‘I don’t feel like a man’: Gender and sexuality in Wes Craven’s Cursed and My Soul to Take

Wes Craven directed just four feature films in the final decade and a half of his life. Three of them were mainstream horror movies: Cursed (2005), My Soul to Take (2010) and Scream 4 (2011). Both Cursed and My Soul to Take were received poorly by both critics and audiences alike. While they drew heavily on themes and imagery from Craven’s past films, there were also some significant differences, most notably that they both centred primarily on a male rather than female protagonist. The male characters that take centre stage are not the traditional jock-type found in many teen horror movies. This article will examine the role that masculinity and sexuality plays within these two often-neglected films, and how they connect within the wider context of other mainstream teen horror films of the late 1990s and early 2000s that also feature gay characters and/or presentations of non-traditional masculinity. It will demonstrate that the progressive attempts in Cursed and My Soul to Take to feature more prominent and complex characters of this nature are undermined by both the simplistic writing and the apparent disconnect between director and intended audience – a disconnect that had not been present less than a decade earlier.