Norwegian director Emilie Blichfeldt on her reframing the Cinderella story as body horror about the bloody pursuit of beauty. "There's only one Cinderella, the rest of us are the ugly stepsister."

The Ugly Stepsister takes viewers to an enchanted kingdom in which impossible standards of female beauty lead to graphic violence and gross-out gore, with Lea Myren playing the titular character, who is usually one of the villains of the classic fairy tale.

Fairytales are inherently horror stories, and they’re at their best when they skew the world that the viewers are accustomed to the most. Shudder’s The Ugly Stepsister offers up a body horror-fueled wicked twist to the classic Cinderella story that we’ve all come to know.