This Period Piece That Fails as a Horror Movie Is Still Worth Watching – Armessa Movie News

The Cursed debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2021 under the title Eight for Silver. It was renamed for the theatrical release in February 2022. The film tells the story of John McBride (Boyd Holbrook), a traveling pathologist investigating strange deaths and disappearances on nobleman Seamus Laurent’s (Alistair Petrie) land. Yellowstone‘s Kelly Reilly stars as Seamus’ wife, Isabel. The Cursed was written, directed, and produced by Oscar-nominated director Sean Ellis. Ellis attempts to bring new life into the old-school story of werewolves through a combination of a period piece and a horror film. While The Cursed successfully handles the period piece portion of its genre, the horror is ineffective, repetitive, and overly derivative.

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What Is ‘The Cursed’ About?

There are two excellent scenes at the start of The Cursed that exemplify its strength as a period piece. The movie starts strong with a realistic depiction of World War I trench warfare. The audience is shown the brutality of the battlefield, with mustard gas and machine guns decimating hopeless young men. After the battle, the film moves on to the medical tent where countless victims lay in agony. The camera highlights the gory medical operations being performed. A man screams while his leg is being amputated, and another gushes blood while a doctor pulls bullets out of his body.

The film then takes the audience back in time to late 1800s France and introduces us to the Laurent family. Seamus, the head of the Laurent family, is fighting a land dispute with a Roma clan residing on his estate. The Roma claim to own the land they are occupying and historical records give credence to their claims. After a meeting with other influential men from the town, it is decided that the Roma must be removed by force to secure the Laurents’ land rights. What follows is the finest scene in the film and the other strong example of how excellent a period piece The Cursed is.

Seamus and a group of men ride into the Romani camp to remove them. While this plays out, the camera stays motionless and zoomed out. The audience sees the entire camp, but the only thing heard is music. After an argument between the two groups, violence breaks out. Seamus’ men start attacking the Roma and their campsite. With the way the attack is shot, the chaos can’t be completely followed. Everywhere the audience looks, a different attack is happening. Men and women are shot, tents begin to catch on fire, and panicked victims run off into the woods. After the devastation the camera cuts to Seamus’ children, Charlotte (Amelia Crouch) and Edward (Max Mackintosh), singing about true love during a music lesson. It is a perfect ending to the scene and provides an excellent commentary on the differences between the lives of the nobility and the Roma.

‘The Cursed’ Doesn’t Glamorize the Past

The Cursed shines when it is showcasing the uncomfortable and cruel reality of the time it’s set in. Many period pieces gloss over the more unsavory parts of their setting to focus on the entertaining side. But The Cursed doesn’t shy away from showing the uncomfortable parts of the past in full explicit detail. It’s refreshing to see more than drama between rich people in a modern period piece. But the darker tone isn’t the only reason why The Cursed succeeds in this aspect. It’s clear that Ellis put a lot of effort into getting all the film’s historical points right. The costumes, locales, and characters were appropriate, and there were details to be appreciated everywhere. From the slow reloading of black powder rifles to the flash of old-school cameras, everything was well executed. The social commentary on both the 1800s and the modern day was also handled well overall. But, for all the strengths of The Cursed as a period piece, it still fails as a horror film.

‘The Cursed’ Brings Nothing New to the Werewolf Genre

The idea of someone uncontrollably turning into a man-eating monster is scary. Giant killer wolves are also scary. So reasonably, a werewolf, which combines two scary things, should also be scary. But werewolf movies have existed for over a century, and werewolf stories have existed for much longer. The passage of time and our culture’s exposure to werewolf content has watered down the fear people once associated with the beasts. There is no doubt that werewolves as a concept are still scary, and the presence of one would be terrifying in reality. But in the mind of the modern movie-goer, these horrifying monsters have been largely reduced to Scooby Doo villains, toy dolls, and embarrassing teen romances. For a 2022 werewolf horror movie to succeed, it has to overcome this stigma and offer the audience something unique and deeply scary. The Cursed didn’t provide this.

Before it turns into a monster movie, The Cursed attempts to be a slow-paced psychological horror that uses nightmares to explore the guilt, fear, and paranoia of its characters. After the massacre of the Roma, the townspeople begin having nightmares about the corpse scarecrow and a set of silver wolf teeth buried beneath it. The first time one of the characters has this nightmare, it’s eerie and unsettling. The audience can feel the fear the character is experiencing. The issue is, this same nightmare scene plays out nearly identically several times throughout the film. The scarecrow appears in the foggy field, the character walks around and looks scared, the same cut-and-paste video of birds flitting on the ground plays, and the teeth are dug up. This is shown over and over with very little that differentiates each appearance of the scene.

Why ‘The Cursed’ Fails as a Horror Movie

A large part of horror, and the feeling of fear in general, is encountering something shocking, disturbing, unexpected, or unknown. Repetition acts completely opposed to these factors. In most cases, the more you see something, the less scary it becomes. So, when The Cursed shows the same nightmare sequence several times, it completely kills the scariness and becomes laughable. It was admirable of Ellis to try a slow and psychological take on the typical werewolf story. But for this to be effective, the audience has to feel the fear and uncomfortable emotions that the characters do. When the audience is laughing about seeing the same dream for a fourth time, and others are leaving the theater out of boredom, the horror is clearly not effective.

Another issue with The Cursed’s horror is its overuse of clichés. It seems as though Ellis sat down and thought of all these cliché horror movie things and then put them together. Biblical curses, Indian (Romani) burial grounds, a mysterious but knowledgeable stranger, children turning into something evil, nudity, gory violence, monsters, etc. This has all been done before and better. The Cursed doesn’t add anything substantial to the horror genre or the werewolf myth. Ellis attempted to make the story feel unique through slow pacing, a new monster design, and some additions to the traditional lore. At its core though, The Cursed is the same werewolf story audiences have seen for decades. It doesn’t arouse fear and is filled with banal tropes. Audiences will walk away from the film remembering the scenes of historical brutality and will forget the tedious nightmares and shamefully hairless werewolves.