It’s really unfortunate writer/director Sean Ellis‘s 1800s-set werewolf horror film Eight for Silver has been re-titled The Cursed, a title so bland and generic that I wasn’t even interested in watching the newly released trailer… until I remembered The Cursed is now the title of that werewolf movie I’ve been looking forward to. The trailer can be seen in the embed above, and judging by that it looks like The Cursed is going to be a much better movie than its new title suggests.
Our own Chris Bumbray had the chance to watch the film as part of the Sundance Film Festival last year and gave it a 7/10 review.
Here’s the synopsis for The Cursed, according to Wikipedia:
In the late nineteenth century, brutal land baron Seamus Laurent slaughters a Roma clan, unleashing a curse on his family and village. In the days that follow, the townspeople are plagued by nightmares, Seamus’s son Edward goes missing, and a boy is found murdered. The locals suspect a wild animal, but visiting pathologist John McBride warns of a more sinister presence lurking in the woods.
Boyd Holbrook (The Predator), Kelly Reilly (Eden Lake), Alistair Petrie (Victor Frankenstein), Roxane Duran (The Way to Happiness), and Áine Rose Daly (the Amazon series Hanna) star.
Speaking with Variety, Ellis said The Cursed was “inspired by a love for horror classics”:
I wanted to go back to a genre piece. I’m a big fan of horror films. Films like Alien and The Thing had a big influence on me. … I felt it needed to be a period film – they’re more cinematic. When you do a period piece you’re creating a world. I think cinema is about visiting other worlds.”
Ellis also revealed that his film features “a kind of werewolf that audiences haven’t seen before” because
I kind of love the werewolf mythology but I hadn’t loved where it had gone. It felt like zombies had been updated and we could do many different things with that. There was just this cliché of what the werewolf was.”
In bringing the monsters to the screen, the filmmaker found “old school special effects and animatronics more powerful than CGI” and tried to do as much of the creature action in camera as possible – and he has even cut down the amount of CGI effects since the Sundance screening.
As the trailer reveals, The Cursed is scheduled to reach theatres on February 18th.
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