Ten Days of Terror!: The Cursed

Film: The Cursed
Format: Streaming video from Hulu on Fire!

There’s a certain art to naming a movie or a book, or really any project. The right name piques interest while the wrong name puts people off or doesn’t get anyone thinking about anything. Case in point is The Cursed. I struggle to think of a more generic title for a horror movie; there certainly can be one, but I don’t know off-hand what it would or could be. This is especially true when you discover that the original name of this project was Eight for Silver, which is at least evocative of something, or has the potential to get the audience thinking.

The curse in this case is going to come from a group of Romani people (called “Gypsies” throughout the film as a slur, because it is one), and the cursed of the title are going to be the men who slaughter them and their families. We’re going to start in the future, though, at the battlefield of the Somme in World War I, where a man is treated for bullet wounds—and an additional bullet of non-German design is found in his body.

From here, we’re going to learn about the curse. The Romani group have a claim on a parcel of land in France currently owned by a man named Seamus Laurent (Alistair Petrie), whose name appears a strange combination of Irish and French. Knowing that trouble is coming, the Romani make a cast of silver fangs in the shape of wolf teeth for protection, but this is more about revenge than real protection. They are, of course, slaughtered by Laurent and the people who live on his land. As a punishment and a warning to other Romani, one has his hands and feet cut off, his limbs stuffed with straw, and is erected as a scarecrow. The leader of the clan is buried with the teeth.

The curse manifests itself in the dreams of the people living in the area. The children, who aren’t specifically aware of what happened, have dreams of the scarecrow and the teeth and seek them out. A group of children led by Timmy (Tommy Rodger) find the place and dig up the teeth, which Timmy puts in his mouth. He then bites Edward (Max Mackintosh). Those who didn’t see him attacked conclude he was attacked by a wild animal, and Timmy is nowhere to be found. That night, Edward is discovered trapped in woody vines, and he disappears into the night.

So, that’s going to be the transformation—anyone wounded by the teeth, or someone wounded by the teeth, passes on the curse. Once afflicted, the person is trapped in vines (for some reason, probably because it looks cool) and then becomes a sort of human/wolf hybrid and seeks to hurt others and continue passing on the curse. All of this is being observed by a pathologist named John McBride (Boyd Holbrook), who appears to have had some experience with what is happening.

There are a few things that The Cursed gets right. While there are certainly parts of it that don’t make a great deal of sense, it looks great doing it. The vines, for instance, don’t really fit into any kind of lycanthropy/shapeshifting mythology that I know of, but it’s a really cool image. The sequence with the scarecrow creation is also incredibly horrifying—it’s a moment of completely believable cruelty from people who clearly should know better and legitimately don’t care about anything but their own greed. The creatures also look good—they are terrible in the right way, brutal and bestial, but with just enough humanity left in them to make them truly monstrous.

But there’s not a lot else here that makes a great deal of sense. Why are we in France but have people singing Irish songs and being named things like Seamus? Why exactly are they covered in vines before transforming? Why is one person specifically pulled down into the water and somehow not drowned before changing? At the end, where there are evidently dozens of people wounded, what happens with the curse? And how does the ending really tie to the beginning?

The Cursed really wants to create a sort of new mythology for lycanthropes or possessed creatures, but it doesn’t tell the audience how any of it works. We’re left to intuit what we can from what we are seeing, and there’s not a lot given to us in terms of connecting those dots. Audiences, at least some audiences, are smart. Horror fans know the genre and are able to make a lot of intuitive leaps from concept to film reality, but when we don’t have handholds to get us there, we generally stop caring. Things happen because…visually cool? Creatures work this way because…makes for exciting scenes? It stops being coherent, and that’s disappointing. I’m happy to suspend disbelief, but only in a world that is internally consistent and explained enough to be understood. The Cursed is neither.

And seriously, that name really sucks.

Why to watch The Cursed: Lycanthrope stories are cool.
Why not to watch: A lot doesn’t make sense without explanations, and nothing is explained.