Somewhere along the trenches of the Western Front of the First World War, Captain Edward Laurent leads his gas-choked regiment into a hail of German machine gun fire. Sustaining three shots to the abdomen, Edward lies dying on a stretcher in a Red Cross tent, only for his surgeon to discover something unusual: a fourth bullet, a silver one, lodged deep in his chest.
Receiving news of Edward's death, his older sister Charlotte remembers the end of their childhood and the death of their innocence. The scene changes to a "wild goose" Irish settlement in the rural parts of western France in the late-19th century. Charlotte and Edward (Amelia Crouch and Max Mackintosh) are the children of Seamus Laurent (Alistair Petrie), the baron of the commune. When a clan of Romani people moves into the area, staking an apparently legal ancestral claim to the territory, Seamus and the rest of the settlement fathers hire a gang of mercenaries to massacre them all. Not only are all the "gypsies" piled into a shallow mass grave, but one them even gets his hands and feet chopped off, stuffed like a scarecrow and crucified on the spot. The whole scenario is not only rather gruesome, but arguably counter-intuitive. The settlement fathers forbid anyone from going near the site of the massacre in a bid to cover it up, but they probably would have been better off by just paying the mercenaries a few extra francs to not leave a towering totem to their deeds.
In any case, the taboo proves futile, as the dreams of the local children are soon consumed by prophecies of their going to the site, digging at the loose soil beneath the scarecrow, and discovering a case with a strange set of dentures inside, the unnaturally sharp teeth made of silver and engraved with strange markings. Led by a boy named Timmy (Tommy Rodger), Charlotte, Edward, and some other kids break the taboo and go to the site of the scarecrow. When Timmy digs up the dentures, he is overpowered by a malevolent force, places them in his mouth, and ravages Edward, biting him on the neck. Later that evening, Edward disappears from his sick bed, and by the next day Timmy is discovered dead, literally torn to shreds. Enter John McBride (Boyd Holbrook), a young, Van Helsing-esque pathologist on a cryptic mission. Though McBride concludes that Timmy's death is consistent with a wolf attack, it's obvious that the settlement is facing down a good old-fashioned horror movie "gypsy curse."
Having premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival under the title Eight for Silver, British filmmaker Sean Ellis's The Cursed sees its U.S. release this Friday following a standard Thursday night preview. And it's difficult to know where to start with it. Though its publicity campaign doesn't appear to be very substantial, The Cursed is hitting the market as a non-franchise horror film with a cryptic pitch indeed. For me, all I need to see in a trailer is some vicious-looking fangs, some allusions to silver, and torch-wielding mobs scouring misty woods, and I can already rest fairly assured that I've got a werewolf movie on my hands. I imagine this might be the case for more viewers than I might have initially anticipated, but the issue is that it's not only the advertisements for The Cursed that are beating around the bush; it's the film itself. Thus, for a critic, you want to be comprehensive in your assessment of a film, but you also want to be tactful. Even if you don't like the film, you want to try to approach it in good faith, with respect to what the filmmakers are at least trying to accomplish as best as you can see it. And as director, writer, cinematographer, and co-producer of The Cursed, Ellis seems to be very earnestly playing up a kind of self-aware, though certainly not glib tension. The film twists and re-imagines the conventions of a "werewolf movie" in such a way as to make part of its appeal that it never settles into being a familiar monster movie. So one really has to wonder, if I call The Cursed a "werewolf movie", am I giving it away? Am I "spoiling it"? Right out of the gate, am I undermining exactly what the filmmakers have set out to do?
There is also another thin line that Ellis appears to be treading with The Cursed, this one drawn between two contemporary fashions of horror. On the one hand, Ellis's film is definitely of a type of middlebrow arthouse horror, akin to, say, The Witch or It Comes at Night. The latter of these had a similarly cryptic publicity cycle that ended up more starkly polarizing viewers expecting a monster movie, when what writer-director Trey Edward Schults was really doing was re-imagining the pandemic/medical disaster movie much in the same way that Ellis attempts to circumvent werewolf movies The Cursed. More formally stylized, more overt in its courtship of metaphorical interpretation, and more intensive in its psychological and melodramatic focus than the average horror movie, the middlebrow arthouse horror is not only more popular these days, but in its popularity also affords the filmmaker a greater degree of artistic and conceptual freedom to test the boundaries of genre, to ostensibly create a work of challenging art rather than a de-personalized spectacle of shock.
