‘Cursed Films’ on Shudder Successfully Debunks Movie Myths With Insightful Research, Along With A Touch of Humor

This week on Shudder, the horror-centric subscription streaming service available through Amazon Prime, the fourth episode (of a five-episode second season) of Cursed Films drops. The episode covers Wes Craven’s 1988 voodoo horror film The Serpent and the Rainbow, and deals with, among other strange occurrences during the filming, the fact that the screenwriter Richard Maxwell at one point believed that he had been possessed by some kind of Haitian demon, and had to leave the production. But crucially, what the show – directed, edited, and written by Jay Cheel – doesn’t do is pretend that Maxwell actually was possessed. What it does do, in this and all other episodes from both seasons, is explore how strange yet explicable occurrences — and occasionally horrible tragedies — can plague the making of certain films, and how these can cause myths to arise around them, and subsequently perpetuate a kind of mystical, conspiratorial form of critical thinking.

The first season of Cursed Films, which aired on Shudder in 2020 right at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, was heavily focused on “cursed” horror movies. That season covered The Exorcist, The Omen, Poltergeist, The Crow, and Twilight Zone: The Movie. As Cheel explained in an episode of Film Junk, the highly idiosyncratic film podcast he co-hosts with Sean Dwyer and Frank Knezic, there was an intended arc to the order of these episodes that was rearranged due to Shudder having streaming rights to The Exorcist, but nevertheless the philosophy of the show couldn’t have been clearer from the beginning. The title Cursed Films seems to have thrown some people off, believing that it took the idea of curses seriously, but all you have to do to figure out where Cheel is coming from is watch the Poltergeist episode. This remains my favorite of the two seasons, and details the belief the film was hexed due to, among other reasons, the tragic early deaths of Heather O’Rourke and Dominique Dunne. One reason some claim Poltergeist was cursed is that in the famous climactic scene featuring JoBeth Williams’s panicked swim amongst a pool full of skeletons, those skeletons were real, not models (not an unusual practice), thereby bringing the wrath of, I suppose, the dead down upon the film. O’Rourke died of a rare disease, and Dunne was murdered by a stalker. In the episode, regarding these sad deaths, Craig Reardon, one of the film’s special make-up effects artists, says “The idea of having a few [real skeletons] on the set of Poltergeist and killing two lovely young girls is a pretty pernicious idea. It’s an insult to the memory of a very sweet little girl, Heather O’Rourke, and it’s worse than that: Dominique Dunne was strangled to death by her boyfriend, which had fuck-all to do with a skeleton.”

In season two, it would appear that, given the success of season one, Shudder has allowed Cheel to branch out, and cover films outside of the horror genre. While horror is still represented here – an episode about Rosemary’s Baby has already aired, and the last episode will take a look at the, to me, inexcusable Cannibal Holocaust – we also get explorations of The Wizard of Oz and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. These last two are my favorites of the season thus far. Cheel has a particular sense of humor which he injects into the episodes on occasion (there’s a cut to a City Slickers poster in season one that killed me), and in the one about The Wizard of Oz he brings in comedian Gregg Turkington, playing the character of “Gregg Turkington” made famous on the web series On Cinema at the Cinema that he hosts with Tim Heidecker. On that show, Turkington’s version of himself is a clueless cinephile, a gullible film expert, who knows far less than he thinks he does and has shit taste. On this episode of Cursed Films, he shows up to praise the much-reviled Under the Rainbow, the 1981 Chevy Chase comedy that attempted to keep alive the legend that the actors who played the Munchkins in Victor Fleming’s 1939 classic went wild in their hotel during production. This, among many other myths surrounding Oz, are debunked throughout the episode, except by Turkington. The choice to bring in Turkington has apparently baffled some, to the extent that they think Cheel believed Turkington was on the level. But of course the assumption is that the viewer will get the joke, and understand that Turkington represents everyone who has bolstered this kind of nonsense for the past several decades.

The Oz episode ends with a long section about Judy Garland and her life and career after that film. There is, of course, a lot of sadness in that story, and Cheel unfolds it with great sensitivity. Being able to include this and the Turkington section in one 40ish minute episode, and make it all work, is perhaps his greatest gift. But he also knows when to step away from that kind of ironic juxtaposition. The best episode of season two, so far, is the one about Stalker, a film that, as anyone who’s seen it knows, has a connection to The Wizard of Oz. In this episode, Cheel deftly describes the making of the film, the near un-making of it, and the terrible circumstances which may have led to the early deaths of Tarkovsky and two of the film’s lead actors. Yet it’s also a tribute to a cinema classic, a one of a kind science-fiction masterpiece. The stories told throughout both seasons of Cursed Films are often tragic, even, at times, infuriating. But they are also illuminating, human, and humane.

Bill Ryan has also written for The Bulwark, RogerEbert.com, and Oscilloscope Laboratories Musings blog. You can read his deep archive of film and literary criticism at his blog The Kind of Face You Hate, and you can find him on Twitter: @faceyouhate