A surreal danse macabre conjoins the last moments of an 1860s garment worker and those who sacrificed her life to the demon of fashion. A true (experimental) story based on historical records.
The autopsy of young British flowermaker Matilda Scheurer reads as a horror story on its own—hands, eyes, and lips stained green by the arsenic she used daily in her work, creating artificial botanical arrangements for demanding fashionistas of the era that were as deadly as they were beautiful. Reminiscent of the later Radium Girls, this earlier example of workplace toxicity is explored through a visually dynamic threeway narrative split between all those who would suffer for fashion—the devil in a ballgown, a bloody kind of period piece we haven't seen before. Matilda's final hours are taken directly from historical documents, with a counter narrative pulled from headlines and newspaper articles, in a story that's both flamboyant and extremely relevant today.
Elle Schneider is a filmmaker from New York City with a love of art in all disciplines and a passion for genre film. Her work as director and cinematographer has been featured in Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone, and American Cinematographer, for which she is now a contributing writer. A history lover, who cites Roger Corman, David Lean, Robert Wise, and Ken Russell as her biggest cinema influences, Elle is the foremost expert on 1959 sci-fi melodrama TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE and industrial-educational production studio CENTRON CORPORATION. She shot and directed two seasons of History's acclaimed THE FOOD THAT BUILT AMERICA, and Western NEAR TO SUPERSTITION for Panasonic.
A director and DP working cross-platform, Elle often selects projects that feature dark or unconventional stories that resonate with her interest in time period, texture, and color. She has directed music videos for Gangstagrass, Mock Sun, Sad13, Isla June, and Speedy Ortiz; the most recent premiered in Fangoria. Shorts have played at festivals like Slamdance, Sidewalk, HollyShorts, and Tallgrass.
Elle was a 2020 The Future of Film is Female finalist, a 2022 ReFrame Rise Finalist, and 2025 recipient of the inaugural Ashes to Films grant for fire-affected filmmakers; her one-take horror short TRUE CRIME is currently in post. Previously, she was a 2015 Big Vision Empty Wallet fellow for WWII biopic In Search of the Sun, and she is the only two-time recipient of the Marguerite Roberts Award for Feature Screenwriting at USC School of Cinematic Arts. Her in-development docu-series, MOTHER OF ALL EVIL, based on Heidi Honeycutt's I SPIT ON YOUR CELLULOID, the history of women directing horror films, was selected to pitch at the 2025 Sitges Film Festival.
Also in 2025 she was cinematographer on Oscar-shortlisted documentary ALL THE WALLS CAME DOWN and BOORMAN AND THE DEVIL, which premiered at the Venice Biennale.
