Monsters and Matinees: The Evil Queen was a Beast Hidden within a Beauty

The Evil Queen was a Beast Hidden within a Beauty

Her lips are as red as a rose, her skin as white as snow and
though we can’t see her hair, the dark wimple wrapped around her head and
throat is as black as ebony.

In the 90 years since she was introduced in Walt Disney’s 1937 animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, she has remained an iconic image that is referenced today, most recently in the new 2025 live-action Disney film.

But make no mistake, I’m not talking about sweet young Snow
White, but rather her stepmother, the magnificent Evil Queen.

Fairy tale beginnings

When the Brothers Grimm introduced her in their 1812 fairy
tale, it was simply with the word beautiful. (She was also proud and haughty,
quite unattractive attributes.)

Fast forward more than a century when Disney chose Snow
White as his first full-length animated feature. In the “storybook”
introduction that opens his film, she is called the “vain Queen” – and she has
good reason for that.

The Queen is stunning in her gold crown, oversized white collar, flowing black cape and regal blue-purple gown. Her pale skin is colored by the same rosy cheeks and red lips as Snow White. Her oval eyes are impeccably enhanced with deep purple eyeshadow, long lashes and thin, but pronounced, eyebrows.

She is breathtaking.

As the first character in the film, she’s also immediately
unsettling with a coldness radiating from that beauty. Something is off. She is
calm but stern as she talks to the slave in the mirror, looking for affirmation
that she is the “fairest one of all.” But this time, for the first time, she
isn’t.

That’s when her deep blue eyes turn green with jealousy and
anger, conjuring strong winds that whip around her. Though her posture is erect
in the way that royals hold themselves, her expressive eyes speak volumes as
she glares in a way that makes you think “if looks could kill…”

A queen as a monster

What is the Evil Queen doing in a column about classic film
monsters? Because she is one – a monster that is a beauty and a beast in one.

Her murderous soul orders the chilling murder of a child without hesitation. If she must eat a human heart to get what she wants, so be it. She’s driven by vanity and arrogance without apology.

No explanations, no backstory to soften her evilness as happens in some modern variations like the well-made TV series “Once Upon a Time.”

The Evil Queen is one of my favorite villains, even outside of the Disney universe. I’ve been thinking about her again with the new Disney film starring Gal Gadot in the role. As with any Snow White adaptation, I’m interested in how the Evil Queen looks and is portrayed. Gadot’s Queen is a dark, gothic figure with an impressive crown. Costume designer Sandy Powell based her design on the original film’s iconic appearance of the Evil Queen because “I think it’s a really striking look,” she said in a video shared by Disney.

How did we get here?

The changing face of the witch

For centuries, witches were presented in literature as grotesque
creatures with pointy hats and broomsticks. Films of the early 19^th
century depicted witches as a mix of frumpy, silly women or as caricatures of
that witch on the broomstick with warts and a snaggle tooth.

That’s how she appears in the 1932 Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies short Babes in the Woods – a take on Hansel and Gretel – where the witch also had chin whiskers, a crooked nose with a wart and wears a tattered black cape and large brown hat.

In the 1933 short film Betty Boop in Snow-White, from Max Fleischer’s Fleischer Studios, she was homely, a bit plump and comical with a face that bears a resemblance to, of all characters, Olive Oyl (who also was drawn by the Fleischer studio).

For Walt Disney’s Snow White, his first full-length
animated film, he gave his illustrators a great deal of leeway to experiment –
while also giving some direction, of course. They would create drawings where
she was chunky and comical (an ode to queens of the royal variety) and “a
high-collar stately beautiful type,” according to the book Walt Disney’s
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs & The Making of the Classic Film.

In an early 1934 outline for the film, Disney described her
as “a mixture of Lady Macbeth and the Big Bad Wolf – Her beauty is sinister,
mature, plenty of curves. …”

That’s her, all right.

Inspiration for the queen

Though I obviously love the queen’s look, I never thought
about the inspiration for her monstrous beauty until a few years ago. I was watching
the 1935 sci-fi fantasy She for the first time – and there she was:
Disney’s Evil Queen, except she was the title character – She Who Must Be
Obeyed is the full name – played by the stately Helen Gaughan.

Of the multiple theories about the Queen, She is near
the bottom of the list because it’s the one that has never been officially
confirmed. Trust me, you’ll see the similarities.

