The Underappreciated Queer Icon In Wes Craven’s ‘Cursed’
We’re never going to see Cursed how director Wes Craven would have wanted. For years since its release, fans have been treated to interviews, behind-the-scenes snippets, deleted scenes, lore—the whole spectrum of delicious nuggets building a base for the movie Cursed was meant to be. Instead, on account of studio interference and dovetailing perspectives, we got the Cursed that released in February 2005. An R-rated cut helps, but it’s not the vision anyone involved hoped for. Against all odds, Cursed has nonetheless endured as a cult oddity, a remarkable wrinkle in Wes Craven’s sterling career and further proof that Kevin Williamson’s scripting savvy extends beyond metatextual slashers. Cursed is far from perfect, but there’s plenty about it I and other Craven acolytes can’t help but love. One of those is, without a doubt, Milo Ventimiglia’s Bo.
Bo could have been a lot of things in Cursed. At the start, he ostensibly is. He’s introduced as a cad, a terrible boyfriend who greets Jesse Eisenberg’s Jimmy as “the dodgeball crotch target.” Which, really, is pretty benign. After he’s told to lay off, he’s incredulous, calling Jimmy a “geek on his way to Fag Town.” That isn’t a real place, so it probably doesn’t need to be written as a proper noun, but yeah, not especially great, Bo.
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It stings a bit more in retrospect, largely because any millennial who grew up in the early aughts can attest to how regularly that word was thrown around in media, often for laughs. Hilary Duff could only manage so much. From there, Bo gets worse. He ceaselessly bullies Jimmy at school and goads him into trying out for wrestling since all that “male-to-male contact” sounds like it would be right up Jimmy’s alley. Wisely, Williamson resists making Jimmy entirely helpless. He pointedly asks back “Why? Is that the appeal for you?”
Eventually, Bo is humiliated in front of the school after Jimmy taps into his werewolf sensibilities and beats him in an incredulously staged wrestling match. Those moves can’t be legal, right? Which, in theory, should be the end of Bo. Cinematic bullies had a pretty strict trajectory, especially in horror movies. Appear, exhibit some pathological, obsessive behavior toward the target (often a protagonist or someone protagonist-adjacent), and get punished.
Horror is dense, complex, and political in every form, though movies like Cursed—as is evident in its production woes—are also, at their core, a product. There’s artistry, but they’re also designed to make money. And, sure, it’s easy to exclusively blame executives for appealing to the lowest common denominator, but general audiences expect, perhaps demand, some semblance of karmic, filmic justice. Wolf Creek got an F Cinema Score. Wolf Creek also ends with its killer walking away unpunished.
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Bullies like Bo are regularly the horror equivalent of cannon fodder. They’re expendable for the audience’s sake. Buddy Repperton in Christine. Chris Hargensen and Billy Nolan in Carrie. Nancy Downs in The Craft. Really, any teen movie, horror or otherwise, from the 1980s. Contemporary films to this day continue to populate their stories with detestable characters whose sole narrative purpose is to either die or suffer some considerable comeuppance.
Conventionally, then, Jimmy’s triumph in the wrestling tryout should be the end of Bo. If he were to return, it would be as werewolf slaughter. But that’s not how Bo returns. Cursed transitions into its final act with Bo showing up on Jimmy’s door to… confess his undying love to Jimmy.
It’s subversive and a little charming. Bo being gay doesn’t excuse his horrible behavior—and it does perpetuate some misguided yet frustratingly common perceptions that all homophobes are just closeted themselves. But it’s not at all what anyone but Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven would have done.
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Wisely, Williamson resists scripting the scene as a jab at Bo. It’s not funny, “Ha ha,” that Bo is gay. Instead, Bo’s confessional solidifies the werewolf lore—namely Jimmy’s pheromones that render him intensely desirable—and augments Jimmy’s own development as more than a helpless dweeb. He doesn’t punish Bo or rub it in his face. He turns him down, but he does so tenderly.
But that’s not even the end of Bo. He features prominently in the third act, fleeing Jimmy’s home alongside him to track down the head werewolf. Pheromones aside, he is completely down with whatever Jimmy has to say. Oh, your sister is in danger from a werewolf? Let’s go. Bo even survives the ordeal, looking on awkwardly as Jimmy embraces Bo’s ex in the movie’s final moments. Sweetly, Jimmy offers to walk them both home.
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Is Bo groundbreaking? Quietly, yeah. He’s tethered to some early aughts ideals of what queerness means, but for the time, his characterization was quietly revolutionary. Especially so in a Kevin Williamson project, a writer whose horror works were often imbued with considerable subtext but few explicitly queer elements. Remember the lovebird bodyguards in Scream 2? Comparatively, Bo is in a league of his own.
Almost two decades after its release, Cursed endures for myriad reasons. It’s funny, campy, smart where it counts, and—for some— the end of an era. Post-Curse, Wes Craven was never quite the same. He took a five-year break from filmmaking, returning with both My Soul to Take and Scream 4 as his last directorial outputs before his death. Cursed carries with it, then, an unintentional wistfulness, maybe even a tinge of sadness. The production was cursed in its own way, but with characters like Bo, Craven still delivered something special.
Let me know what you think over on Twitter @Chadiscollins.
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