In the case of The Cursed, Ellis's unorthodox choice of frame-narrative does a lot of allegorical heavy-lifting. In addition to weaving a story about ethnic cleansing, superstition, and magical vengeance, Ellis also embroils themes of class inequality, oppressive authority, and the whitewashing of history. Though there are literal monsters, the gothic focus of the film is monstrosity, the monster's evisceration and transformation of its prey only ever echoing the mercenary genocide and mutilation of the Roma at the beginning. Bracketing this with the "real" horror of modern, turn-of-the-century warfare, Ellis further echoes not only the gory imagery of mutilation, but also subversive notions of inscrutable powers leading innocents to the slaughter and of the "truth" of history being repressed. The Cursed becomes something rather interesting, which is a work of 21st-century gothic horror that narrativizes the ennui and pessimism of the end-of-an-era, or Fin de siècle, in which it takes place.
Though the word "werewolf" is never spoken in the film, even Ellis's arguably cagey approach to the werewolf as a creature of both antiquated folklore and 20th-century genre cinema proves considerably layered in context. Though werewolves, like vampires, had become more popular in gothic literature during the period in which the film takes place, widespread belief in werewolves as actual shapeshifters had all but disappeared. Simply the allusion to the werewolf invokes centuries of transformation in not only form but also in underlying association. It's appropriate that the settlers of The Cursed are French-Irishman, for instance. Medieval Irish, English, and Norse literature is replete with references to werewolves in Ireland. It's likely that the allegories of these works evolved from blood libel to parable, from methods of portraying the Irish as squalid, subhuman animals to venerating their redemption from paganism by the Holy Roman Empire. Possibly descended from ethnic and religious refugees themselves, the characters of Ellis's film now turn that blood libel back on a new group of ethnic and religious "subhumans."
The positioning of the Roma themselves, though preceded by the framing and "Othering" of southern and eastern Europeans in 19th-century werewolf literature, is pure Hollywood stuff, only going so far back as Universal's 1941 hit The Wolf Man, written by Curt Siodmak. Same goes for the "silver bullet" that debuted in the 1944 sequel House of Frankenstein, and which Ellis shamelessly recasts as a solution to his own werewolf plague in The Cursed. Universal's house of horrors is, indeed, pretty much ground zero for everything people know, or think they know, about what werewolves are, what they look like, and, more importantly, the fears that they evoke.
Ellis's conception of his monsters is considerably different from more overt werewolf movies, especially since the 1980's. Though they share the hulking stature and "super-powered" strength, speed, and agility of lycanthropes from The Howling to Underworld, their hairless, fetal-textured skin takes them even farther away from gothic traditions and places The Cursed more in the territory of body-horror. Rather than the wolf coming out from under human skin, as in An American Werewolf in London or The Company of Wolves, Ellis makes the inspired choice of portraying a werewolf as a person trapped within an organic, visceral shell. A particularly cool sequence in which McBride performs an autopsy on a recently-felled werewolf even seems to allude more directly to John Carpenter's The Thing than any werewolf movie.
At the same time, this theme of being "over-taken" or "infected" by contact with the werewolf - the emphasis on contagion and plague - is very much a part of the werewolf legacy. In adapting the werewolf to modernity, whereas some authors of the first half of the 20th-century chose to stay true to folkloric or gothic representations, others, tasked with swiftly introducing the creatures to an audience that had virtually no previous cultural awareness of them, opted to instead model the werewolf story on the "mad science" yarn. Werewolves, like in Universal's The Werewolf of London from 1935, became variations on Jekyll and Hyde, or else the mutant creations and slaves of monomaniacs, as in PRC's The Mad Monster from 1942. Hell, a scene in The Cursed of McBride examining some werewolf blood under a microscope even recalls yet another Universal horror, House of Dracula, in which a surgeon promises Lon Chaney, Jr.'s long-suffering Larry Talbot that lycanthropy is a medical, rather than a supernatural phenomenon. These sci-fi elements are not new to the werewolf film, but in Ellis's film they more directly call upon modern fears of invisible corruption due to disease rather than sin, as well as the social and moral degeneration of men of social standing and power literally grinding up and consuming those beneath them.
