The Cursed (2021)

An English-speaking gothic horror film about the consequences of stealing land and the sickest set of dentures ever.

A wonderful poster that informs a viewer chunks will be bitten out of them and swallowed during first or seventh watch.

Welcome.

It’s very common in horror to ask what is scarier: not knowing what terrifying things are coming or being the source of it? In the gothic horror The Cursed (2021) this is not only the core, but the festering wounds held and carried throughout it. When the monster is a single human being’s decisions reflecting back onto a group of people who have no idea why the affliction is happening, does it make the person who knows the truth worse for keeping their mouth shut? This tends to be a constant conflict in every sub-genre within horror; knowing vs. unknowing, source vs. variants, infection vs. uninfected, monster vs. humans, monster vs. monster, humans vs. humans¹ - the list goes infinitely. It mutates into a labyrinth the more layers the core conflict[s] generate, the more components that can be mixed together always plate themselves in the same solution: a concoction of melancholic outcome.

Before we set out into the tall grass fields of early dawn in France, we have to arm ourselves with whatever is available. Your companion in creeping is here to reassure all readers [new and returning] of DEATH RATTLE and viewers of this film that skipping both or either isn’t a show of cowardice. Some things that lurk are best left for the proper nerves, but it is still my job to warn of the coming scares. The Cursed contains some truly horrific and startling things not meant for everyone, which include: war scenes, gore, nightmares, surgical/medical horror, child murder and death, murder in general, mass homicide and torture of Romani by European colonizers, use of outdated derogatory termage (slurs), dismemberment, drowning, self-immolation, suicide, discussion and visual representations of PTSD triggers, pandemics, nudity, claustrophobia (possible triggering visuals), and discussion of addictions (within the newsletter, not the film).

If you need to pass on this film and newsletter, stay safe inside, and try another spooky film instead.

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The Cursed (2021) is a gothic horror film directed and written by Sean Ellis, an Englishman who also wrote and directed The Broken (2008), a twisting horror film starring Lena Headey as a radiologist working with patients that have Situs Inversus². (She might also have a possible doppelganger problem.) Other films by Ellis are majority historical and focus on war, which is also the genre and focus of The Cursed. The film takes place in two separate time periods - one of them we begin and end with (The Battle of Somme, 1916) and the other we spend nearly our entire time in (1881)³ fighting a much smaller-scale battle. We begin within trenches during the Battle of Somme⁴ in the present day of the story; the colors of the Western Front are washed out, unsaturated, mud-coated and bleak, the French soldiers lining the trenches are covering their eyes and faces with goggles and heavy cloths as makeshift respirators. A captain (portrayed by Stuart Goodwin) of these men comforts those who acknowledge him as he passes, patting a few firmly on the back and nodding. The captain too looks just as worn as his soldiers. There are sudden explosions in the sky, giving the French pause, but then immediate action once realizing that gas⁵ was being deployed. As the French struggle and suffer with their gas inhalation, they respond to a whistle calling for the first wave of men to run into No Man’s Land, including our captain - only armed with a pistol - and his troops. On the opposing side, all black gas-masked German soldiers set up a machine gun’s feed and fire at the probably half-blind, still gas-disabled French men.

Though we do not see the bloody results during the clash, there’s a quick cut from the machine gun fire to the captain in a cramped medical tent, taken off the battlefield and weaved through fellow wounded soldiers. All other occupants of the tent are on makeshift gurneys and gauzed up like bloody mummies, some with extremely mortal wounds, blasted apart appendages, faces blown off to varying degrees, and amputations taking place while the patient is still very much conscious and screaming loud enough for the audience to know so. We even watch as a mangled foot is dumped into one of a couple buckets of other severed body parts.

Thankfully there are no amputations needed for our dear captain, a very kind doctor introduces himself and checks on the status of him. Knowing he has to work in haste, the issue at hand is quickly identified by the doctor and work is immediate - three giant shots to the abdomen that have to be extracted to have a chance at saving the captain’s life. While he is worked on, the captain stutters through agonizing pains and shock. After leaning down to listen momentarily, a nurse parses out the captain is reciting a nursery rhyme. The first two bullets are extracted without too much issue, but the third shattered inside of his body, requiring the doctor to go in a second time for the rest of the bullet. However, he discovers something else is lodged inside of the captain, and struggles as he pulls out a piece of silver. The doctor looks at it in confusion before saying: “..that’s not a German bullet.”