The moment I saw She on her throne, I pictured the Evil
Queen. Her pale face with thin eyebrows and deep lips is framed by a black
wimple beneath the large crown. She’s dressed in a deep-colored robe with an
ornamental jewel at the base of her neck.

Beyond the clothing and makeup, she recalls the Evil Queen in the way she stands, moves and holds her head high with confidence that borders on arrogance. And like the Evil Queen, she erupts when provoked in the slightest way. She was made two years before Snow White and it seems clear to me that someone at Disney was inspired by this film and there’s nothing wrong with that.

If She is not a widely regarded inspiration for the
Evil Queen, who is? There are three popular theories.

Masks of WT Benda:In the first outline of Disney’s Snow White in August
of 1934, the masks of Polish illustrator Władysław Teodor “W.T.”
Benda, were mentioned as an inspiration. Walt Disney was a fan of the Polish
illustrator whose dramatic masks were used in magazines and in theater. Cold
and mysterious, they held a unique beauty from the dark eyebrows, long lashes
and red lips that provided bold detail to an otherwise pale face. Sound
familiar? Yes, those are the same striking details of the Evil Queen.

A German beauty:For her wardrobe and overall appearance, look to Uta von
Ballenstedt, a noblewoman in Medieval Germany. She is captured eternally in a
famous 13^th century painted statue with a fabulous upturned high
collar, large golden crown with a wimple around her face and neck and a cape
majestically wrapped around her shoulders. She has a softness about her beauty
that the Evil Queen lacks, but you can still see the similarity. The statue stands
today outside of Naumburg Cathedral in Germany, where it is a popular selfie
spot, partially because of the link to the Evil Queen.

Hollywood stars:The one-word description of the Queen as being “beautiful”
in the original fairy tale gave much room for interpretation to the
illustrators. So why not look to the glamorous Hollywood actresses of the time
for inspiration? And they did.

Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich and Gale Sondergaard are the actresses most often mentioned as reference, and you can see that in EQ by looking at their faces. In the 1920s and ‘30s, actresses often had their eyebrows plucked and redrawn in a pencil-thin line. Their eyes and lips were heavy with makeup, their beauty cool and mysterious. They carried themselves like royalty, with a sexy swagger, and they had an unmistakable magnetism and sultry magnetism.

Her role in Hollywood

The Disney animators could not have realized how their version
of the Evil Queen would change the depiction of the witch on film. It’s a topic
discussed in the 2020 documentary “Witches of Hollywood.” In the Disney film,
the witch was not the traditional hag (until she changed herself into one), but
an empowered woman (evil, but empowered).

She also was the first witch on film who was beautiful and
evil; “more than one thing,” as author Dianca London puts it.

“She’s not just the beautiful kind of cold, mean queen, or
the hag in the woods – she’s both,” London said. “And she has the ability to
shift between the two things at her own will which I think is a new and
exciting thing.”

Heather Green, author of Bell Book and Camera, said
the Disney film is significant in that it has two important witch figures: the
recognizable crone, as well as the “very first fantasy vamp witch.”

“She is a woman who is out for her own power, who is more interested in her beauty and her sexuality than in anything else. And she’s seeking to destroy a young girl to achieve that,” Green said. “For the first time in American film, we saw a very, very powerful, beautiful alluring woman as a witch.”

Yes, the Evil Queen gave permission for evil not to look monstrous. With her wicked nature hidden beneath her beauty, you didn’t see evil coming for you.

That’s something now common in movies, but it started with
the Evil Queen and that cinematic legacy is her crowning achievement.

– Toni
Ruberto for Classic Movie Hub

You
can read all of Toni’s Monsters and Matinees articles here.

Toni Ruberto, born and raised in Buffalo, N.Y., is an editor and writer at
The Buffalo News. She shares her love for classic movies in her blog, Watching Forever and is a
member and board chair of the Classic Movie Blog Association. Toni was the president of
the former Buffalo chapter of TCM Backlot and led the offshoot group, Buffalo
Classic Movie Buffs. She is proud to have put Buffalo and its glorious old
movie palaces in the spotlight as the inaugural winner of the TCM in Your
Hometown contest. You can find Toni on Twitter at @toniruberto or on Bluesky at
@watchingforever.bsky.social