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Elisa Hormazábal is the confirmed costume designer on Eli Roth’s Knock Knock (2015), as well as on his related Chile-shot projects The Green Inferno (2013) and Aftershock (2012).

She is a Chilean designer whose work sits inside the “Chilewood” pipeline Roth built with Nicolás López and others—films shot in Santiago and surrounding areas that stand in for American settings while drawing on local crews.

The protagonist of Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017) is also named Elisa (Elisa Esposito). That shared first name creates a direct nominal link between the costume designer on Roth’s erotic-thriller/home-invasion story and the mute cleaning woman whose clothing, thrift-store sensibility, and evolving red accents (shoes, coat, strength) form a core visual and emotional thread in del Toro’s film. Costume design is the explicit professional identity of one Elisa and a major character-defining element for the other.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tNxUxm3-658&ra=m

Chile / South American production and thematic backdrop

Knock Knock was filmed in Chile (primarily Santiago and Chicureo), with Roth explicitly preferring the local production environment. The same collaborative circle produced The Green Inferno, which places American characters in a South American jungle setting involving indigenous groups and extreme violence. The Shape of Water’s amphibious creature originates from the Amazon—another South American aquatic “other” captured and studied in a laboratory.

Documented patterns of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation in Chile and the broader region (including networks involving Venezuelan, Colombian, Paraguayan and other migrant women, and later groups such as Tren de Aragua) form a real-world regional context of women being moved, controlled, and commodified. This sits alongside stories in which young women appear as seductive or predatory figures (Knock Knock) or in which a working-class woman finds agency and connection outside conventional human society (The Shape of Water).

Clothing, desire, and agency

Hormazábal’s role was to costume the young women (including Roth’s then-wife Lorenza Izzo) whose appearance and sexuality drive the plot of Knock Knock. In The Shape of Water, Elisa’s wardrobe is deliberately muted and thrift-oriented at first—she blends into the institutional world—then gains red accents that mark emerging strength and desire. The film repeatedly frames clothing (and its absence or transformation) as part of how the mute heroine expresses herself and bonds with the non-human. The parallel places two “Elisas” on opposite sides of the costume process: one designs the clothes that shape seductive or vulnerable female presentation; the other is defined by the clothes she wears and the private world they help construct.