When Emilie Blichfeldt’s “The Ugly Stepsister” premiered at 2025’s Sundance Film Festival, few would have pegged it as a future Oscar nominee.
The Norwegian filmmaker approached the classic Cinderella story with a body-horror twist, following young Elvira (Lea Myren) as she drastically changes her appearance to win the affection of a handsome prince (Isac Calmroth) — especially over her beautiful stepsister, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss).
“The Ugly Stepsister” mixes the picturesque with the grotesque, contrasting a world of fancy dresses and ornate hairstyling with blood, guts and a freakishly large tapeworm. Appropriately, boutique horror streaming service Shudder distributed the film in the U.S.
The movie, just hours shy of being a year old, was a surprise nominee for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, with recognition going to prosthetic makeup designer/special makeup effects artist Thomas Foldberg and makeup designer Anne Cathrine Sauerberg. “Thomas is the effects and I’m the pretty stuff,” said Sauerberg with a laugh.
One of the earliest steps Elvira takes on her road to conventional beauty comes when she swallows a tapeworm in the hope of becoming thin. This parasite quickly morphs into a symbol of the social rot and decay surrounding Elvira’s mutilative beauty pageant, swelling and festering in her stomach. By the time the worm comes out at the film’s end, it’s grown into a giant, gloppy monster, with a number of little tape babies in tow.
“We did several meters of tapeworm and then we did half a puppet head of Lea with a mouth open and a nose,” Foldberg said. “We could pull out the tapeworm and squash a lot of worms and slime out. Then that was composed in VFX with the real actions of Lea, so that whole thing where she pukes the worms is one big VFX composite of two shots.”
Broken noses, amputated feet, balding heads and pierced eyes: Elvira goes through the wringer in “The Ugly Stepsister,” meaning Foldberg and Sauerberg needed a muse willing to endure the simulated mayhem.
“She wears prosthetics the first half of the film and then all the gross stuff afterwards,” Foldberg said. “She doesn’t really have one break in the whole movie from something that’s typically kind of annoying, or at least tough to work with.”
Luckily, Myren was game to go through it all, and first-time filmmaker Blichfeldt was committed to even the most extreme makeup. Foldberg said the designers were worried that some of their work would be removed between the script and the screen “because it would simply be too gross,” but the behind-the-scenes artisans knew their story needed all the gore intact.
“It’s what women go through to be beautiful,” Sauerberg said. “If we saw it in a movie, it would be much worse than this one.”
Of course, this Cinderella-style fairy tale doesn’t work without some beauty on screen. While Sauerberg wouldn’t reveal the exact details of her budget — “It would be (disloyal) to my colleagues to say how cheap you can make a movie,” she said — the makeup designer did note that she had to summon a little magic to get the hairstyling done as needed.
“At one point, they decided that costuming was gonna be a big thing and special-effects makeup was gonna be a big thing, and they decided to not do any wigs,” she said. “I thought, We’re not going to make a fairy tale with people’s own hair. I went to Paris, to a big neighborhood where there’s a lot of wig shops, and I bought bits and pieces and dyed them and cut them together and made our wigs… I just knew what it had to look like. It was just like, if I had to cut my own or Thomas’ hair off, I would’ve done it.”
This story first ran in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine, which will be published Feb. 19, 2026.
