Folklore and fairy tale are some of the few human mechanisms that withstand the ruins of time. They outlive tyrannies and war and globalization and industrial and technological revolutions, reinventing themselves to suit the structure of whichever generation they live in. Such is the Cinderella story, where a humble woman is freed from her suffering via The Love of a Good Man. This spring, Norwegian director Emilie Blichfeldt offers a more frightful, satirical idea of this perceived happily ever after, and considers just exactly what a girl might do to get her happy ending.

Blichfeldt’s directorial feature debut The Ugly Stepsister finds the Cinderella story mangled and bloodied, told through a lens she coins as “beauty horror.” Its Sundance premiere saw an audience member vomiting in the theater aisles, while over at horror’s Overlook Film Festival it took home the feature film audience award. Considering the hold that the classic Cinderella story has on the masses, Blichfeldt says, “Women have lived as objects—thousands of years as objects that have been under the power of men, that have been owned by men, and that have been controlled by men. Although we have been emancipated, there are still some of the same expectations in our cultural role as objects.”

‍The Ugly Stepsister is told from the perspective of Elvira (Lea Myren), who assumes the titular role. She arrives on screen rather innocently, with dreams of marrying the handsome prince (Isac Calmroth). In Blichfeldt’s version, this prince is ungentlemanly, a horny, drunken jock as opposed to charming. Elvira’s fall from grace ensues when her mother, desperate for money, concocts a plan to marry her off into a wealthy family, the only problem being that Elvira lacks the aesthetics of an eligible bride—let alone a princess—and must commit to doing whatever it takes to be the most beautiful girl at the prince’s ball. The inversion of the original story asks: why, with society in constant flux or change—or, as we might like to believe, progression—we’ve held close the fairy tale?

“I think that we hold on to the fairy tale,” Blichfeldt considers, “because it makes it easy to keep living the way women have lived for thousands of years. It’s really hard to try to carve out that other role—what would it be? I think fairy tales appeal to us because it matches the expectations we have or get from society…these fairy tales tell us that if you’re just the most beautiful and the most kind you will succeed in the world. It’s a kind of fantasy that we want to buy into, but I think it’s a very old tale that we should reconsider.” Elvira takes no prisoners in her quest for beauty, with her extreme efforts seeping into the psyche. Blichfeldt’s beauty horror lens sees Elvira undergo the most gruesome of body modifications (those that are considered quite normal in our culture today) performed with 19th-century technology: a hammer to the nose, lashes sewn into a waterline, a parasitic weight-loss technique.

Blichfeldt explains of her choices: “I’m a big fan of body horror myself. I think it’s a very bodily experience to be a woman, right? The cultural role shows how easily even the most powerful women could be reduced to bodies like this,” Blichfeldt snaps her fingers. “You know, a lot of products for women, or the ideas for womanhood, are presented [as] pretty, but the realities of it are often so brutal and so disgusting. We were always kind of balancing the beauty and the horror mixed together, or coexisting.”

Released via IFC Films and Shudder, Blichfeldt shares her own fairytale of an independent film production’s arrival to the metaphorical ball: “To my and everyone else’s surprise, the financing of this movie was a dream, and we got on board all the creatives that we wanted to work with,” Blichfeldt smiles. “All the best people and all the actors and everyone we wanted came on board.” This includes her producer, Maria Ekerhovd, and veteran costume designer Manon Rasmussen. 

Blichfeldt’s résumé is thematically feminist, with shorts like How Do You Like My Hair? and Sara’s Intimate Confessions, both of which, similarly to The Ugly Stepsister, challenge the ethos of beauty standards. Independent filmmaking creates a space for Blichfeldt to work out these ideas, whereby she hopes to reach wider audiences with body image issues that she struggled with for most of her adolescence and young adult life. “Independent movies are important—when they are successful it’s very often because it’s a human’s specific outlook on the world, not a reproduced idea that everyone can agree on—it’s not just reproducing Cinderella the same way we’ve heard it…When you go so specific on something, it can become important to so many people, because they can relate so strongly.”

Photographed by Stephanie Sikkes

Styled by Rikke Bøe

Written and Produced by Franchesca Baratta

Hair: Sandra Siff

Photo Assistant: Anna Larsen

Location: Sommerro House