Interview with Emilie Blichfeldt director of The Ugly Stepsister

The Ugly Stepsister, Blichtfeldt’s debut feature — which premiered at Sundance and will screen in the Panorama section at the Berlinale — reframes the classic fairy tale through the POV of Cinderella’s sibling and her horrifying quest to achieve the beauty she sees as required for love and acceptance.

Taking equal parts inspiration from the Brothers Grimm — whose version of Cinderella includes the stepsisters mutilating their feet to fit the famed slipper and fool the prince — and from the visceral gore of David Cronenberg, Blichtfeldt’s film is a further addition to a new wave of feminist body horror and would make a nice double bill with Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. In place of the high-tech, Ozymepic-esque injections Demi Moore subjects herself to in Fargeat’s film, we have a low-tech parasite, in the form of a tapeworm egg which the stepsister Elvira (Lea Myren) swallows to make her thin. “When Elvira eats the egg,” says Blichtfeldt, “it’s a metaphor for her internalizing that objectifying gaze. That worm inside her eats her up, both metaphorically and physically.”

Blichtfeldt spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about twisting the Cinderella myth into a tale of body horror, the painstaking practical effects she used to “get the gore right,” and why she thinks her take, rather than Disney’s, has universal appeal. “There’s only one Cinderella. The rest of us are the ugly stepsister, struggling to fit into the shoe.”

What version of Cinderella did you grow up on?

I grew up in a house in the north of Norway, where the road ends at the horizon, with no other children around, a very isolated place. And my parents were all about books. We got a combined VHS/DVD player when I was 13, which was the first time I started watching movies. Before that, it was all about books. We had a TV with one channel that wouldn’t work if there was a storm. was storm. But in Norway, there is this tradition of watching a Czech version film version of Cinderella every Christmas. It’s called Three Wishes for Cinderella (1973). I don’t know how young I was when I started watching it, but I remember I saw it with my brothers when I was in my pre-teens and I just found it magical. It’s funny and so otherworldly. It’s so real and unreal at the same time. I really love the Eastern European fairy tale cinema from that time. They are shot on real locations and it’s all live action but the costumes and the special effects are kind of unreal, uncanny, very magical, and beautiful, like a parallel universe.

It’s not like Disney or more American fairy tales, where everything is unreal, where there’s nothing that has this gritty quality. That has its own charm, but I was always taken by this style. I also had a book, which I now understand made a very big impact on me, the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella, one of the first books I read as a child. I found the book again a few years ago after I got the idea for this film, and there’s this image in it: One of the sisters is on the horse with the prince and has the slipper on, and there are big blood drops falling from the shoe. It’s an image I could never get out of my head.

Where did the idea come from to flip the script of the story and tell Cinderella from the perspective of the ugly stepsister?

I’ve always been very fascinated by, and have empathized with, women who have trouble with their body image, and who are struggling to fit within femininity. In my previous work, I’ve tried to show these characters, where you can empathize with them, but also see them as beautiful, to really challenge the ideas of what is beauty, and what does it do to us to have these struggles.

I was like having one of my creative naps, and suddenly this character from one of my shorts, Sarah, a [6 foot tall] full-bodied, beautiful woman, is in this Cinderella costume, and here’s the prince is coming. So she slips on the slipper, which fits perfectly, and she runs out. The prince lifts her up on the horse like she weighs nothing, and then they start riding. Then she looks down and the shoe is full of blood. She realizes: “I’m not Cinderella. I am the Stepsister. I cut off my toes to fit the shoe.” I woke up and realized: That’s me. I’m the ugly stepsister. Not just because I wear [size 11] shoes myself, but because I also long to fit into this idealized form of womanhood. It’s impossible to fit in, but the longing is so big. Because you’re trying to be loved, you know? But there is only one Cinderella. The rest of us are the ugly stepsister, struggling to fit into the shoe. I knew from that moment this was going to be my first feature.

Interestingly in your film, although you change the point of view, you still stick quite close to the events of the fairy tale.

I’ve taken the liberty to combine different versions of Cinderella. The Brothers Grimm one describes the sisters as beautiful on the outside and ugly on the inside, which I still think is very interesting. Then there’s the Charles Perrault version, the French one, which Disney drew from. Disney added the idea of linking beauty and kindness on one side and physical and inner ugliness on the other. You had that in fairy tales before, with witches and their big noses, but Disney really makes it obvious.