Ellis cherrypicks and synthesizes centuries of werewolf tropes in fairly radical ways, the ultimate result being a fairly fascinating product in both intellectual and visceral terms. Nobody says "werewolf" in The Cursed, but, just as with the spectator, the word is clearly lingering at the very forefront of the characters' minds. Rather than going over the same old ground of having McBride desperately trying to convince the settlement fathers about the existence of long buried horrors, Ellis does something quite ingenious, which is to portray the same fundamental conflict between the hero McBride and Seamus as the figurehead of established authority, but where they are both, fundamentally, on the verge of a completely modern way of seeing the world. Nobody says "werewolf," not because the werewolf isn't real, but rather because the conception of the werewolf is "outdated." The "werewolf" itself is an inadequate framing that suggests access to occult knowledge where there isn't any. What is shown in the movie is literally the same ancient creature, only seen from a perspective of modernity and rationalism. Just as horrified, the characters are also more alienated and repressed, paralyzed from drawing conclusions, and are thus all the more vulnerable and over-powered. We as spectators, in turn, perceive not a monster that is a metaphor, but rather a monster that is simply a rare, novel monstrosity in itself.
Despite its parallels to the middlebrow arthouse horror film, The Cursed is also, on the other hand, a straightforward monster movie that trades on suspense rather than metaphorical obscurantism. There is very little mystery to the film at all, and some may grow weary of Ellis's patience with his own predictable, monster-hunting procedural. But The Cursed is at its best when it succeeds because of its cliches, framing the abundantly familiar in unfamiliar ways, either due to Ellis's own imagination or due to the present remoteness of a certain kind of certifiably English horror movie in our current film market. Don't be fooled by the rather philosophical framing of the story within the context of the turn-of-the-century, or by Ellis's deliberate efforts to distinguish his monsters from mere "werewolves." There is also a tenor of deep nostalgia to the film, especially for the supernatural and period horror films that studios like Hammer, Amicus, and Tigon churned out for the matinee crowd in the '60s and '70s. In particular, Tigon's The Blood on Satan's Claw from 1971 seems to be a major influence on The Cursed. There you also see the setting of a period countryside in the 19th century, with a particular tension between old superstitions and new rationalism. You also get the unearthing of some taboo, diabolical relic, the contagion of evil, especially drawing in and effecting young people. And, last but not least, you get the subtle sentiment that the monstrosity of the film can not be entirely conveyed in the terminology of the past or present; that this "folk horror," indeed, has some "cosmic" undertones. If The Cursed has flaws - and it has many - even these take on a kind of charitable, naive simplicity when considered in the pantheon of exploitation films that never strayed too far from their vulgar origins, but at least tried for something a little more substantive.
Sad to say, however, that in toeing that fine line between the middlebrow arthouse horror film and the vulgar Friday night horror movie, The Cursed simply comes up stretched and unbalanced. The best thing one can say about Ellis's direction is that while often stylish it is rarely stylized to an alienating extent, where one feels like they are more being invited to appreciate the formalism of a shot rather than identify with its subject. Whereas many of his horror contemporaries have gone digital, Ellis has opted to shoot on 35mm, getting the most out of the baroque lighting of his interiors and the textures of the temperate, mist-saturated locations where he lays stage. I'd even go so far as to argue that the climax of a werewolf movie hasn't looked so evocative since the original Wolf Man. Ellis consistently scores a correct balance in creating imagery that is picturesque but rarely makes his presence in the arrangement of the shot so overt as to take us out of the experience.
The problem is that, when Ellis does take us out of the story, he really takes us out of it. As I mentioned before, the human scarecrow, so much a fixture of the characters' nightmares, just doesn't make any sense in context. Its gruesome spectacle alone underscores the strange imbalance between a certain "chastity" with which Ellis cuts away from most instances of gore, only to then embrace the grotesque even a second later. It would be one thing if Ellis believed he could accomplish more with less, wishing to leave a lot of the more gruesome details to the spectator's imagination. But, again, there's no mystery to The Cursed, no sense of a thematic build-up in all the blood and carnage. The practical effects and make-up work is consistently excellent, but the compositing of CGI monsters into the scene, as well as Ellis's very composition of these elements within a shot, leaves a lot to be desired. Even that brilliant autopsy scene, one of the highlights of the whole picture, is slightly undermined in this way, suggesting less John Carpenter's The Thing and more its 2011 prequel.
