Norwegian director Emilie Blichfeldt’s feature debut “The Ugly Stepsister” takes inspiration from an unlikely pair of genres: Disney fairy tales and Italian Giallo films. The movie, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and was acquired by Shudder, reimagines “Cinderella” as a body horror film from the empathetic perspective of the titular, vilified sibling, Elvira (Lea Myren). As Elvira prepares for the prince’s royal ball, she undergoes body transformations large and small to try conforming to society’s highest beauty standards.
“The most important thing was to make just a normal, cute teenager who is just really in love with this prince,” explains the movie’s makeup designer Anne Cathrine Sauerberg, “and to show what people do to themselves.”
Just the initial effect of making the 24-year-old Myren look like a teenager was a feat for the prosthetic and makeup departments. “She was wearing cheeks and a nose and has a fake neck that actually stops in the middle of the neck,” says prosthetic makeup designer and special effects artist Thomas Foldberg. “We didn’t want her neck to be too broad. We wanted to erase the collarbone and some of the neck muscles. We wanted to make her softer without exaggerating, so it had to be kept really tight and really subtle.”
At first, Elvira’s transformations are indeed subtle. At the behest of her mother, Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), Elvira undergoes a cosmetic nose realignment, executed in the archaic medical practices of the film’s 19th-century setting. The doctor (Adam Lundgren) intentionally fractures Elvira’s nose and she wears a face brace for much of the first act, removing it once to reveal a partially healed, misshapen ridge and later removing it again to reveal a much more conventional nose. Because Foldberg and Sauerberg had Myren in a prosthetic nose from the beginning, they were able to adjust it accordingly to create the subtle change.
The subtlety decreases as Elvira further modifies her body in anticipation of the ball. Once her nose is in place, Elvira gets an eyelash transplant whereby the same doctor threads fake lashes through her lower eyelid. The camera captures the procedure in an extreme close-up of Elvira’s eye and reverse shots from Elvira’s horrifying perspective.
To achieve the realistic look of the extreme close-up, Foldberg opted for a blend of practical and digital effects. He collaborated with visual effects supervisor Peter Hjort to composite the actor’s actual eye onto a dummy head. “We did the whole scene with the actress and then we did it with the fake head, which I was actually stitching into, and everything was put together afterwards” Foldberg explains. “It’s basically half a dummy head from the eyelids below and then the other part is the actor herself.”
The film’s most gruesome scene, however, comes after the ball and is ripped straight from the pages of the original “Cinderella” folk tale. In an effort to fit into the slipper that her stepsister Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss) left at the ball, Elvira severs the toes from her right foot. In a series of sanguinary close-ups, Elvira takes a cleaver to her digits, first slicing them and then fully dismembering them.
“It was extremely complicated to do the slit where the blood is kind of beating out,” explains Foldberg. “That was one big prosthetic foot and then we had two fake legs that went from under her knees and below. We had this blood rigged leg for the initial chopping off of the toes and then it had some small attachments.”
After Elvira cuts off her toes and is bleeding out, Rebekka finds her and realizes that she severed the wrong foot for the slipper. Obsessively, Rebekka recreates the wound on Elvira’s left foot, this time captured in a wide shot that shows the foot and leg attached to Elvira’s body. “The real leg was hidden under her dress,” says Foldberg of the shot. “It’s just bent and then the prosthetic leg goes from the knee and down.”
Despite her pathological efforts, Elvira fails to win over the prince and in the final sequence, she crawls about on her broken feet, her hair thinning and teeth chipped from the trauma she’s put herself through.
Much of that trauma stems from a tapeworm egg that Elvira consumes to lose weight at the beginning of her transformation. By the end, the worm is fully grown, several feet long, and Elvira’s sister, Alma (Flo Fagerli) must help her remove it in a gristly game of tug of war. To achieve the effect of Alma extracting the worm from Elvira’s mouth, Foldberg and his team created several silicone worm pieces and then fed them through a contraption attached to the side of Myren’s face. The contraption was composited out in post-production to make it look like the worm is expelled from the depths of Elvira’s throat. “We also had a puppet head of her from the nose down,” says Foldberg. “Where you could push big chunks of this worm and slime out of her.”
The film as a whole used minimal CGI and instead went for practical effects paired with compositing, creating a raw and seamless look throughout. This ingenuity paid off, as “The Ugly Stepsister” is now shortlisted for Best Makeup & Hairstyling at the upcoming 98th Academy Awards. It is Shudder’s first shortlisted film in the category.
For the film’s success, Sauerberg and Foldberg credit Blichfeldt. “She was so well prepared and had so many ideas,” says Foldberg. “I was really, really blown away by her knowledge of genre films and she had really a specific vision for this project.”
“We all know Cinderella’s story so well, so we all have different pictures of how it should look like, and [Blichfeldt’s] vision was just so extremely clear,” adds Sauerberg. “It was so easy to connect with her and her visions and align them with my own visions.”