But Cinderella is a fairy tale, so there is no original version. The question for me was: What’s my perspective on this? It was really important for me to make the stepsister a three-dimensional character, not just an archetype. I thought: What if we met the real person behind this archetype? It was also important for me not to make her into a new Cinderella, that she’s the kind one and Cinderella is evil. There was an American movie [2002’s Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister] that presents the stepsister as being misunderstood, that she’s actually very kind. But for me, it was important that she becomes the stepsister of the fairy tale. So halfway through the movie, when she swallows the tapeworm egg, that’s when you really step into the fairy tale. Cinderella becomes Cinderella, and Elvira becomes the wicked stepsister.

Actually the hardest character to put into this three-dimensional world was Cinderella. I wanted her to be a complex character as well. At one point I found a sentence that was the key to unlocking her character: That everything comes naturally for Cinderella. Her beauty, her emotions, her kindness to animals, she’s a natural. And Elvira is not. Everything is difficult for Elvira. I think we can all relate to that. We’ve all had those friends where everything seems to fall into place.

Was the idea from the start to make it a horror film, and a body horror film at that?

Around the same time I got the idea, I discovered David Cronenberg, which was a very big deal for me. It was in film school and I was struggling. I had this theme, I had this voice and point of view but I didn’t know what movie I was going to make, what my style and my taste should be. Then during Christmas break, I stumbled over [David Cronenberg’s] Crash (1996) on Norwegian national TV, which was a weird choice to broadcast over Christmas, and I was just instinctively so taken and so intrigued. I’ve never been able to watch horror movies. I can’t do jump scares. I’m afraid of the dark. I don’t do amusement parks. But there was something about body horror that was so intriguing.

Diving into the whole of Cronenberg’s filmography, I started to see how this was something I wanted to to use in my stories. His style was so linked to my themes, because it was about people in bodies, having real bodies that they had to deal with. And as an audience, we relate to these characters through their bodily experiences. Then there’s the even deeper layer, where these bodily experiences are filled with metaphors and deep philosophical ideas. Cronenberg is insane on that that level. I thought: How cool wouldn’t it be to tell a story like that with one of my characters? The Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella is also body horror. But I wanted to be sure that every piece of gore in my movie wasn’t there just for the gore but would hold these ideas, these metaphors, that were so interesting and important for me.

The gore in your film, like Cronenberg’s, feels very visceral. Is it all practical effects?

Yes. I’m also a big fan of Dario Argento and his body horror. There’s something about practical effects, something about an effect that actually looks a bit fake or a bit wrong, that makes it feel more real or more scary because you can’t really control it or place it. But I also have this theory that maybe we like it because it’s not totally real. It’s like a contract you make with the audience: We know this isn’t real, so we can dare to look at it and enjoy it. If you make it too realistic, it’s not possible to watch.

It becomes pornographic.

Exactly.

What was the most challenging scene to shoot, from the practical effects point of view?

This is a debut feature made under the European system, so there’s a limit to the budget you can get for this. There were economic constraints and we had a very pressed schedule. But I knew I couldn’t make a body horror movie and have the gore be shit.

So we used a whole day, 12 hours, for the scene where she chops off her toes. We used a whole day for the scene when she pukes up the worm. We had these scenes precisely storyboarded to make sure we had the practical stuff we needed, but it’s still so technical and takes so much time. It was a real fun process for me to find the language of these scenes. I think I tossed half the storyboard out on the day, just rethinking, rethinking what was possible. There is some VFX in the film, there are cleanups and stuff like that. But I was very fortunate to work with a legendary VFX supervisor, Peter Hjorth, who does all of Lars von Trier’s movies. And he’s very pro-practical effects. He says you get these quirks, these faults, with practical effects that a computer, or a person behind a computer, would never think to put in, but that is actually what makes these things come alive.

Your film deconstructs the beauty myth or the Cinderella myth. Do you think it can have an impact on the way young women see these stories?

I hope so! That’s why I make movies, to reach an audience and have an impact on them. But you can choose what to take away from it. There’s a moral in this film, but it’s not moralistic. I also fucking adore those costumes! After the body horror, my favorite thing working on this film was getting into the costumes. I spent two years researching, going to the Victoria Albert Museum of design in London, and just diving into fashion history.

There are so many aspects of fairy tales that are appealing and I think these stories are amazing, but I also want to deconstruct certain aspects of them. Like why do we value our looks and our appearance, to such a degree, why do we view ourselves as objects?

In the middle of the film, a character tells Elvira that “it’s the inside that matters” but that she’s brave because “you’re changing your outside to match what you know is on the inside.” I think that’s the language I know from the modern-day, it’s the language that capitalizes on our insecurities. Real beauty might lie on the inside, but the real value we give to people is based on their outer appearance. When Elvira eats the egg, it’s a metaphor for her internalizing that objectifying gaze. That worm inside her eats her up, both metaphorically and physically.