It's a series of full details behind some of the famous 'Cursed' horror movies in Hollywood. The series follows the full events of these truly terrifying scenes through interviews with experts, witnesses, actors, directors and producers who lived through them. There are a number of full details including aircraft crashes and explosions during the making of The Omen, the rumored use of a real human skeleton on a set of Poltergeist and other strange frames.
I feel like maybe this could have made a compelling feature documentary with each of the profiled films being a short 10-minute segment and doing away with all the ridiculous side excursions that all the episodes I have seen so far take...
At a half hour, the episode is too short to really go deep on these topics. But director Jay Cheel approaches his sometimes eccentric subjects with an open, yet skeptical mind, lending both credulity and levity to the season premiere.
It's more a documentary about how the public is fascinated by curses or how the "curse" adds to a film's legacy. In this sense, Shudder's documentary series is an absolute success.
What is most interesting is that the episodes don't gravitate around the urban legends surrounding the sets but, in fact, they try their best to debunk what we've heard.
Cursed Films remains an entertaining watch, one that is more interested in how these rumors and legends are created and why they persist than in the validity of them.
We are never chastised for finding curses appealing or comforting but rather are implored to consider what a curse actually does, not to its victims but to those processing unexplainable, bizarre, or tragic events.
Despite its occasional shortcomings, Cursed Films does a stellar job of balancing its responsibility to its subjects and the morbid intrigue of the more sensationalist details of these stories.
The series is a horror fan's delight from top to bottom, providing insight from folks involved with the films in question as well as several renowned horror film experts and aficionados.
