Director – Louisa Warren, Screenplay – Harry Boxley, Producers – Jerome Cowan & Louisa Warren, Photography – JamieTouche, Visual Effects – Parisa Bahri, Simon Dymond, Michael Milligan & Alex Murray, Animation – Cineakash Productions Pvt Ltd (Supervisor – Akash Singh), Special Effects – FilmSFX Ltd (Supervisor – Keith Harding), Production Design – Bridget Milesi. Production Company – ChampDog Films.
Cast
Kelly Rian Sanson (Cinderella), Danielle Scott (Stepmother), Sam Barrett (Prince Levin), Lauren Budd (Ingrid), Natasha Tosini (Hannah), Chrissie Wunna (Fairy Godmother), Helen Fullerton (Anja), Ivan Wilkinson (John), Frederick Dallaway (Moritz), Charlotte Coleman (Queen), Peter Watson (King), Sarah Cohen (Phia)
Plot
Cinderella is forced to work as a scullery maid for her stepmother and two stepsisters Ingrid and Hannah following the disappearance of her father. The prince Levin comes to the area to invite the stepmother and sisters to the ball being held for him to select a wife. He encounters Cinderella and insists that she be invited too. However, on the day of the ball, the stepmother insists that Cinderella stay behind. The fairy godmother who hides in Cinderella’s diary comes to her and offers her three wishes. Cinderella believes she is in love with Levin. As one of her wishes, she asks to attend the ball. She is given a fabulous gown and coach and attends. Unknown to her, the prince has conspired with Ingrid, his intended bride, and uses the opportunity to humiliate Cinderella. Cinderella then uses her third wish to wreak bloody vengeance on all of them.
Louisa Warren first appeared as an actress with uncredited roles in the last two Harry Potter films. She then pivoted to working for prolific British director/producer Scott Chambers/Scott Jeffrey. She has appeared in thirty plus of Jeffrey’s films and produced fifty of them since 2017. In addition, she has also directed 33 of his films at current count – see below for these. Warren produces the film under the label of her own production company ChampDog Films.
Chambers/Jeffrey had a modest international hit with his horror take on Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2022) – Warren even makes an acting appearance in the sequel Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey II (2024). This has led to Jeffrey overseeing a host of other horror versions of children’s stories or fairytales with the likes of Mary Had a Little Lamb (2023), Three Blind Mice (2023), Bambi: The Reckoning (2025) and Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025), along with earlier works such as Toothfairy (2019), Curse of Humpty Dumpty (2021), The Legend of Jack and Jill (2021) and Curse of Jack Frost (2022). Indeed, the same year as Cinderella’s Curse came out, several Jeffrey associates and actors were involved in another horror take on Cinderella with Cinderella’s Revenge (2024).
Cinderella is a story that dates back at least to Ancient Greece, although the version we are most familiar was the one put down by Charles Perrault in 1697 and later the Brothers Grimm. Cinderella has the record as the most filmed-ever story. Cinderella’s Curse offers a horror take on the familiar. Even as the traditional set-up of the fairytale is occurring, Warren is peppering it with flashes of blackened bodies and exploding coaches, not to mention a scene where the stepmother and stepsisters take the friendly maid (Helen Fullerton) and whip and torture her before slitting her throat. When the Fairy Godmother appears, she looks like a hideous hag who has just come from being burned at the stake. The production values for the film are surprisingly good. It doesn’t look like a cheap B film but that the film has cannily arranged reasonable costuming and set resources.
Kelly Rian Sanson as a vengeance-seeking Cinderella
To work as a horror film, Cinderella’s Curse does have to significantly rewrite the fairytale story. In the traditional telling, the ball is Cinderella’s magical transformation where she is made over from scullery girl to princess and meets her love. Contrarily here, the ball serves as an epic humiliation for her. She gets to meet the prince beforehand where he comes to her house and develops a crush on him after he asks her to come to the ball. We then move into the story’s standard course of the stepmother tearing up her dress and the appearance of the fairy godmother. However, when Cinderella does get to the ball, it appears that the prince is just as evil as the stepmother and sisters and that he has been conspiring with one of the stepsisters to humiliate Cinderella in front of everybody.
It is after this point that Cinderella’s Curse essentially becomes Cinderella by way of Carrie (1976) as she enacts her third wish and uses it to slaughter all and sundry at the ball. Louisa Warren even seems to consciously quote Carrie with cutaways to the bolts on the doors of the ballroom sliding shut of their own accord. Warren then proceeds to go for broke with assorted scenes including showing Kelly Rian Sanson’s Cinderella stabbing people with the glass slipper and cutting off one of the stepsister’s toes so that she can fit the slipper on her foot.
Louisa Warren is a regular Scott Jeffrey director, having also made Bride of the Scarecrow (2018), Curse of the Scarecrow (2018), Cyber Bride (2019), Pagan Warrior (2019), Toothfairy (2019) and sequels, Scarecrow’s Revenge (2019), Witches of the Water (2019), Vengeance of the Leprechaun’s Gold (2020), Virtual Death Match (2020), Doctor Carver (2021), Leprechaun’s Rage (2021), Conjuring the Plastic Surgeon 2 (2022), Jack and Jill 3 (2023), Aliens Return (2024), Ouija Castle (2024) and Shockwaves 2 (2024) for him, as well as Cannibal Cabin (2022), Legend of Lizard Man (2023), Return of Punch and Judy (2023) and Pigman (2024) under her own ChampDog banner. In between this, she also manages to appear as an actress in a number of these and to produce a further twenty films.
