Horror Meets Folklore | NIFFF 2025

Fairy tales and fables have long served as markers in society. Their adaptive nature allows them to evolve with each retelling, shaped by the concerns of their era. They hold up a mirror to the zeitgeist, shifting in tone and form across generations. In 2025 though, these once simple moral lessons and “happy ending” bedtime stories have taken on darker shapes. At NIFFF (Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival), they become vessels for horror, because the world they now reflect is terrifying.

The Ugly Stepsister

When we think of fairy tales today, what comes to mind are the sanitised versions popularised by Disney in the 1990s. These retellings transformed folklore into glossy, idealised narratives which reinforced whitewashed beauty standards, rigid gender roles, and romantic hierarchies. These versions, that were especially marketed towards young girls, are contemporarily being criticised for promoting a narrow and damaging view of women.

The Ugly Stepsister, a Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Polish co-production, directed by Emilie Blichfeldt, retells Cinderella from the perspective of the older “ugly” stepsister. While this shift recalls works of Gregory Maguire (Wicked or Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister), Blichfeldt’s take is more radical. She abandons the notion of villainy altogether, instead showing how each woman reacts to the conditions imposed on her. Their actions are shaped by circumstance and survival, challenging the original tale’s tidy equations of beauty equalling kindness and ugliness equalling cruelty.

Elvira, the titular stepsister, is scorned by her mother, rejected by society, and humiliated at every turn. She loves the prince in an idealised childlike way. Her mother, Rebekka, a ruined widow with two daughters, is cruel only in proportion to what survival demands: turning Elvira into someone beautiful enough to marry well, and resorting to prostitution herself. Agnes, the Cinderella figure, has neither family nor fortune and plainly states that the prince is her salvation. Alma, the youngest daughter, remains mostly on the margins, only allowed to exist in alignment with herself, because she is not yet subject to the demands of womanhood. 

While the female characters behaviours are on a spectrum of what might be considered “good” or “evil”, the men are uniformly agents of harm. They each inflict pain, some intentionally, others simply because they can. Otto (Agnes’s father), as the family patriarch, is excused for mocking Rebekka and humiliating Elvira. The doctor, the dressmaker, the prince, even the stable boy, each one plays a part in the slow, persistent brutality the women endure. Said pain is inflicted casually, endured as the natural order of things.

Elvira undergoes physical transformation as she is hammered, starved, stitched and amputated, some of it inflicted upon her, some self-inflicted. In her world, beauty is violence, but beauty is also fashion and, right now, fashion means the vacant perfection of the doll-face aesthetic. Once the transformation is complete, there is no way back. Elvira becomes not a princess but a product, an object formed by the same brutal logic that governs every woman in this story.

Dui Shaw

This horror, rooted in systems of control and gendered expectation, also pulses through Dui Shaw, a Bangladeshi film directed by Nuhash Humayun, structured as a four-part anthology based on South Asian folklore.

Two of the stories,  Antora and Besura (off-key), probe the roles women occupy in folklore and social imagination: the wife and the witch. In Antora, a woman unknowingly marries the devil, and as her memory is wiped, the question arises: is her identity bound entirely to her husband, or has society conspired to erase her sense of self? «Life for a woman only starts after marriage», the film notes. In Besura, the familiar image of the witch in the woods is upended. The true threat is not the woman on the margins but the villagers themselves, whose greed and destruction of the land summon a curse.

The remaining two segments focus on those on the margins of society. In Waqt (Time of Islamic Prayer), five men are hired to desecrate a sacred site belonging to another religion, claiming to act in the name of their own – but judgment doesn’t come from those they’ve offended, it comes from within their own faith. One by one, they are killed at the time of Azaan, the Islamic call to prayer, a moment meant for spiritual cleansing now turned into a reckoning. A holy man they turn to for guidance quotes the Quran: «To you, your religion, to me mine», making it clear that they are in the wrong and thus subject to divine retribution. The men believe their actions are righteous, a delusion fostered by a system designed to exploit them, a system where the powerful sow division among the poor to keep them blind to the very hierarchy that oppresses them.

Bhaggo Bhalo (Good Luck) follows a fortune teller who approaches fate like a science. He learns to manipulate it for personal gain, but every benefit he claims comes at someone else’s cost. The film draws on a kind of karmic physics, echoing the law of conservation: «Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed». Where capitalism makes us believe there’s always more to extract, this story reminds us that luck, like social class ascent, is a zero-sum transaction.

The Ice Tower

If The Ugly Stepsister and Dui Shaw show women crushed by systems, transformed into products, forgotten through marriage, and erased by myth, then The Ice Tower turns the lens inward, asking what remains when identity itself becomes fractured.

A retelling of The Snow Queen, The Ice Tower by director Lucile Hadzihalilovic treats the mirror as the film’s central mechanism. Jeanne (Clara Pacini), a teenage girl fleeing her foster home in a remote mountain village, crosses paths with Cristina (Marion Cotillard), an actress playing the Ice Queen on a nearby film set. Their meeting sets off a recursive dance of reflections: one older and one younger, one performer and one fugitive, but each contains something of the other.

Their relationship becomes an infinity mirror: an endless loop of beauty and innocence, identity and performance, loneliness and desire. What is being mirrored isn’t just appearance, but condition: their roles prescribed and performed. The film amplifies this multiplicity through aesthetics as well. Corridors, doors, and lateral openings repeat in symmetrical compositions, creating a visual echo. Shots within shots, reflections within reflections, everything folds back on itself. The form mimics the content.

These three films don’t add horror to folklore, they uncover the horror that was always there, buried under layers of moralism, tradition, and romantic fantasy. Nowhere is this clearer than when Antora reads aloud page after page of newspaper headlines, then burns them one by one in front of her husband, the devil, and says, «Humans no longer need the devil, they are the devil». So maybe the real monsters were never hiding in the woods. They were always our reflections in the mirror. And the most terrifying stories don’t need embellishment.