To which the captain replies:

“Eight for silver.⁶”

The life drains all at once out of his eyes, the doctor drops the bullet into the dish with the other pieces of metal, the larger and fourth bullet making a very solid and much heavier clang. Silence slowly resonates after the bullet, building up to the noise of gravel underneath an automobile’s wheels as it takes a long road up to an estate in the countryside. A woman clad in all black exits the vehicle and asks a servant how someone in the estate is doing, to which the servant solemnly gives a shake of the head and a ‘not so good’. While she waits within the house, the woman looks over a mantle - or table - that shows a large cluster of black and white pictures. Picking one up that she regards with a fondness shows three figures - two young children stood beside a seated older man, all with pale skin and dark hair.

Noise of children laughing and playing start to invade the silence between the woman and the photograph. She turns slightly as if looking over her shoulder for the source of the noise - a boy’s voice calling out her name, which becomes sharp and as clear as ever as we are transported 35 years into the past with her being taunted by her brother. Charlotte (as a child, portrayed by Amelia Crouch, as an older woman, portrayed by Annabel Mullion) and Edward (as a child, Max Mackintosh) are young and rambunctious, living in the estate in the countryside. Their home is vast and full of rooms, tall paned doors and windows, and richly furnished. They give us a tour running up and down stairs and halls as Edward plays keep-away with one of his sister’s books - which he quickly and ultimately fails to do for too long. Their mother Isabelle Laurent (Kelly Reilly) is a very fashionable and thin woman, who we meet scolding Edward for teasing Charlotte, but the audience can tell that she isn’t a very harsh or tightly wound kind of person. She asks for a bath to be drawn while her children rush off to play somewhere else - in which we may complete the family with a focus on our directly opposing patriarch of the Laurent household.

Seamus Laurent (Allstair Petrie) is a square-jawed and severe man, out shooting rabbits in the fields on his property for dinner when he is introduced. Returning to his estate with a couple of them tied together, he searches for his wife’s whereabouts within the endless rooms. It doesn’t take him long to find her taking her bath, but he doesn’t knock when throwing the door open nor does he seem particularly happy seeing her. Isabelle does not cover herself when Seamus bursts inside and they share a lingering silence before he leaves that allow the audience to speculate the marriage is that of loveless convenience. Seamus Laurent is full of secrets and conversations behind nearly-shut doors by light of candles while Isabelle is often present with their children and loves to hear them singing and the piano playing.

Servants move around inside and outside of the Laurent estate like blood flowing through a network of thin veins. Not long after dinner has finished that evening, there is an arrival of other townsmen of wealth and standing to discuss a rather urgent issue. Seamus has established a settlement in the French countryside and as its land baron⁷ he is kept up with details of the settlement by the other gentlemen in his private study. Tonight's discussion between finely dressed colleagues is different and rather serious. Through hushed whispers of anxiety and a slightly open door - in which the two Laurent children get a little bit of snooping in, but not enough for them to understand what is being spoken of before being found and scooted back to bed - we learn that the settlement is built on already claimed land. Even more damning? There’s recorded evidence of the claim and the people are making their way back to the area to make legally acceptable demands of the man and settlement that simply built on it without their permission. They really only want to set up within one of the fields, that they can legally do, but the men simply cannot have it leading to questions of their power and position!

The only way to settle it is insisted by not only the religious leader of a Christian church but followed agreement by the other men as well which gives Seamus a very slight pause. The people are to be scared off and away from their settlement so it cannot be bothered and authorities will not come to see what the commotion is about. Of course we are forgetting the very key identification of who the rightful land holders are: a nomadic caravan of Romani peoples⁸. At the same time, the caravan of families making their way towards the settlement are also having dinner and conversation. A blacksmith takes a weighted bag of silver coins from one of the caravan's leaders to fashion a set of pure silver dentures out of a wolf's teeth and place them back into a pair of jaws. The prosthetic is created to keep the group safe, as the leader asking for it to be made has had a premonition of impending death.

Seamus sends his men out the following early morning to frighten the Romani caravan away - but the audience can already feel the stone in their insides weigh down even heavier as the group of men on horseback crest the hills with torches in hand. We do not hear the conversation had but the tension in the air is suffocating, individuals approaching the men on their horses and talking with them until Seamus and his men grow frustrated and shoot the first man who had come to confront them. The gunshot echoes into the surrounding woods and hills, screaming barely heard on the wind, people rushing forward to help the man wounded are met with further gunshots and horses stomping on their bodies without second thought. Seamus and company murder women protecting their children, shoot down anyone trying to run, set fire to the entire caravan and people who are still alive, and the slaughter and destruction lasts in full view from the hill for minutes. For the colonizing settlers, this is familiar: routine, efficient, controlling, done in a formation with supplies all picked out and distributed beforehand. There was never going to be a discussion.