But the chief failing of The Cursed is quite simply its scattershot sense of dramatic perspective and focus. It would be one thing if Ellis took a more sociological approach, concentrating on the geographic and social isolation of the Laurent household in the midst of chaos. This at least appears to be what he will do at the start of the story. But we should know from that audacious opener that our writer-director is going to be doing a lot of leg-work to try and tie it all back together again. Despite the fact that the story opens from the older Edward's perspective, and is then framed in a flashback from the older Charlotte's perspective, we are always ping-ponging between players whose own roles in the horror are just frankly not as interesting, or as well-acted. It is the outstanding performances of the child actors that end up anchoring The Cursed to a sense of dramatic credibility, and yet Ellis pushes Mackintosh and Crouch to the margins to instead follow Holbrook's performance of the much flatter McBride through a procedure without mystery.
What it all comes down to is a sad case of a film that is ultimately more interesting than it is good. The Cursed might still scratch that very slight itch for a more elegant kind of monster movie, or else a less inscrutable kind of arthouse horror film, but there's no getting around its visceral charms coming off just a bit too dry, and Ellis's overall vision coming off as just a bit too pretentious.
It all comes back to that question of how The Cursed both is and is not a "werewolf movie." The reasons for nobody in the movie daring to say the word might be internally coherent, but one can't help but recall that brilliant scene in Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead, where the protagonist Shaun admonishes his best friend Ed for calling the living dead ghouls lumbering around the neighborhood feasting on living flesh "zombies."
"Don't say that," says Shaun. "The 'zed' word, don't say it."
"Why?" asks Ed.
"Because it's ridiculous."
Or how about George Clooney's great "I don't fucking believe in vampires, but I believe my own two eyes" riff from From Dusk till Dawn? Both those movies are comedies, obviously. But in both cases you get excellent demonstrations of filmmakers of an above-average caliber rephrasing an all too often belabored cliche of the horror film - when the reality of the supernatural is met with modern skepticism and ridicule - in such a way that it makes sense within the context of the story, elegantly reflects character, and just as importantly reinforces the symbolic significance of the monster itself. It matters that the south-of-the-border titty bar in From Dusk till Dawn is filled with vampires. It matters that the dead-eyed London masses of Shaun of the Dead are a zombie plague. The specificity of the monster proves significant unto itself, from both the perspective of its self-aware layering of themes associated with the monster and its history, as well as from the perspective of its mere visceral impact. Like it or not, the mystifying specificity of monsters is just as important to making a horror movie dramatically credible as is anything to do with the psychology or melodrama of the living and/or human characters. The Cursed comes off as being disinterested in the specificity of whether or not its monsters are werewolves, and that sort of disenchanted approach can only reinforce a reciprocal level of disinterest.
Ellis has retained the thematic underpinnings of the monster, but his vision of the monster, whether a werewolf or not, is also overly analytical. He has written the metaphor before the monster, the allegory before the horror, and this quite simply couldn't be further from how monsters identifiably arise in the collective imaginary, or what keeps them enduring and evocative. Whether there is a "rational" foundation behind myths of werewolves, vampires, or witches in European antiquity isn't nearly as important as the fact that people really did believe in these creatures; that the existence of monsters, not metaphors, was a crucial component of their cultural, social, and personal lives. And whether or not the werewolf is a representation of the dehumanized "Other," the dark animal origins of man, or the threat of social disease, is not nearly as important as the fact that the werewolf, in its various incarnations, sprung organically from a fascination with making monsters, with giving discernible shapes to abstract fears and desires.
Contemporary filmmakers, even technically excellent ones, seem to be gradually loosing grasp of that kind of visceral fascination with the monstrous. They seem to feel an inordinate need to justify the "substance" of spectacle, to render their analyses of horror genre tropes before simply asking themselves what they find scary, what they feel apprehension about, or what fills them with a sense of revulsion. Maybe that's just a reflection of our times. We have become too comfortable in our armchair, pop psychology. The extent of our personal experience is increasingly shallow, and the mythology we draw upon is all too apparently manufactured for individual consumption rather than the coherence of a collective sense of order and identity. We slip ever more into solipsistic nihilism, and there are less and less fears to conquer or tether us to our humanity, of which that repressed monstrous side is a crucial part. At the very least, on the end of the spectator, it means we remain starved, despite Ellis's admirable efforts, of a really juicy Friday night monster rally.
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