You are reading the twenty-second edition of Field Notes From Hell, a weekly horror column from Deep Cuts.
Each week, I’ll send an email with a four-pack of horror film recs, along with a hand-picked curation of news clips and horror collectibles. I send these — or I try to, anyway — every Sunday.
This week’s featured rec is Emilie Blichfeldt’s darkly satiric fable, The Ugly Stepsister, wherein beauty is nothing more than learned pain, not inherent grace.
IN DREAMS, ELVIRA LOSES her heartaches. Drowsing after her crush’s poetry — the modern times equivalent, no doubt, of a performative matcha boy’s self-published zine — she sees him there, radiant, the charming prince that he is. He’d carry her with his princely arms and languidly caress her princessly, frost-bitten cheeks. Then so quickly, she’d be shot awake back to reality. She sees her widowed mother, Rebekka (Ane Dahl Thorp), marrying a decrepit old man for money with a daughter whose beauty she can’t rival. She doesn’t have the tiny nose, the touched-by-God features, nor the upright posture befitting a princess. No, she is the ugly stepsister, an unavoidable fact that her mother reminds her without relent.
But here’s the thing: they can’t order Elvira (Lea Myren) to stop dreaming. And in her sorry state of delusion, a monstress eventually rears her head, one that turns her passive victimhood into active self-destruction against the backdrop of a cruel, patriarchal society. It’s a tragic reframing of a story we’re all acquainted with, one that — in writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt’s hands — deftly surfaces harrowing truths (and lies!) about beauty and womanhood.
By happy chance, Blichfieldt’s vision seems in perfect step with Coralie Fargeat’s The Subtance, another film that’s somewhat of a literalization of “beauty is pain.” Here, the call doesn’t just come from inside the house; the phone rings abuzz from everywhere — from Elvira’s emotionally abusive mother, the gentry gargoyles gawking at her pre-teen peers, to the very institute that vows to look out for young women’s welfare. If it’s not surveillance by body shaming, it’s predacious manipulation veiled as empowerment (see: the fucking tapeworm).
It’s unknowably bleak, especially for this writer who can’t say he’s lived the same sordid circumstances. But I know there isn’t much humor in seeing the self-mutilation, the inward rerouting of aggressions, and the deeply rooted pains that afflict women, no matter how amusing they may telegraph on-screen. In what feels like a twisting of the knife, the film’s denouement reminds us that we’re watching a Cinderella story. There’s no consolation of pulpy violence at the end, just the bitter, sobering taste of defeat, and a solemn resignation to the fact not everyone gets a fairy tale ending.
ABOUT THE FILM
👠 The Ugly Stepsister dir. Emilie Blichfeldt | Horror, Thriller, Comedy | 🇳🇴 🇵🇱 🇸🇪
Elvira dreams of the weak-kneed virgin, Prince Julian, and is willing to go to great lengths to conform to the kingdom's ideals of beauty. A surprising and raw twist on the fairy tale `Cinderella', seen from her stepsister's point of view.
Horror recs this week
Every FIELD NOTES FROM HELL dispatch includes a three-pack of horror recs: 1.) recent horror, 2.) horror classic, and 3.) overlooked or underrated horror.
Here are this week’s recommendations.
1️⃣ New Horror: Looky-Loo (2024, dir. Jason Zink)
To call this voyeuristic found-footage film snuff fetish wouldn’t be an unfair estimation. The whole 83-minute runtime is strictly allotted to following a frustrated filmmaker enact horrendous transgressions across a nondescript suburban town. It’s a committed exercise to the film’s base intentions — to sicken and unnerve. Think In A Violent Nature without the surprisingly beautiful aesthetic; The Poughkeepsie Tapes without the showmanship and flair. Watching it on a laptop feels vile, like I myself feel complicit to the faceless creep’s crimes. I don’t think it’s a good film at all, but it disturbed me deeply.
2️⃣ Classic Horror: Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975, dir. Peter Weir)
Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is possibly the most beautiful film I’ve ever seen. The painterly lensing, the hypnotic scoring, and the masterful editing altogether just tickles me pink. It reaches a point (almost!) of forgetting that the story is actually quite scary: a couple of pupils from an all-girls boarding school after traipsing a notoriously perilous geological terrain. Every character speaks in pithy, lyrical one-liners, like each one is their own harbinger. I love it. It’s mesmeric, unnerving, and at times nightmarish. Sure, it’s not a horror film. But surely a classic, yes? (I think so, it’s already in my Four Favorites on Letterboxd)
3️⃣ Underrated/Overlooked: R-Point (2004, dir. Su-Chang Kong)
This grossly overlooked South Korean horror is as topical now as it was in the early aughts. The incessant, self-repeating violence of global warfare blurs into ghostly encounters, and the paranoia curdles into red-eyed interrogation. Who wins in the purgatory-like limbo that is war?
Every week, we’re listing down upcoming horror films and television series. We’re also throwing in some notable horror news to keep you all looped in.
Here’s what’s new in horror this week.
Teaser posters for Chris Stuckmann's 'Shelby Oaks.'
📹 Out October 3rd, Chris Stuckmann’s debut feature, Shelby Oaks, dropped the above cryptic posters ahead of tomorrow’s trailer relaease — Bloody Disgusting
🛎️ The first (and only?) season of Hell Motel has just wrapped. I might review it soon, should I’ve the energy to muster. Watch on Shudder.
🧟♂️ 28 Years Later finally hit PVOD the past week. If you missed it in theaters, now’s your chance to catch it.
👽 Perhaps because news about the fourth Cloverfield is radio silent, John Krasinski is blessing us with a fourth A Quiet Place film (the third one, not counting the prequel with Lupita Nyong’o). He’s directing the film — FANGORIA
🫣 The first official teaser for Corin Hardy’s Whistle is here — and it’s spooky.
📿 The Conjuring: Last Ritessets the stage for what looks like a dark and dreadful finale. Watch the trailer.
🌲 And finally, Netflix’s Waywardlooks just fine (watch the trailer here), but as a Toni Collette completist, I feel obliged to share.
Terror trinkets & threadfuls
O.K., so I’ve decided this is going to be a weekly thing. This week, let me put you on some cool trinkets, merch items, and collectibles.
From left to right, here are the products featured :
The Substance Glow Green Activator Water Bottle — $45 at MUBI
Terrifier Art the Clown Pocket Pop! Vinyl Keychain — $8 at Hot Topic
That’s it for this week’s digest! Thank you so much for reading through.
ABOUT FIELD NOTES FROM HELL
FIELD NOTES FROM HELL is Deep Cuts’ weekly email digest. Dispatches go out every weekend, with handpicked capsule reviews, news updates, and horror recommendations.
I watched Picnic for the first time this year--yes to "the painterly lensing"--and it really stuck with me.