The Cursed: Ashamed of the Wolf Man
2022 Halloween Spooktacular: Werewolf Week Day #5
I saw this film during the virtual edition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, back when it was still called Eight for Silver (a much less generic title). After Sundance, it kinda disappeared, except for a couple low-profile international festivals. I kept my eye out for any news because I liked it and was interested in discussing it. To me, this seemed like a slam dunk straight-to-streaming release — far more high-profile horrors have gone this route successfully. So, color me surprised when I started seeing ads for a film called The Cursed with the dreaded COVID-era tagline “only in theaters” and a bleak February release date.
The teeth poster I’ve included above is a nice piece of marketing for a werewolf film, but other art was produced that is a lot more ambiguous. Even the initial trailer skirts the issue of what kind of “curse” we’re talking about here. Instead, it emphasizes other supernatural elements like a spooky scarecrow man that only appears in a couple dream sequences. I don’t know what horror audiences want these days, but if this marketing is a reflection of that, then the genre is in a pretty sorry state. The film received some decent critical reviews, but the audience score perhaps indicates that people didn’t care for the deception.
In any case, I feel like the audience got it wrong on this one. The Cursed is, at the very least, an interesting film. It starts off with a World War I prologue and a wounded French soldier being treated by a surgeon. In addition to pulling three fresh bullets from the soldier’s abdomen, the surgeon extracts a fourth silver bullet. Intrigue!
The viewer is then transported back 35 years to the French countryside. The story is pretty simple and familiar. A brutal land baron has been having a problem with the Romani community settling on “his” property, so he slaughters them, but not before they issue a curse upon the land. Soon after, strange dreams draw a group of area children to the site of the massacre and they find a pair of freaky silver teeth (seen above). One of them is compelled by mysterious forces to put them in his mouth, at which point he starts a-bitin’. And so the Romani curse is set in motion.
The child who was bit — the land baron’s son — falls very ill before taking off into the night. His family frets and the vicious animal attacks that start up only serve to increase their anxiety. John McBride (Boyd Holbrook), a pathologist who experienced something similar in the French province of Gévaudan, is called in to investigate.
Why is Gévaudan significant? The timelines don’t line up here, but what the film is trying to draw connections to is the historical case of The Beast of Gévaudan. The story goes that between 1764 and 1767, a vicious and formidable predator (or predators) preyed on the people of the province. How many victims there were is a source of debate, with some claiming hundreds of attacks, and nearly as many deaths. What was the beast? A large wolf? Some other canid or pack of canids? A lion? It’s difficult to say for certain. There are A LOT of theories, but it’s no wonder that the story is often connected with the legend of the werewolf. Recent wolf man films and TV have carried this on. There was mention of Gévaudan in 2010’s The Wolfman, the story and the beast itself figure prominently in the events of the Teen Wolf TV series, and, as mentioned, its connected to the plot of The Curse.
From what I’ve seen, this film goes through the most trouble to actually make some sort of logical connection to that story, and it results in some big deviations from traditional werewolf lore. According to the John McBride character, similar atrocities against the Romani population resulted in an outbreak of carnage and death in Gévaudan. If it isn’t stopped in this new place, it will spread via those who the beast fails to kill. Here, there isn’t much rhyme or reason to why and when people transform. The monster operates in hazy daylight just as well as under cover of night, so no full moon is required (just as the historical Beast of Gévaudan’s attacks occured at all times).
When victims transform, they do not sprout fur, but are instead enveloped by bloody-looking tentacles that form a wolf-like creature. The final product is a gruesome variant. After taking down one of these creatures, McBride and company perform something of an autopsy in a scene that is pretty clearly inspired by John Carpenter’s The Thing. What they find is a young girl at the center of all the gore, but she is beyond saving. Writer/Director Sean Ellis (Anthropoid) says he wanted to twist the idea of the werewolf curse so that it’s not something that changes you into something else, but instead holds you prisoner to it. It’s not a version of the monster I’m want to see repeated, but, like I said, it’s at least interesting, and it results in some unique visuals and horrifying attack scenes.
In the end, there’s a bunch of religious mumbo jumbo tacked on about where the silver in the cursed teeth came from (Judas…or something?). It’s the only element of this film that doesn’t work at all. With nowhere left to hide, the villagers cower in a church, which is where they ultimately stop the beast and use the silver (now in bullet form) to restore the humanity of the land baron’s son. What will happen on the the battlefield of the Somme now that the army surgeon has removed it? The film doesn’t say.
Despite the many liberties it takes with the typical werewolf myth, The Cursed is still very clearly part of the subgenre. You’ve got the Romani element seen in the original The Wolf Man, the importance of silver, transmission by bite, and, even though it is visually distinct, the creature still takes the shape of a large wolf and kills via tooth and claw. I do not think the filmmakers were ashamed to make a werewolf flick. They were just trying to make something a little different. The distributor, LD Entertainment, is another story. Maybe they were right to feel that way. Audiences these days seem more interested in lazily written apparitions that open their mouths REALLY wide than in the humble lycanthrope. Maybe Werewolf by Night will be a vehicle for change in that regard? I sure hope so.
Is it scary? Yeah, I think there are some legit frights here.
Streaming: The Cursed is currently available on Hulu
