“Fair of face and full of grace.” Emilie Blichfeldt on the ferocity of fairy tales
We all know that fairy tales aren’t real, right? That fairy godmothers don’t turn mice into footmen and pumpkins into carriages. That gingerbread and candy houses don’t exist deep within a forest for lost children to find. Or this kiss of one true love can break an enchantment from a wicked witch (or fairy) and usher in a happy-ever-after. Fairy tales might not be real, but they are certainly part of an oral tradition that would take aspects of people’s real lives and turn them into moral tales. No big bad wolf is coming to huff and puff and blow the house down – but it’s a good idea to use the best building materials possible to create a stable home. Bluebeard might not have locked his curious wives in a chamber and murdered them, but Gilles de Rais did torture children and historically existed, and he’s the model for Charles Perrault’s tale. Stranger danger becomes a wolf on the pathway to Granny’s house. Food shortages mean children are abandoned. Both maternal and infant mortality rates mean the “evil stepmother” exists.
There are versions of Cinderella, Aschenputtel, or Mossycoat (the titles alone would take an essay) reaching from Asia to Africa to the European tradition – the one we know best via Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers. The often-unnamed heroine (she only gets her name when she is made into a servant of the kitchen smut) resonates across continents and countries as an example of how true beauty and obeisance can never be eclipsed by falsity and trickery. The noble and gentle young woman will be found by her true love and saved from a life of drudgery. The proud and wicked stepsisters and stepmother might be forgiven (Perrault), or they might have to cut parts of their feet off and end up with their eyes pecked out by birds as punishment (The Grimm brothers).
Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister (Den stygge stesøsteren) imagines Cinderella from the perspective of one of the stepsisters who is as much, indeed more, a victim to the demands of a being a noble and gentle young woman who will attract the eye of the prince. Elvira is a bookish and awkward teen who is hauled in tow with her younger sister Alma to the house of minor aristocrats in Swedlandia where her mother, Rebekka is marrying a man she believes will raise them all out of poverty. When that doesn’t happen as planned, Elvira is pitched against Agnes (Cinderella) to be the fairest of all, leading Elvira down a terrible path of pain, delusion, starvation, and madness.
Nadine Whitney speaks to Blichfeldt about the horrors of beauty and how fairy tales are quite real: real enough that we believe in the moral coding that they have spun around our collective understanding.
Nadine Whitney: I love the way that you used a kind of indistinct 19th century. It has a Brontë Sisters Jane Eyre stylization at the beginning with the mid-century look and moves into a much later belle epoque style. So, you’ve got this stretched-out 19th century…
Emilie Blichfeldt: I love that you’re knowledgeable on this!
Nadine Whitney: Oh yes! The film is unanchored in time because it uses a fairy tale, but even more unanchored in time within its diegetic world because of the synth soundtrack and the visual references to Cinderellas across the ages. Angela Carter said there is no way to tell a folk or fairytale because the tale changes with each teller. You have remade Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, plus placing it into an everlasting context that points out the reality behind the fantasy.
Did you expect to get such a strong response from the film?
Emilie Blichfeldt: First of all, I just want to say, I love how you just you’ve just seen my film so beautifully, like all the delicate weaving I’ve done with the times and genres. So, thank you so much for that. But no, I didn’t expect the response. It’s totally overwhelming and also my dream scenario. I knew that in taking on the Cinderella story, there was a potential commercial aspect to it, in that it could speak to the whole world because it’s so well known. But I also knew that the body horror part of it could also make the film quite niche.
I hope that my way of creating it, tricking the audience into this fairy tale beauty and soft, feminine world and then twisting it slowly before it explodes in your face at the end, could be a way to kind of easing people into it. The Ugly Stepsister has been eight years in the making, and then, in the meantime, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance came out and was trailblazing. So, when I released my movie, everyone knew what body feministic body horror was, and they were like, “This is so cool. I want more!” And then my film is released, and I couldn’t dream of better timing.
