‘The Ugly Stepsister’ Director Emilie Blichfeldt On Crafting Her Weird Girl Body Horror
Female beauty standards have always been a focus of the horror genre, but never more than in the last few years, especially as female filmmakers have finally been granted the resources to tell their weird, nasty stories about what it means to exist in the world in a female-presenting body. And the latest entry into this brutally necessary subgenre is writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt’s feature film debut The Ugly Stepsister. Even though it’s set in the past, Blichfeldt’s brutal piece of body horror holds a grimy mirror up to a society obsessed with self-mutilation as beauty.
The film’s official synopsis reads,
“A sinister twist on the classic Cinderella story, The Ugly Stepsister follows Elvira (Lea Myren) as she prepares to earn the prince’s affection at any cost. In a kingdom where beauty is a brutal business, Elvira will compete with the beautiful and enchanting Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss) to become the belle of the ball.“
We spoke with Blichfeldt about why she loves body horror, growing up as girls with size 11 feet, and the literal and metaphorical power of the tapeworm.
Dread Central: How has it been showing The Ugly Stepsister to everybody and seeing everyone’s reactions? What has that experience been like?
Emilie Blichfeldt: It’s been so crazy. I finished the film 10 days before the premiere at Sundance. It’s just been like, I’ve been running a marathon, looking forward to the goal line, and then it’s like, “Oh, now you’re starting a new marathon.”
DC: Oh my God. So you haven’t had a second to really rest and be like, “I did it.”
EB: At the same time, the film has been so successful. It’s my dream come true, but I’m so tired. [Laughs]
Sundance and Berlin were so scary. I was worried about what people would think and what the reception would be. But it was wild. People really got off on it. Now I’ve had a moment to rest, and now that I’m here, I’m just so much more relaxed and not feeling [as much pressure that] I have to represent and say all the right things.
DC: I saw that you are also a size 11 shoe girly, and I have to say I identify with you. [Laughs] The struggles of having big feet as girls! But that also translates to Elvira because she really is just trying her best, and she’s just a little weird. I wanted to hear more about creating her character and working with Lea Myren to create her vibe of being both very sweet and so very awkward.
EB: I relate so much, not only because I have size 11 shoes, but I’ve also had my own struggles with being a weird girl. Sometimes, if you start a bit weird and wrong as a girl, then suddenly it just goes off the rails. Somehow, you end up in the ditch, and then it’s so hard to get up again. If you’re “the wrong way” out of the gate, you’re fucked more or less. If you have that kind of awkwardness, it just builds.
I was a loner because I grew up in places where there were no other people in northern Norway. There was no place for me. So I was a bit of a weirdo. Then, when I got into my teenage years, I had built up so much anxiety around whether I fit in.
When my girlfriends were starting to date and have sex, I was like, “What are you doing? How are you doing this?” It was Greek to me. Suddenly, they were disappearing into rooms at parties, and I was like, “What are they doing in there?” Then they would tell me the day after, and I would pretend to understand.
So Elvira is that. I really wanted her not to know how “wrong” she was in the beginning, to really have that innocence. Then, people start pointing out how awkward she is and objectifying her. She starts as the victim, and then later she starts self-objectifying because she internalizes that gaze. And that for me is the tapeworm. That’s the metaphor. When she does, it’s like the red pill, blue pill moment from The Matrix. She buys into that reality, that gaze. Then it eats her up from the inside, both metaphorically and literally.
DC: I wanted to know what the research was like for The Ugly Stepsister. How did you figure out what procedures to include, because so much of the body horror here is surgical or self-mutilation?
EB: So, for me, what separates body horror from just gore or splatter is that body horror is always infused with meaning. It’s a very deliberate thing within the story and a way for the filmmaker to tell the audience something through something very gross. And that’s what I love about it, to give intellectual, emotional ideas through someone puking up a worm.
It’s not through intellectual words and all of that, but through a bodily experience that you can get these ideas. Especially as women, where a lot of our life is a very bodily experience, we often are forced to undermine our bodiness and try to be only brains. But if anyone knows what you can feel and understand through a body, it’s women. So that was a big thing.