But it isn’t finished.

Taking the blacksmith and the caravan leader we were introduced to in the previous scene, Seamus and a couple of his men subject them to even more torture. The Romani man is dismembered in the field, his hands and feet ripped from his body, a rough tweed bag put over his head and tied to him. The men post him to a cross made of wood and place the cross - and the man - into the fields’ ground. A scarecrow, hoisted high, a marker of the settlement’s mass murder and a warning to any Romani coming onto the land again. The caravan leader shouts at Seamus’s company as they bury her alive underneath the soon to be corpse-now-scarecrow. They toss the silver wolf dentures in with her, taking no mind to her foreign words - promises of a curse, of revenge, of blood, of their children.

Nightmares immediately begin to plague the settlement’s children. It is the same sequence for each: they are in the fields somewhere, mist curls around the area, they find themselves walking towards a tall scarecrow, and some have an overwhelming urge to dig. The ground whispers in a different language as they plunge their hands into the freshly dug hole and unearth the fangs. One day, the children all gather to listen to a farm boy, Timmy (Tommy Rodger), tell them that he has found the scarecrow from their shared nightmare. The children swear not to tell anyone about Timmy’s knowledge or that they were out in the fields where the scarecrow stands. Timmy starts to dig. Edward starts to become increasingly uneasy about the whole situation and tries to get Timmy to stop digging at the base of the scarecrow - but something is using Timmy’s body and digs up the silver wolf fangs. Overcome by the supernatural force, the farm boy puts the fangs into his mouth with no hesitation, and turns to bite Edward’s throat out.

The children disperse quickly from the sudden violence in absolute horror, leaving Edward behind to be ripped and bitten at by the possessed Timmy. Charlotte quickly makes her way home, out of breath and screaming, sobbing, hoarsely calling for help. It is her father that retrieves pale and bloody Edward from the fields, but with Timmy and the silver wolf fangs nowhere to be seen as well as the vowed secret sealing the truth of the attack, there aren’t any leads to follow. The settlement’s doctor is called for and visits the Laurent estate, concluding that the attack was from a sort of wild animal. Edward rapidly worsens and becomes even more ill before the night arrives, but wakes his sister with blood-curdling screams after the lights have all been snuffed out. Investigating by candlelight, Charlotte hurries to her brother’s room, equally frightened when discovering that what has caused Edward’s screaming are thick tendrils of wooden vines curling and moving out of his body. Racing to wake her parents, the Laurents rush to return to Edward’s aid only to find a smear of blood and the bed empty.

Early the next morning, Charlotte and her maid Anais (Roxane Duran) visit the church for any sort of comfort that praying can bring the young girl. Timmy hides in the confessional, beckoning Charlotte over and into the other half of the booth so they may speak secretly. Timmy is terrified and worse for wear, telling Charlotte that he has absolutely no memory of what happened the day they found the fangs in the field after he put the dentures into his mouth. Charlotte asks him where he put the silver fangs and Timmy reveals in confidence to her that they reside in the church, where nobody would look, on holy ground. In an attempt to give any further help, Timmy rips a page out of the bible that contains passages on the silver coins given to Judas as a reward for turning Jesus over to the Romans. Anais soon finds them both but takes no action against Timmy past surprise of the fact he was in the booth. Not knowing of the situation or his involvement, Anias - and Charlotte, clutching the torn page - watches him hurry out of the booth in a scramble and run out of the church. With paranoia in his haste, Timmy cuts through the woods and reaches a crumbling and abandoned structure, the place the audience can surmise as his hiding place since the bite. Something follows behind, matching his pace. There is a breath between Timmy’s collapse into the run-down shack and the much larger pair of fangs that bite down on him.