Nadine Whitney: Your film is doing some great and very original things, but the feminist fairy tale in itself isn’t new. In a lot of ways, because women are so often at the center of fairy tales, either as protagonists: tricksters or victims, princesses or witches –it’s a genre where women tend to be more represented than men. We grow up with the “old wives’ tales,” and the fact that they’re called our old wives’ tales means that, whether real or imagined, it is women telling the stories.
The first book I was given on the day of my birth was a huge compendium of fairy tales that I still have. I couldn’t believe the cruelty of them. People cut off fingers and toes, and they dance in hot shoes; crows come and pick out their eyes for transgressions, and vipers and toads fall from the lips of “bad girls.”
What you’ve done in The Ugly Stepsister, beyond the body horror, is to boil down the Cinderella story to the economics of the female body. Rebekka (the ‘evil stepmother’ played by Ane Dahl Thorpe) and her daughters, Elvira (Lea Myren) and Alma (Flo Fagerli), only have their bodies to sell to survive.
What is happening with Elvira is that her mother is forcing her body into a state of being saleable, which is being marriageable. The obsession with beauty becomes all-consuming.
Emilie Blichfeldt: I knew very early that the mother-daughter relationship would be very central to the film. Because this is not only the way these ideals, as you say, are passed on from one generation to the other through our common cultural heritage, like the fairy tales, but also through mother-daughter, right?
So, you are trained to think of yourself in one way as a woman, and you start living that way, and you place your value in how you appear and appeal to others. It’s really hard to deconstruct that when mothers who have daughters want to make them in their own image somehow. And that the daughter also strives within this world that she learned to navigate as a woman where appearance has been a big part of womanhood.
I think that kind of everlasting cycle is also one of the reasons why we’re still stuck with body issues after thousands of years of being objects, right? We’ve been partially emancipated, but we’re still doing this dance, and it’s so hard to unravel because it’s so personal for every single woman, and it’s such a big part of our identity.
We are taught very early to self-objectify, and then if you start self-objectifying, it’s so hard to unlearn it because you’ve integrated with your identity. So, to stop doing that, or to stop putting your primary value in your looks, if you’ve invested a lot in them, is really, really hard and very, very vulnerable.
I also thought a lot about how we have this idea that Cinderella is a story about class, in the sense that we talk about the Cinderella story being like rags to riches, but really, in most of the European versions, she is a noble girl that is just put in the kitchen for some time before she marries the prince. The whole time, she has had nobility and a comfortable life. She had an upbringing with manners, education, and proper food. While the stepmother is a widowed woman with two children, and what does that actually, practically mean? That her body is her asset. I think that’s also present in so many of the versions. She’s often described as this vixen, this evil vixen, that’s like carrying herself with sex appeal or with a kind of sensuality, and it’s very looked down upon. But actually, it’s like, “Who can blame her? It’s her way of surviving, right?” But it’s so looked down upon, and that’s the real class role. You know, if you have no money, that’s the only way you go. Cinderella has so many other assets. She’s not poor with her perfect face.
Nadine Whitney: Your Cinderella, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), is not a maiden or virgin in your telling, which I think is great. You’ve taken the Charles Perrault version and knocked out the moral lesson at the end of the tale.
Emilie Blichfeldt: I thought that it was really shocking to me when I found out that she was having sex, but it also helped me to find my Cinderella. Because I still wanted her to have like a Cinderella quality as an archetype. For me, her archetype is this natural beauty, and she also has this natural way of being in life where nothing is really natural. Her emotions and her sexuality. She has no shame, you know, and that’s also what makes her free and beautiful. She is also kind of like an aspirational role model, right? I really love that for her, that she could still be a kind of a role model, but in a modern and real way. Not in the moralistic, just be nice and shut up.
I think so many “purified” versions of fairy tales leave out eroticism. I really wanted to put that in there to make them people of the flesh.
Nadine Whitney: Very much of the flesh! We can start talking about the horror aspects. I don’t think I’ve ever seen “eye cam” quite that way, with the POV being sewing through the eyelid, through the point of view of the eye. That was a lot!