But anyway, with the research, I had to be very mindful. It has to be an integrated part of the story and Elvira’s journey. So I found a news article from America in the late 1800s about the newest fashion from Paris, where people were sewing eyelashes with a needle and thread using cocaine as a pain relief. And I just thought that was so yucky. But also, it’s still a thing that we’re obsessed with!
DC: Have you watched the TikTok videos of people getting eyelashes installed? It’s not much better than watching someone get them sewn in, with how close they are to your eye with sharp tweezers.
EB: I’m like, “Why are you doing all of that?” It’s not good. But it’s funny, with the tape worm, not a lot of people can say, “Oh, that was me, I swallowed a tape worm.” But there are a lot of girls who have eyelash extensions. I didn’t want to make them feel like I’m saying they’re doing something wrong. I wanted to confront [beauty standards] but not make any viewer feel stupid.
So the design of the eyelashes was very, very important to give the eyelashes that dated feeling. So if you were sitting there with your long lashes in the cinema, you wouldn’t feel like suddenly everyone was looking at you. I also just needed the second visit to the doctor’s to go even crazier.
With the tape worm, it was great when I found it, and how it could carry this metaphor for self-objectifying. The nose clamp is from the 1920s.
DC: I’ve watched too much reality TV about surgery, and I hate nose jobs. So when you showed it, I shuddered. It’s not even that bloody of a scene. But the sound and her scream, the way you executed it, it’s just so upsetting.
EB: I’m so glad you said that. So in the 1920s, they would just put the thing on and hope it would squeeze your nose into a different shape. But I’m like, “That wouldn’t work. But if you broke it, that could maybe work.” So that’s my own invention, actually.
DC: I was looking at your Sundance interview, and you talked about Holiday, Isabella Eklöf‘s film, which is one of my favorite movies, too. I wanted to hear about working with her on The Ugly Stepsister. You called her, I think, the fairy godmother of the film.
EB: So many people got so upset with Holiday because Isabella didn’t give her the fairytale ending where the knight in shining armor got her out of there. Isabella actually chose the ending that the character wanted for herself. But the audience didn’t want that because we think that’s the wrong way to go. I love how she dared to go against what the audience wanted for the story.
That’s the whole movie for me. It’s one of the best endings in cinematic history, and it’s so brave. When I told people I was remaking the Cinderella story, so many not-so-intelligent people tried to give me great advice and be like, “Oh, you have to do this”, or “You definitely have to do that because the audience is expecting blah, blah, blah.”
I didn’t like that at all. And I thought, “It would be sick to have Isabella Eklöf to give me advice, because she’s clearly brave, intelligent, and insane.” I had some connections to her through my producer; she agreed to meet me, and we just really vibed. She’s insanely intelligent and very funny.
We both thought that she might write The Ugly Stepsister for me because I hadn’t written before. But when we tried it out, she wanted to put it in the modern era, and I really wanted to do the fairytale. Then she saw a pilot I’d done—it was a really shitty pilot—which was a very, very cheap fairytale. Even some of the costumes were from H&M, it was that cheap. Because she hadn’t seen any of my shorts, I was like, “Shit, that’s the introduction to my work??”
She watched it, turned around, and said, “What do you need me for? You know what you’re doing.” And I was like, “No, don’t leave me. I need you. I can’t do this alone!” [Laughs] So she agreed that she would kind of be the midwife of me writing it, or my big sister holding my hand. She was with me through the whole development and the writing of the first draft.
DC: She’s so talented. That’s so cool to have her guide you through your first time writing a script. It must have made it a little less terrifying.
EB: And it’s really important. I think a lot of people who make cinema—and I did think this, until I made The Ugly Stepsister—think that you have to figure it out all by yourself. But actually, cinema is such a collaborative experience. Also, when you develop a script, it’s so important to find the people who understand where you’re coming from and can support you in that, because you will meet so many people who have opinions about what you’re doing. It’s so important to have your entourage, the people I think are intelligent and cool.
The Ugly Stepsister is out now in theaters.
Categorized:Interviews
