At 20, ‘Cursed’ is, and Always Has Been, a Good Movie
The production of Wes Craven’s Cursed has long been considered, well, cursed. The film was reshot several times, bringing the budget to an estimated $100 million, and according to cast and crew, there are probably three very different, almost complete versions of Cursed out there in the ether, all of which largely featured different casts entirely. It was, quite frankly, a mess, which was par for the course with the early aughts Dimension game. Nothing was ever good enough, so the Weinsteins typically pulverized what good ideas there were until nothing but pulp remained.
And Cursed is pulp—but it isn’t a bad movie. That’s been the company line for a while—Cursed is an exercise in what could have been, a theoretically good time dampened by unprecedented production woes. Oh, and it’s also the movie that incited a five-year sabbatical for filmmaker Wes Craven. Yet, as the film turns 20, I’m less convinced that Cursed needs some kind of reclamation, some kind of new analysis, principally because, even with the context, I never thought Cursed was a bad movie to begin with. In fact, it’s arguably pretty great.
Cursed is one of those horror white whales, the 2000s equivalent of The Curse of Michael Myers’ Producers Cut. So much of the film is missing (and unsalvageable) that Cursed remains a perennial exercise in speculation. The film is specimen jar chic, an oddity, and curiosity better known for its production than the final product. And that’s a shame since while I can recognize why the experience turned Craven away from filmmaking for half a decade, I’ve always considered Cursed one of his best.
To use the enduring Scream tagline, the very first Craven and Kevin Williamson collab, Cursed is clever, Cursed is hip, and Cursed is scary. Not scary, scary—there’s little chance you’ll be sleeping with the lights on—but tragically scary, a kind of werewolf metaphor for a changing world. 2005 was all about power and sex. Lacking either of those requisite qualities meant falling far, far behind. Christina Ricci’s Ellie certainly was, desperately trying to manage her career and caretaking duties for her younger brother (much to the chagrin of Joshua Jackson’s Jake). And Jessie Eisenberg’s Josh, poor Josh. If you were weird in 2005, everyone just figured you were gay. Hilary Duff’s “That’s so gay” PSA wouldn’t arrive until three years later.
There’s poignancy in the fractured family unit and desperation to find some kind of tribe. And really, at their core, that’s what the werewolf mythos have always been about—community. Some sense of primal belonging in a world splitting more apart by the day. It’s why there’s paternal strife at the center of Leigh Whannel’s latest iteration, and why Creighton Tull Chaney’s performance in George Waggner’s original The Wolf Man might be the saddest performance preserved on screen.
Cursed is certainly very Scream, very of its era, though the fascination with probing the lycanthropic subtext remains amidst all the witty rejoinders and pop stars (Mýa) getting eaten. It’s packed with meaning and earnestness, and while that may not seem like much, I’ve harped plenty about how irony is killing the horror scene.
Which is to say nothing of how fluid and dynamic Wes Craven’s actual, technical filmmaking really is. When he returned with both Scream 4 and My Soul to Take, the evidence on screen pointed not just toward a director in decline, but a director without feeling. He might well have wanted to be there, though there are residual Cursed threads omnipresent in his final years. His filmmaking lacked zest, a kind of cinematic tangibility of his disillusionment with the film industry. Watch Scream 4 with a conscious effort to remove the Scream of it all and you’ll see what I mean.
So, really, Wes Craven’s final flight was in 2005 with the double feature of both Cursed and Red Eye. Red Eye is objectively the better of the two, though Cursed isn’t all that far behind. No differently than Craven at the start of his career, there’s tactility to Cursed’s horror shenanigans that were a staple of the filmmaker—a filmmaker who prioritized people as much as he did monsters.
Wes Craven might have hated the process, but he certainly didn’t hate the material, at least as evidenced by what made it to the screen. Even the clear reshoots—whether from the second or third round—are abounding with care and precision. No one does tension better than Wes Craven, and whether it’s that infamous parking lot stalk-and-slash or an earlier accident along a stretch of California highway, it’s clear his preeminent goal is to get the audience to feel something. Was that something rustling in those bushes? Is Mýa going to be safe in the elevator?
We all know the often imperceptible differences between a good movie and a bad movie. We can’t always pinpoint why that’s the case, but we can certainly feel it. Often viscerally, as if tapped into the same wavelength as the filmmaker behind the camera. Craven’s Cursed aura isn’t quite cursed. If anything, it’s remarkably assured, a steady hand from a steady horror figure who knows exactly what he wants you to feel and when he wants you to feel it. That’s love, and if all art is love, Cursed eclipses its rocky production by dint of Craven’s own will alone.
Wes Craven remains, and will remain, my favorite filmmaker of all time. So, it’s fair to assert some kind of bias here. If you recoil at the thought of Cursed being anything other than a cult favorite, I think that’s fair. For me, it’s the final love letter from one of horror’s greatest. While he may not have intended it as such, it’s a kind of swan song. Everything he so expertly mastered throughout his decades in filmmaking is on full display here. Not even the combined malice of the Weinstein Brothers was enough to derail the innate love and care Craven had for not only his work but for the audiences who would be seated in theaters to see it. Truly one of the greats with one hell of a resume, Cursed included.
Categorized:Editorials