I was just reading about plastic surgery in the 19th century, and I was also reading a book by Harper’s Bazaar called The Ugly Girl Papers, published in 1875, telling “self-identified” ugly women how to not be ugly. Beauty being a pain is far from something that we’ve come to learn only in the 20th century. It has been women’s duty to be beautiful and suffer for centuries.
Emilie Blichfeldt: That is also a very big part of the Chinese version of the fairy tale with foot binding. Chinese poetry says about the binding of women’s feet that if a woman has unbound feet, there is no way for a man to “know” where the woman has been. She can run around with people, and with unbound feet, she has to work. If you bind your feet, you don’t have to work. An unbound foot is like a broken piece of jewelry. It doesn’t have any value. Morality via “beauty” turns women into objects, and their job, their trajectory, is to become the perfect objects. I think that’s so creepy.
Nadine Whitney: One of the aspects of your story that I found very interesting is Alma hiding her menses from her mother because she knows as soon as anyone becomes aware that she is of bleeding / marriageable age, she will be forced into the corsets and starvation that Elvira is suffering through.
Emilie Blichfeldt: I love Alma, and she’s such an important character. When I was writing the script, I came to understand her role because I knew I wanted two stepsisters, but I didn’t want one just to follow the other. I thought hard about how I utilized her sisterhood. I thought about how the younger sister sees the older one and what she is going through in front of her. She gets a chance to kind of see what is happening before she’s a victim of it herself.
I saw her as the only sane character in this insane world. She’s the audience surrogate. You look at the film, and everyone’s crazy, desperate, or corrupt, but Alma sees. Alma is also a representation of me as well in the story. In the end, with Alma being the rescuer, I wanted Elvira to get the worm out, but I didn’t believe that she would be able to do that herself, or she would be emotionally thinking, “Oh, I didn’t get the prince. Now, let’s get this worm out,” as she’s so frenzied and lost by that point.
I thought, of course, Alma wants her sister to get the worm out. When I had that idea, I got quite emotional because I think there’s a beautiful and very important truth in surviving body dysmorphia. You really get affected by unreasonable beauty ideals and start objectifying yourself. It’s so hard to get out of that space because your thoughts, and your gaze on yourself, and on others is obsessive and unhealthy.
That’s what I myself have suffered from for a long time. And if it hadn’t been for the people around me who saw that I was suffering and who said, “Please, here’s my gaze. Here is how you really are. You know this is, this is not okay. You know, the things that you’re seeing or believing are total bullshit.” If it hadn’t been for them, I wouldn’t have gotten out. It’s almost impossible to get out of that by yourself. And I think that’s just so powerful because when you suffer from things like that, you feel so lonely. You think that you’re the one to blame. It’s some kind of personal secret, a private thing. But actually, it’s something we have to deal with together and really talk about more publicly.
There is a big industry that’s earning a lot of money from us and pushing women into those unhealthy spaces. And we have to help each other get out from that mindset.
Nadine Whitney: Khloe Kardashian said that she wanted to take a tapeworm at one point. Part of one of the most famously aspirationally rich and beautiful families in the world was talking about ingesting tapeworms, which is insane.
Emilie Blichfeldt: It’s insane. I don’t know what to say to that. Actually, I try not to think too much about that because then I get very overwhelmed, and then whatever happens with my movie feels like a drop in the ocean. I know you can’t save the world in a day. I’m trying to nudge the narrative or at least present another narrative.
It’s also very important for me to say that I don’t judge anyone trying to navigate that space of “how to be a woman.” It’s so such a hard, hard space to navigate. I don’t judge anyone for the choices they make in that space. But I think we have to dare to go into that space and talk about how we are influenced, how we are influencing each other, and how we can try to make that space a freer one.
Nadine Whitney: Hopefully, we can all be Almas for the Elviras and write new fairy tales where the one true love is a firm, supported, and healthy sense of self.
