Norwegian director Emily Blichfeld’s feature debut, The Ugly Stepsisters, takes inspiration from an unlikely pair of genres: Disney fairy tales and Italian giallo films. The film, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year and was acquired by Independent Film Company and Shudder, reimagines “Cinderella” as a body-horror film from the empathetic perspective of the titular villainized brother and sister Elvira (Lea Mirren). While preparing for the prince’s royal ball, Elvira undergoes numerous body modifications, both large and small, in order to conform to society’s highest standards of beauty.
The film’s makeup designer, Anne-Katherine Sauerberg, explains, “The most important thing was to create a normal, cute teenager who is really in love with this prince, and to show what people would do to themselves.”
The initial effect alone of making 24-year-old Myren look like a teenager was a feat for the prosthetics and makeup departments. “She had cheeks and a nose and a fake neck that actually stopped in the middle of her neck,” says prosthetic makeup designer and special effects artist Thomas Foldberg. “We didn’t want her neck to be too wide. We wanted to erase some of the collarbone and neck muscles. We wanted to make her softer without exaggeration, so we had to keep it very tight and very delicate.”
At first, Elvira’s changes are certainly subtle. At the behest of her mother Rebecca (Ane Dahl Tope), Elvira undergoes rhinoplasty. The surgery is based on outdated medical practices from the 19th century, when the film is set. A doctor (Adam Lundgren) intentionally breaks Elvira’s nose, and Elvira wears a facial brace for much of the first act, removing it to expose a partially healed misshapen bump and then removing it again to reveal a more conventional nose. Because Foldberg and Sauerberg had Maylen in a prosthetic nose from the beginning, they were able to adjust it accordingly to create subtle changes.
Subtlety decreases as Elvira further modifies her body in anticipation of the ball. Once her nose is adjusted, Elvira will undergo eyelash transplant surgery, where the same doctor will thread false eyelashes onto her lower eyelids. The camera captures the surgery with extreme close-ups of Elvira’s eyes and reverse shots from Elvira’s terrifying perspective.
To achieve the realistic look of extreme close-up, Foldberg chose a combination of practical and digital effects. He worked with visual effects supervisor Peter Hjort to composite the actors’ real eyes onto the dummy heads. “We shot the whole scene with the actress, then we actually sewed the fake head on and shot it, and then we put everything together,” Foldberg explains. “Basically, the bottom half of the eyelid is a dummy head, and the rest is the actor himself.”
But the film’s most gruesome scene comes after the ball, ripped straight from the pages of the original “Cinderella” folk tale. Elvira cuts off the toe of her right foot while trying to wear a slipper left at a ball by her sister-in-law Agnes (Thea Sophie Locke Ness). In a series of sensual close-ups, Elvira holds a kitchen knife to her finger, first slicing it, then severing it completely.
“It was very complicated to make the slits so that the blood would gush out,” Foldberg explains. “It was one big prosthetic leg, and then we made two fake legs, one below her knee and one below. We first had this blood-rigged leg to cut off the toes, and then we attached some smaller appendages.”
Rebecca finds Elvira bleeding and cutting off her toe, and realizes that she cut off the wrong foot to wear slippers. Rebecca obsessively recreates the wound on Elvira’s left leg, and this time a wide shot shows her foot and leg attached to Elvira’s body. “The real legs were hidden under her dress,” Foldberg said of the shot. “You just bend it, and it becomes a prosthetic leg from the knee down.”
Despite her morbid efforts, Elvira is unable to convince the prince, and in the final scene she is seen crawling around on a bruised leg, her hair thinning, and her teeth chipped due to the trauma she experienced.
Much of that trauma comes from the tapeworm eggs that Elvira ingested to lose weight at the beginning of her transformation. Eventually, the insect becomes fully grown and grows several feet long. Elvira’s sister, Alma (Flo Fagerli), must help remove the bugs in a gruesome tug-of-war. To achieve the effect of Alma taking the bug out of Elvira’s mouth, Foldberg and his team created several silicone bug pieces and fed them through a device attached to the side of Maylen’s face. This contraption was composited in post-production to make it appear as if the bug had been forced out of Elvira’s throat. “We also had the doll’s head from the nose down,” Foldberg says. “Where I can push this big chunk of worms and slime out of her.”
The film used minimal CGI throughout, instead opting for practical effects combined with compositing to create a raw, seamless look. As a result of this ingenuity, “The Ugly Stepsisters” has been selected as a finalist for Best Makeup and Hairstyling at the upcoming 98th Academy Awards. This is IFC and Shudder’s first film to be shortlisted in this category.
Sauerberg and Foldberg credit Brickfeldt with the film’s success. “She was very well prepared and had a lot of ideas,” Foldberg says. “I was really, really blown away by her knowledge of genre films and the specific vision she had for this project.”
“We all know the Cinderella story so well that we all have different images of what it should look like, and[Brickfeldt’s]vision was very clear,” Sauerberg added. “It was very easy to connect with her and her vision and align it with my own.”
