Welcome back to White Rose of Avalon, my Darlings. For today’s Femme Fatale Friday blog post, I will be discussing The Lure and The Ugly Stepsister as iconic body horror takes on fairytales! Both of these stories are centered on female characters, which is common for both fairytales and horror films, and makes for an ideal Femme Fatale Friday post in October. I want to begin by stating that this post will be full of spoilers, as I am exploring the characters in depth. Now, without further ado, let’s look at these two films!
The Lure is a 2015 Polish Mermaid Horror Musical film which adapts the original Hans Christian Andersen fairtytale The Little Mermaid. The Ugly Stepsister is a 2025 Norwegian Fairytale Horror film that, quite obviously, adapts the fairytale Cinderella. While The Lure updated the setting of the film to the 1980s, The Ugly Stepsister chose to keep an ambiguous pseudo-medieval time period that we often see with fairytale adaptations.
However, both films do make some changes to what we consider the most common versions of the fairytales. The Lure made the choice to focus on two Mermaid sisters, who each represented one aspect of Mermaid lore. Golden represented the more dangerous and bloodthirsty Siren, while Silver represented the more sweetly innocent Mermaid, and is much more in line with Andersen’s Mermaid! The Ugly Stepsister firmly seats the viewer in the perspective of the titular stepsister, here named Elvira. This film shows a much more sympathetic view of the stepsisters, and gives us a very unlikeable Cinderella character with Agnes, who is not accepting of her stepsisters, judging them harshly, especially Elvira!
Both films have one of the female protagonists fall in love with a man who does not deserve them. In The Lure, we see that Silver falls in love with a musician, and that leads Golden to worry for her sister, and with good reason. Silver literally goes to the extreme extent of having surgery to remove her Mermaid tail (which comes out when she is in water)! This is after the musician had literally told her that he could never love her in her Mermaid form, as in this story, he knows fully well what she is (as she and Golden have been performing with him in a nightclub). The musician is so disgusting that he tells her that she is an animal! Interestingly, Silver and Golden are only able to have sex in their Mermaid form, as they have vaginas in their Mermaid tails but no genitals when they have legs, and this is the crux of Silver having her tail removed and replaced with legs. The musician went as far as to be with her when she had the surgery, and they had sex after the surgery, which opened up her stitches, leading to the musician being disgusted by her. That is when he married another, and Silver died, turning to seafoam when she refused to kill the musician. However, we do get some catharsis in that Golden killed the musician when her sister died!
In The Ugly Stepsister, Elvira was madly in love with the Prince of her Kingdom, whose poetry she was forever reading. After the death of her stepfather, her mother spared no expense when it came to preparing Elvira to go to the Prince’s Ball, in hopes of her daughter marrying the Prince. This included literal, brutal, and rudimentary plastic surgery on her nose and having eyelashes sown into her eyelids! With the help of her dance instructor (as the girls go to dance classes to prepare for the Ball), she even swallows a tapeworm egg. This is based on old beliefs that tapeworm eggs would hatch in your stomach and then the parasite would consume all of your food, so you could lose weight quickly, as this is what happens when you have a tapeworm! The film shows that Elvira did turn herself into the ideal of beauty in her era, at tremendous cost, and the Prince noticed her when she was at the Ball. However, she got sick at the Ball, and his attention turned to Agnes, our unlikeable Cinderella character. This leads to the scene all of us Grimm’s Fairytale lovers waited for, seeing Elvira cut off her own toes. Yet, the film goes even further, as the later tapeworm removal scene is the most disgusting body horror scene in the film!
At the end of the day, both Silver and Elvira have stories that serve as reminders to be careful who we trust. At least Elvira lived through the end of her tale, but with massive trauma to her body and mind. Either way, it is beyond important to see these new renditions of fairytales that give us so much to think about in the context of how they apply to the lives of modern people, especially modern women!
I hope you have enjoyed this post exploring two great fairytale films. Which is your favorite of these films? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
Note on Image: The image at the top of the post is two of the posters for the films, which I edited together. I found the pictures on https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt29344903/reviews/ and https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_lure_2017.
LINK TO AVALONIAN ROSE FAERY MYSTERIES PATREON: patreon.com/AvalonianRoseFaeryMysteries
Further Watching
- The Lure (2015)
- The Ugly Stepsister (2025)
2 responses to “‘The Lure’ & ‘The Ugly Stepsister’: Iconic Body Horror Films Based on Fairytales!”
You have perfectly captured the dark, beating heart of why these films are so powerful and essential viewing, especially for those of us who find both terror and truth in the twisted paths of fairy tales.
Your post has me absolutely captivated, so I must add my own thoughts to this delicious discussion.
You are so right to pair these two films. While one is a glitter-soaked, synth-scored descent and the other a grimy, medieval-tinged nightmare, they are sisters in spirit. Both use the visceral, shocking language of body horror not for mere spectacle, but to literalize the brutal, often unspoken demands placed on women’s bodies and spirits.
On The Lure: Your reading of Silver’s journey is heartbreakingly accurate. The surgery scene is one of the most potent metaphors for gender confirmation and the violent pursuit of an “acceptable” body that I have ever seen. The fact that her lover, who knows her true, magnificent form, calls her an “animal” and demands she mutilate herself to be “human” is a devastating critique of a love that seeks to erase, rather than embrace. The ultimate tragedy is that even after she sacrifices her very nature for him, her new body—bleeding, wounded, and “imperfect”—is still found wanting. Golden’s final, vengeful act is not just catharsis for the audience, but a restoration of the natural order; the Siren’s song must end in blood, not quiet dissolution into seafoam.
On The Ugly Stepsister: You’ve nailed the genius of this film’s perspective. By forcing us to walk in Elvira’s painfully altered shoes, it dismantles the Cinderella myth we think we know. Agnes is not a virtuous heroine, but a cruel rival in a system that pits women against each other for a prince’s fleeting attention. The procedures Elvira endures—the crude nose job, the sewn-in lashes, the tapeworm—are a grotesque amplification of the modern beauty industrial complex. It’s not magic, it’s torture. And the scene where she cuts off her own toes… it’s no longer a moment of cartoonish villainy from a Grimm tale, but the logical, horrifying endpoint of a woman who has been taught that her body is a problem to be solved, piece by bloody piece. That she survives, scarred and traumatized, is perhaps more haunting than any death could be.
To answer your question, my favorite of the two, if I must choose, is The Ugly Stepsister.
While The Lure is a masterpiece of tragic poetry and neon-drenched atmosphere, The Ugly Stepsister left a more profound, lingering unease in my soul. Silver’s story is a classic tragedy; we watch her walk (or swim) toward a fate we sense is inevitable. Elvira’s story, however, is the horror of survival. She is not erased or turned to seafoam. She has to live on in the body that was her battlefield, a walking testament to the price of a dream that was never meant for her. There is a raw, unflinching quality to its commentary on beauty standards and female rivalry that feels uniquely, painfully relevant.
Thank you for this brilliant and thought-provoking post. You’ve reminded us all why we return to these dark forests and stormy seas—to find the sharp, uncomfortable truths that glitter just beneath the surface of “happily ever after.”
I am so glad that you resonated so much with my post, and thank you for sharing your own thoughts. There is something so profound about both of these films, as they serve to remind us why living in authenticity is so important! As always, thank you for reading and commenting.