Our protagonist (Boyd Holbrook) is late to be introduced⁹. In a dark tavern, an equally dark-clad and melancholic man looks for a place to rest while he travels around France. While signing into the ledger book, he asks the bartender if there had been any sightings or talk of Rom caravans passing through. It's not a question answered by the bartender with kindness or a straight response, making the audience believe that our new stranger has hit some sort of dead end....again. The man signs as John McBride in neat cursive and takes a seat away from everyone in a dim corner of the tavern. Not too long after, the settlement's police lieutenant Alfred Molière (Nigel Betts) approaches McBride after hearing he was asking about the caravans. Molière tells McBride about the troubling news happening within the settlement and McBride's eyes have some glimmer of hope return to them. He asks to accompany Molière to the Laurent estate to be of any help and Molière, knowing about McBride’s occupation as a pathologist¹⁰ and his previous station in Gévaudan¹¹, accepts it.

The pair talk with Seamus about Edward’s disappearance, going to search with him until someone finds a mutilated child’s body out in the woods. All of the men go to investigate on the chance of it being Edward, but recognize that it is Timmy, attacked by the same strange animal that had bitten Edward days before. Now that the animal has struck twice and both times had tasted human flesh, Molière gives up on any belief that Edward is still alive in the wilderness. Though he leaves Seamus and the rest of the men with the body, McBride is wary with all of the deja vu happening between his previous station’s attacks and doubts his immediate assumption of the connection at first. He offers to stay with the Laurents and becomes pretty quick friends with Charlotte and Isabelle, who both welcome company that is pleasant albeit his dead-person-touching occupation. We also learn McBride’s wife and daughter both died pretty recently¹², leaving him with a travel-friendly frame that houses a medium-sized photograph of them. The first night McBride sleeps in the estate, something large tries to get in but is unsuccessful.

The next morning, another brutal attack happens, killing two of the three workers that were sent into the fog-thick fields to work on building trellises as a group. Though they were all very cautious and smart about approaching their chore, the creature still catches the oldest of the three by surprise, killing him without expending a lot of energy or effort. When his body is found by a horrified Anne-Marie (Áine Rose Daly), the beast realizes it has even more people to chew on. Only alive because of the other man of their quickly dispatched group engaging the giant monster by pulling it off of her, she crawls for feet while the man screams for her to run and is disembowled in the hazy but still too close for comfort distance. Finding her footing, Anne-Marie gets up and runs the rest of the way back up the hills into the settlement, yelling for help as the villagers quickly realize she is covered in blood¹³. Seamus and McBride gets word of the attack, but McBride quickly hurries towards town when hearing that Anne-Marie survived the wounds. Though it is already too late for the break-neck speed of infection to be stopped, McBride traps and kills the creature with quick thinking and previous experience knowledge. To explain how the infection works, McBride returns to the estate and brings the corpse of the creature with him and performs an autopsy. Inside of the giant wolf in some sort of embroytic sack is Anne-Marie, protected from outer attack from the form grown around her, but also acting as the source of fuel for the creature. To everyone’s least wanted or expected surprise, Anne-Marie slowly raises herself up and starts screaming at them as she repairs the creature form. McBride yells for someone to shoot her so she doesn’t come back a second time to start killing and infecting the village - and after a too-long hesitation a villager delivers the shot. McBride explains that there is no way to save a victim, the infection takes hold and spreads after being wounded by the creature at a speed that burns through the victim’s body. With the knowledge of the disease, it effectively seals Edward’s fate to Seamus.

Later in the evening, Isabelle and McBride have a discussion in the kitchen. McBride finally reveals the truth about his wife and daughter’s death by the same kind of beast that terrorizes the settlement. The pathologist has been following the Romani caravan through the countryside for answers after they had ‘completed’ the curse on the lands. Isabelle supplies equally important information to McBride and to the audience - she is privvy to the origin of their settlement’s curse. McBride is surprised at first as Isabelle tells him of her husband’s mass slaughter of the same caravan he has been following, meaning that he lodges in the epicenter of the curse. McBride and Isabelle’s conversation is cut prematurely when Seamus overhears them talking in the kitchen at the late hour, telling McBride to stop speaking to her alone, at night, in their house¹⁴.

Charlotte also puts her trust in McBride by revealing where the silver fangs are hidden in the church. McBride takes most of the day to have the fangs turned into four pure silver bullets, Seamus goes to patrol the settlement with the boys for any werewolf signs. During their absence, one of the werewolves attack Anais, though it’s scared off when Seamus returns. McBride notices Anais’ wounds - fresh and hurriedly gauzed - and attempts to stop her from running off somewhere to transform but Seamus has other plans. The two argue until a loud noise is heard inside of Anais’ room by Seamus and he rushes to investigate. The audience knows that it is a transformed Anais¹⁵, who leaps onto Seamus the moment he enters the room and knocks him onto the ground. His lit candlestick also plummets and the very flammable estate is on fire near-immediately. Seamus defends himself successfully but with the cost of a bite. Before McBride can rush into the fire to save him, Seamus stops him and tells him that he wants his wife and children to be told that he's regretful of this curse he brought to the settlement through the massacre. Seamus sets himself on fire after asking McBride to relay his apology, before he starts to transform into one of the beasts himself.

