The Most Underrated Horror Movie Of 2025 Has Better Make-Up Effects Than You Realize

When makeup designer Anne Cathrine Sauerberg and and special effects makeup artist Thomas Foldberg signed on to Emilie Blichfeldt's "The Ugly Stepsister," not even their wildest fantasies included being shortlisted for a Best Makeup & Hairstyling Oscar. Mainstream awards shows notoriously overlook accomplishments in horror and other genre films, but smash-hits like Coralie Fargeat's "The Substance" seem to be opening Oscar doors for carnage in cinema. "The Ugly Stepsister" is most certainly one of the strongest benefactors.

Inspired by the original fairy tale by Charles Perrault but embracing the gruesomeness of the Brothers Grimm version, "The Ugly Stepsister" is a shift in the protagonist's perspective. As I noted in my review after its screening at the Overlook Film Festival, "Pop culture has elected to depict Cinderella's stepsisters as horrible people, but was that truly the case? Or were they, like Cinderella herself, battling a misogynistic world, choosing to fixate on their hearts' wishes (by dreaming of something better), and willing to do whatever it takes to find love and financial security for their family?"

"The Ugly Stepsister" was one of the best horror films of 2025, and a large part of its effectiveness lies in its makeup design and execution. "Emilie was so extremely well-prepared, so for me, it was like a swimming pool of ideas that I could just pick and choose and put together how I wanted it," Sauerberg says. "The beauty and the dirt and the gore together were so inspirational." The combination of prosthetics, beauty makeup, and wigs — and, of course, the gore — displayed the excellence of the craft across the board. "The Ugly Stepsister" deserves all the praise it's received, because some of the best work went unnoticed.

There are some gorgeously grotesque moments, but "The Ugly Stepsister" also boasts smaller, subtle transformations that are unnoticeable by anyone who isn't familiar with the actresses' faces. Lea Myren, the actor behind the titular Elvira, is also a model. There is certainly nothing "ugly" about her, but to make her archaic facial reconstructive surgery noticeable, she was given cheek, nose, and neck prosthetics to give her a more "average" appearance. It was this journey of transformation that initially excited the team the most.

"To me, that's by far the most interesting part of the film, that whole look of Elvira and, first of all, making her look younger, making her look, as you say, average, and just making her believable," Thomas Foldberg tells me. "Even though there's still a kind of almost cartoony silhouette to her, she's still passable for a real person." The team did a number of tests before they found the best look for Elvira, and then made a nose to give Flo Fagerli, who plays her sister, Alma, for the family to match. The work is so seamless that most people watching have no idea that Fagerli naturally has a different nose. The team estimates that they had to do Myren's makeup 20 or 25 times.

An added difficulty is that Elvira and many of the people around her are constantly touching her face and pinching her baby fat. The styling team needed to make sure the makeup not only looked realistic, but could also be interacted with by the actors. They used industry-standard silicon prosthetics, but took extra care to make sure the pieces were seamlessly color-matched to her skin. "There's very little makeup on it, which you can tell in those extreme closeups," said Foldberg.

"I honestly believed that all the gore stuff would be taken out because it would be either too complicated or too gross, and it's not that usual in a Scandinavian movie to do that much in that kind of film," Thomas Foldberg explains. "So I was quite surprised when it came out that we'll just do everything. It's like, 'No, nothing is written out.'" A primitive nose job, literal sewing of eyelashes, a consumed tape worm, the chopping of toes, the results of a terrible fall down the stairs, and the slow deterioration of hair and skin from malnourishment are all on display, and in many cases, in extreme close-up.

The team took 3D scans of Lea Myren's face, building a half face for the close-ups of the eyelid stitching that were blended with footage of Myren's performance during post-production. Foldberg's hands are actually the ones shown on screen, and he joked about how difficult it was to sew with rubber gloves on.

There was also an immense amount of care taken to make sure that the beauty enhancements never came with a judgment call. "We were very aware that we were not supposed to make fun of anybody, so we wanted a very specific look for the lashes that would be different from what kind of look is used nowadays," Sauerberg tells me. "I thought about the emphasis on the lower lashes, and then the whole spidery thing came up. And I also have to mention that Emilie, the director, has put her fingerprints on everything. She has seen everything, and everything is worked out together with her." The end result is a '70s glamour look, very reminiscent of figures like Shelley Duvall and Twiggy.

