Having received positive reviews at Sundance and Frightfest, Eight for Silver (previously called The Cursed) is finally receiving it's home release in the UK.
Skirting a somewhat uneven line between folk horror, werewolf movie and Dracula homage, Eight for Silver is one of those genre movies that shouldn't work. But it does.
If you're a horror fan, there's always a real buzz to be found when you discover a low budget genre movie that actually succeeds, and Eight for Silver is definitely one of those. Yes, there are some poor effects moments, but ultimately that doesn't really matter. As always, it isn't about the monster or what the monster looks like.
We are introduced to a small town in rural France. An English landowner is a responsible and relatively benevolent landlord, however he is less tolerant when it comes to Romani. An argument over the rights to a piece of land (which the landowner doesn't seem to actually be using) results in a brutal massacre.
As the final two Romani are murdered and buried, they describe a curse that will take revenge for them.
Soon the local children become plagued by nightmares and a compulsion to dig in the field where those violent moments happened. Visions of a scarecrow, silver and a ghostly woman floating over the land. One of them finally digs up the silver they are drawn to, and unleashes a curse that infects and spreads in a visceral path of vengeance.
The story moves through a number of genres, beginning very much a folk horror with echo's of The Blood on Satan's Claw giving it a very English slant. Before moving into something more akin to Dracula and Sleepy Hollow. With our own heroic expert that embodies a combination of Abraham Van Helsing and Ichabod Crane in John McBride (Boyd Holbrook). He arrives with his own internal wounds, but desiring his own path of vengeance on a curse only he is familiar with.
This mixed feeling of both English folklore and American land ownership based allegory, gives Eight for Silver a feel that is both familiar and uncanny at the same time. The monster itself is not so much a clear werewolf, and becomes even more unusual and unpredictable as steps to kill it take it through Lovecraftian imagery to the familiarity of Carpenter's The Thing.
That's not to say that Eight for Silver feels derivative as such. It just suggests that director and writer Sean Ellis is a true horror fan. Familiar with the genre and what works, he takes what he loves and combines it in a way that is relatively new.
Perhaps this review oversells what is essentially, beneath all this pretension, an imperfect but charming monster movie. But when those monster movies are good in a way that is surprising, then surely that's what they deserve?
Eight for Silver is released on DVD and Blu-ray on January 30th