The three remaining - Isabelle, Charlotte, and McBride - quickly make their way down into the settlement proper and head for the church. McBride had made the church the settlement’s central safehouse, where all the residents were informed to go until the beast had been killed, so nobody else could be bitten or harmed in the process. Thankfully the settlement lets McBride and the remaining Laurent family into the church before anything else gets them first. That night, the remaining settlement members and McBride rest inside, but Isabelle is having a hard time falling asleep at all. She remedies her sleeplessness by praying and it isn’t too long before it is interrupted by Edward’s voice calling to her from outside of the church. Isabelle rushes over to the barricaded doors of the church and struggles to open them, the noise waking a handful of people and eventually alerting everyone to what’s going on. It’s too late to try to stop Isabelle, who has allowed the giant beast through their barricade, after using Edward’s voice to convince Isabelle to open the doors.

The next half a minute or so is the werewolf ripping through those inside, pulling them apart, gore and terrified screaming mirroring and differing an up-close massacre akin to the Romani’s earlier in the film. Unlike the first massacre, we are within it rather than watching from a distance and rooted to the ground. The camera is too slow and too fast, blurring figures and the werwolf, a panic attack and terror smeared together through blood and sharp teeth. McBride snaps out of his catatonic shock and loads his rifle with the bullets of silver and aims for the werewolf before it can take any more lives. Isabelle quickly stands between his shot and the werewolf, calling out to it, trying to see if the Edward encased inside of it can hear or respond to her. The shouting does gain the attention of the werewolf, as it sprints towards her and takes a huge bite into Isabelle. McBride takes his shot.

The bullet goes through Isabelle and burrows deep into the beast’s abdomen, both son and mother falling together to the ground. Isabelle, on the verge of death, holds and soothes the beast until she passes from the huge wounds made by both the bullet and the beast. As she dies, the beast does as well, transforming back from itself into Edward, who still looks extremely sickly and weeps as he holds his mother’s body after realizing what had been done. After everyone is patched up, buried, and returning to whatever life they tried to lead beforehand, McBride takes both Laurent children into his care. Their parents had both died and their estate was burned to the ground - a widower and his two orphans become a family unit through great loss and a curse that affected them the hardest. Charlotte makes certain that McBride is given the remaining three huge silver bullets after they set out for his home.

In a wonderful ending sequence, we return to an older Charlotte. She is visiting her father, John McBride, who is now elderly and bed-ridden, at their familial home. As she finally gets to visit with him, she returns the fourth silver bullet that was sent to her after Edward’s death on the front, alongside the three others. The set is again complete.

The creaking carapace who watched and now writes about The Cursed believes that it has a lot of interesting things to dissect for further discussion on topics like equating cholera to werewolf outbreaks, colonial destruction, racial cleansing, revenge and those who are mauled to death by it, and ‘othering’. The film almost tumbled into pitfall traps when portraying Romani stereotypes like ‘stealing children’ and ‘having supernatural ‘evil’ powers to dispense on Europeans’. However, there were no redemptive or likeable qualities about Seamus or the leaders of the settlement who all happily agreed to murder and torture the caravan. Ellis does not make McBride a white savior nor does he make some grand speech after all is done denouncing how horrible the Romani caravan was, crafting the fangs for protection against vitrol - and later, violent death and torture - which is a positive step on a long, winding road of representing the Romani as human beings in the media which is still used to build antiziganist propaganda.

If the spirits wish it, perhaps a supplemental or short essay on some of these discussion topics will be made available in the dark distant future.

One for sorrow, two for joy,

Han

1. One day, a hopeful essay.

2. Situs inversus is a real and rare medical condition, where someone is born with all their major organs (or sometimes, just their heart) flipped or mirroring situs solitus (aka ‘the usual way’). Usually, medical professionals will have to undergo an intensive surgical procedure that transposes (flips) everything to a normative placement. It happens during embryotic development, where the genes get confused or duplicated, and can cause extreme organ issues, multi-organ failure, and death in the individual, if something is not done to correct it. Sometimes, people don’t know they have situs inversus until bodily pains, organ issues, loss of sight, etc. has already started to affect them!

