The Cursed brings startling new ideas and awful old ones to the werewolf horror story

polygon.com:

You have to say this for Sean Ellis’ horror movie The Cursed: It doesn’t waste much time on talking that it could spend on bloodshed. The movie, which played film festivals in 2021 under the more evocative name Eight For Silver, pits British villagers in the 1880s against a series of deadly supernatural events, including a monster stalking their fields and forests. The things that monster does to its victims are ugly, and often accomplished with visceral practical effects designed to make all but the most veteran gorehounds feel queasy. But the beast’s origins are far uglier, and far more likely to leave the audience unsettled — sometimes in exactly the wrong ways.

So much independent horror is made on a shoestring budget these days that it’s honestly surprising to see how richly appointed and casually expensive The Cursed looks, first in an opening sequence set on a World War I battlefield, then in a flashback that takes up most of the movie, set 35 years earlier. When a band of Romani set up camp near a British settlement, wealthy aristocrat Seamus Laurent (Alistair Petrie) and his peers send a group of bloodthirsty, sadistic thugs to massacre them. The Romani have a legitimate legal claim to the land that would compete with those local elites’ use of it, so simply forcing them to move on won’t do — Seamus and the others conspire to wipe them out, alter the land records, and bury the evidence in the field where the camp once was.

Shortly after that, all the children in the area start to dream about an eerie scarecrow in that field and an occult item buried under it, and Seamus’ children, Charlotte (Amelia Crouch) and Edward (Max Mackintosh) join the village kids in nervously visiting the site. Events escalate, Edward