"The Ugly Stepsister" is constantly playing with elements of the continuing evolution of beauty standards. 1970s glamour eyelashes blend with dreamy, storybook curly hair, all couples with classically beautiful gowns. "All the effects are so extreme, so we didn't want to make any of the beauty looks too over the top," Anne Cathrine Sauerberg explains. "It should be within this period drama-ish, meeting a bit of cartoon and then making it relatable at the same time [...] we just wanted to do something real girl, girl, girl."

Even before Elvira is given her extreme makeover, she often fantasizes about what her life could be like if she were to marry the prince. In these isolated, idealized moments, "The Ugly Stepsister" provides a welcome balance to the impending visceral nightmare to come with romantic visuals. "Because the prince is kind of like Justin Bieber or whoever is hot right now, and she's really in love with this prince, we wanted it to be just the most romantic of all romantic things," says Sauerberg. The colors of her makeup are matched up with whichever dress she's wearing at the time, giving her three different looks — blue, green, and yellow. Each look has its own distinct identity, but is unified by its unmistakable beauty.

During a dance performance at the prince's royal ball, the would-be future princesses look like floral fairies on the dance floor. It's downright ethereal, and the final moment before everything takes a twisted turn for the deliciously disgusting. As vomit-inducing as things become toward the end of the film, the scattered displays of loveliness serve as constant reminders of the fairy tale origins of the story ... and a warning sign of what is to come.

After Cinderella appears at the ball and her story with the prince continues the way we've known since childhood, Elvira's sense of self and her relationship to reality snap. She has been putting her body and mind through hell in the hopes of marrying the prince, and her efforts have been for nothing. When word gets around that the prince is looking for the owner of the shoe left behind at the ball, Elvira steals the remaining shoe from Cinderella (named Agnes and played by Thea Sofie Loch Næss in this story) and decides she will make her foot fit by taking a meat cleaver to her own toes. The hit alone is enough to make your entire body wince, but then the camera shows the dangling digits in an extreme close-up, the blood in her feet pulsing in time with her heartbeat.

"I think it actually comes down to Emilie [Blichfeldt]'s choices that the three big scenes with the toe cutting and the eyelashes and the tapeworm, they're so long," Thomas Foldberg says with a chuckle. "What's making it gruesome because you see the effects isolated. You can watch a Netflix thing that's far more grotesque and violent and bloody, [these moments] are not that gross."

But the most shocking moment happens after Elvira has had her toes chopped off, her hair fallen out, her nose broken, and her teeth snapped in half, not to mention still wearing a corseted gown. She is, to put it kindly, a disaster. Myren's dedication, despite being completely transformed, elevates the impressive makeup to new heights.

The pièce de résistance of "The Ugly Stepsister" is Elvira's final transformation, when the tapeworm she's consumed is finally ejected from her body like something out of Lucio Fulci's "City of the Living Dead." During the press tour for "Together," Allison Brie and Dave Franco even highlighted the moment as one of their favorite instances of body horror. It's an effect that plays with the audience's rhythm of a scene, making a revolting moment hit even harder. "[It's] unbearable almost to watch, because you kind of look away and then you look back, and then it's still going on," Foldberg explains. Sauerberg adds, "It is so effective because usually it's just a short splash of something, and here you really force it to last longer, and Emilie really wanted that — she wanted you to [covers eyes] like that and then [drops hands down] they would show it again."

One element of the effect was a practical piece Myren could put in her mouth and bite with her back teeth, as well as a contraption attached to the side of her face that allowed the tapeworm look like it was coming from the depths of her stomach, with VFX compositing out the contraption when needed. This allowed her to do as much of the tapeworm expulsion as practical as possible, but for anything that would have been unsafe or impossible to do, they made a fake head from the nose down where they were able to physically shove the rest of the worm and slime out of her mouth.

"It was completely too much — everything was too much, but that was how it should be," Foldberg says with a smile.