3. There are some historical innaccuracies especially regarding timeline events, but all in all pretty alright! We aren’t discussing/watching an Eggers film and Ellis leans comfortably within his knowledge of modern war history.

4. In 1916, English and French troops engaged against the German forces on the Western Front of France along the Somme River. It started in July of that year and ended mid-November, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and volunteers died on both sides of the 141 days of conflict. Ultimately the Anglo-French troops failed to re-take key French points, where the German troops wintered. Due to shortages of supplies with a massive number of soldiers and little to divvy up and out to them, the German troops retreated up to 25 miles back east after March of 1917. With my best historical estimate, we are experiencing the Battle of Verdun.

5. This is probably phosgene or chlorine gas - mustard gas was not used for the first time until later in 1917. Phosgene and chlorine gasses were administered during WW1 warfare to blind and disable enemies, causing coughing fits, inability to breathe, blurred vision, vomiting, and more unpleasantness.

6. This was intended to be the alternative working title for the film. It will be stated, sang, and said, a couple more times throughout. Personally - and I am not alone in this opinion! - it would have been a much more effective title for the film. Originally, it is a line from the nursery rhyme One for Sorrow, based around bird augery with magpies, specifically. Counting magpies was belived to tell you good or bad fortune depending on the number spotted. There’s many variations of the rhyme and it’s rather popular still!

7. A very Olde Timey termage equative to a landlord.

8. If the viewer/reader is or was not educated, the Romani (also used as self-identifiers: Rom, Roma, or more area-specific names!) are an ancient nomadic cultural group of Indo-Aryan peoples with original roots from India that live and travel all across the globe. In media, Romani (or Roma) are seen in an extremely negative and violent light, particularly within Europe. They constantly have to (and continue to) face antiziganism, which includes: racism, exclusion, forced segregation, stereotyping, violence, environmental struggle, displacement (forced, enforced, or otherwise), open hatred, and laws banning them from countries, states, and settlements. On top of continued mistreatment and condoned poisoning and murdering, there have also been countless attempts of genocide by organized religions, governments, and Nazis alike to wipe out and/or colonize the Romani culture throughout the globe. The unfortunately normative slur “gypsy” has been and is still used to isolate, segregate, and other Romani peoples. Educate, continue to learn, and inform yourself and others so we may stand with and support our harmed and oppressed neighbors.

9. It’s really similar to Aragorn’s Strider introduction - without Viggo, or Lord of the Rings, and it’s a film set in France and…okay it’s not really similar but it does have some similar factors!

10. A medical scientist that works on examing the causes and effects of wounds, diseases, and injuries. In McBride’s case, he fits under forensic pathology, which is why a lot of characters give him weird looks - he’s a goth coroner picking at dead people during the breakthrough century of the medical fields finally starting to understand what germs were and how diseases are made, spread, work, and kill. It’s always been very strange to be the guy in all black squatting next to a body, even more so when you have knowledge particular to unlock cause of death.

11. Ellis’ worst historical oopsie that won’t be caught by an audience who aren’t aware of the extreme time discrepency. Gévaudan was a provience in the south of France and was infamously attacked for years by a giant monstrous wolf-like creature, lots of people were murdered and the king deployed noblemen, royal hunters and army men to go kill the thing. There were several times the hunters believed they killed it, but the attacks continued until another giant wolf was killed and the body sent to the king and autopsied, then stuffed. The attacks of The Beast of Gévaudan lasted from 1764 to 1767 - which would make McBride nearly 115 years old if we are to realistically tie Ellis’ given date of the Laurent settlement’s attacks of 1881.

12. Before we’re given additional information, it’s implied that they were victims of the fifth wave of cholera epidemics spreading through the globe during this time. This one started in 1881 and lasted until 1896, killing hundreds of thousands of people globally yearly.

13. This scene was one of the three that made me stop breathing. The first is Seamus et al’s massacre. The third is the next scene.

14. If I were Isabelle, I too would find it beneficial to survival to disclose something my husband might not have expected me to overhear to the sad goth doctor in our house who seems to know what the hell’s up.

15. It’s her room, after all. That, and how mere moments ago, Anias got attacked by the werewolf (Edward) that Seamus was out trying to find, flush, and kill, though that ultimately failed.