiously reading.

Those were very hard and very fun to write. I wrote them first, very dumb, and that was cool. And then my script consultant, Pierre Hodgson, said, “It’s going to be even cooler if it’s still dumb but you write it in a way that it seems very not dumb.” He introduced me to this priest from Shakespeare’s time who had written some sexy love poems, which I loved. So I took some of that and tossed it all together with my stupid rhymes.

So many parts of Elvira’s “transformation” are so gnarly, but my favorite may be your interpretation of her cutting off her toes to fit into the glass slipper, and cutting the wrong foot.

You know where that come from? I’m so bad with left and right. So I was thinking so much when I wrote the script: “But what shoe does the prince have, and what shoe does she have?” And then I just thought, the natural thing would to be just to put the shoe against the opposite foot and do the thing from there. At one point I was a bit unsure if I would keep that. For a long time it was actually cut, and then we put it in again. Now it’s one of the biggest laughs.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t end our conversation with the tapeworms. How did you land on Elvira swallowing this tapeworm egg, refusing to take an antidote, and eventually puking up a whole nest of worms as your grand finale?

I found the tapeworm quite early in development. It was one of the first scenes I really knew and what I wanted it to be. It was the puking of the worm, which is really about Elvira ridding herself of all of the self-objectification, or this gaze, that she’s internalized. I’d also researched it a bit, and I knew I didn’t want her to sh*t it out, which is what people usually did — that would be too gross. I knew it was coming out the mouth.

It [really came together] when I talked to my prosthetic makeup designer, Thomas Foldberg, for the first meeting. I knew I wanted it to be long and thin, because it was something about the thinness that was surprising. But then I was like, “And then she pulls, pulls, pulls, and then it comes out.” That’s when I got the idea that it should be stuck for a moment... and then it all comes out. I’m trying to use every application, every meeting, I always prepare for those things and think of them as a way to always get deeper or further into what I’m going to do. And also when you’re explaining a scene to someone, you want them to have a great experience already then with that scene. So that was what propelled that idea there.

The Ugly Stepsister is streaming on Shudder now.