This Horror Legend's Biggest Bomb Got Better With Its Unrated Version

Published Oct 6, 2026, 5:10 AM EDT Bradley is an experienced and award winning journalist and all around entertainment fanatic. He is a passionate film and TV fan and long time attendee of San Diego Comic Con. The late Wes Craven is known for some of the greatest horror experiences on film, namely creating the Scream and A Nightmare on Elm Street franchises which have been going strong for decades. But even some of the best filmmakers have made bombs and in the case of Craven, his biggest failure was 2005's Cursed, which reunited him with Scream scribe Kevin Williamson to turn the werewolf genre on its head. Only bringing in $29 million on a budget of $38 million, Cursed was a massive commercial failure and to add insult to injury, was trashed by critics. But when the film hit DVD stands later that year, it released an unrated cut that added more blood and gore to the PG-13 cut that was released to the masses. It's no secret that horror and the PG-13 rating rarely mix well, and as such, Cursed's unrated cut was a look at what could've been. Cursed takes the Scream approach to werewolves. With the same creative team behind both films, the comparisons between Cursed and Scream are plentiful. For starters, the film takes the horror genre and mixes it with the concept of the whodunnit, as our heroes know there is a werewolf slaughtering people, but it could be anybody. Much like Scream, there is a crop of suspects and red herrings, but the film's twist is that the main characters are also in the mix of the supernatural horror. The film focuses on two squabbling siblings, Ellie (Christina Ricci) and Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg), who in the opening act, are mauled by an unseen werewolf, inevitably causing them to begin to transform into werewolves themselves. After doing research on the supernatural beasts, Jimmy comes to the conclusion that they must kill the werewolf that changed them to break the curse. As a result, anybody could be a suspect and there is a ticking clock that drives the narrative forward. The unrated edition is the true version of the film. The PG-13 cut released in theaters had severe limitations in terms of the horror presented. Obviously, there could be no blood, no gore, and no swearing, making for a pretty unexciting werewolf movie. But the unrated cut not only restores the bloody kills missing from the theatrical cut, but it makes the film more exciting the stakes higher once the audience sees the true horror of the situation. In the theatrical version, characters were condemned to offscreen deaths, which was severely anticlimactic. Now, the audience can see their true horrific fate, most noticeable in one of the film's first kills, which in the unrated cut, is far more graphic and terrifying. The point of a horror film is to scare the crowd, but when the filmmakers are forced to subtract the violence, that falls by the wayside. The unrated cut is the closest to Craven's vision and as such, is far superior to the PG-13 version. While Cursed may not have struck a chord with horror fans in theaters, the unrated version deserves a look for anyone who didn't care for the original cut and even as a first experience for new viewers. It's far from a perfect werewolf movie, but still deserves a chance from horror fans and fans of Craven and Williamson's works. Birthdate August 2, 1939 Birthplace Cleveland, Ohio, USA Deathdate August 30, 2015 Birthname Wesley Earl Craven