Cinderella’s Curse had its UK première at FrightFest 2024, 22 Aug
Full of witches, beasts, giants, axemen and monsters, not to mention the abandonment, brutalisation, imprisonment and even murder of children, fairytales were the horror stories of their day. It is only due to the sanitised retellings wrought by Disney that these traditional folk materials are now broadly considered to be so wholesome and child-friendly. Look back to the originals, and you will get a different picture. Or alternatively look at a film like Cinderella’s Curse, which retells the story of Cinderella while inflecting it with recognisable motifs from cinema, as though this folk tale were laying down the template for future horror films.
Fairytale adaptations typically begin by showing a tome’s illuminated, illustrated pages being flipped through. This represents a formal ‘once upon a time’ opening, drawing us into the world of the film while expressly acknowledging and framing its storybook provenance. Cinderella’s Curse opens with a variant on this trope that sets out its stall in a rather different genre. For as, in a bloody, corpse-strewn barn, a bound woman (Sarah T. Cohen) begs her husband Jacob (Sam Byrne) not to hurt or kill her, a Necronomicon-like book materialises, bound in flesh, and when Jacob opens its self-animating pages, a trio of hideous Cenobite-like creatures – called ‘Terrortures’ – are summoned to do his infernal bidding. “Untie me,” the woman pleads, “It isn’t real. None of it, you know that. It is the book, it is all in your head. It’s the book, it’s messing with your mind.” Here the traditional fairytale book is being reconfigured as a hellish grimoire that allows its readers to rewrite their own wish-fulfilment story – with horrific consequences.
From there we cut to Cinderella (Kelly Rian Sanson), serving in a castle as maid for her wicked stepmother Lady Dyer (Danielle Scott) – or perhaps Dire (we never see her name written down) – and Dyer’s own daughters Ingrid (Lauren Budd) and Hannah (Natasha Tosini), while awaiting the return of her father who “went to town” some time ago. Kind-hearted Cinderella is constantly humiliated, abused and punished, and when she is asked to finish off and bury her friend and fellow maid Anja (Helen Fullerton) who has just been grievously tortured by Dyer and her daughters with whip and hook, our heroine comes to realise that her ‘family’ are murderers, that her father was almost certainly one of their victims, and that her own fate is sealed. Escape seems possible when she receives a personal invitation from Prince Levin (Sam Barrett) to attend the ball where he is to choose his wife – but Cinderella, forced to stay home by Dyer, will open the flesh-bound book that she has found in the woods, and conjure a grotesquely flesh-less fairy godmother (Chrissie Wunna) who will offer her a Faustian pact with a chance for unholy retribution, and perhaps also for entry into a new family.
Although some of the traditional versions of Cinderella are more macabre than others, none featured one of the wicked stepsisters discussing a threesome and blowing the Prince, or Ella keeping a diary of her masturbatory fantasies (another book of wish fulfilment!). Meanwhile, Cinderella’s ascent from serving girl to queen is here also modulated through references to Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981), Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987) and ultimately Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976), as Ella’s trademark glass slippers are transformed into vicious weapons at the ball.
Make no mistake, Cinderella’s Curse is cheap and nasty, full of broad caricatures rather than characters, and with a climax that, though gory and sadistic, somehow manages, in its bludgeoning repetition, to lack all tension. Yet its director Louisa Warren, a regular with the London-based production company ChampDog Films, is an experienced veteran of the cheap and nasty as well as of fairytale-themed horror (Tooth Fairy, 2019; Witches of the Water, 2019; Vengeance of the Leprechaun, 2020; Return of Punch and Judy, 2023; Jack and Jill 3, 2023) – and she delivers all the demonic blood-spattered payback as intended, and on a tight budget. Although her film, like Cinderella herself, aims, with its cruel cosplay in scenic settings, to rise a little above its humble station, it is otherwise utterly unpretentious.
Most importantly, where the moral of the original was that goodness and grace are their own reward (especially when a fairy godmother has your back), the message about class conflict in Cinderella’s Curse is more realistic (amid all the fantasy) and far more cynical: when surrounded by terrible, treacherous people within an iniquitous system, the only way to get to the top is to break bad and to outdo all your rivals in being perfidious and predatory, mean-spirited and merciless. All hail the Queen!
strap: Louisa Warren’s cheap-and-nasty class-conscious horror transforms the well-known fairytale into a hellbound revenger’s tragedy
© Anton Bitel
