Christina Ricci as Ellie Myers in Cursed (2005)
Yes, Cursed is a real movie. If you met it through a quiz of real and fake films, it is a 2005 werewolf picture directed by Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson, the team behind Scream. Christina Ricci leads it as Ellie Myers, the older sister who gets mauled on a Los Angeles road and has to work out what she has turned into.
The title sounds like a joke, and the film had a rough reputation. Even so, the part of Ellie shows what Ricci does well: she plays a normal person while something uncanny happens to her.
Who Ellie Myers is
Ellie is the responsible one. Her parents are gone, and she looks after her teenage brother Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg). She is also focused on her career in television. Her boyfriend is Jake Taylor (Joshua Jackson), and her publicist is Joanie (Judy Greer). That is the life the curse disrupts.
One night Ellie picks Jimmy up and their car hits an animal and another vehicle. They try to help the other driver, and an unseen creature kills her. Both siblings are slashed by its claws, and both survive. After that they begin to change. They become stronger and more sensitive to smells, and they notice they react to silver.
How Ricci plays it
Ricci does not play Ellie as a victim for long. She treats the early symptoms with irritation, as if they were inconveniences. Ellie denies the werewolf idea longer than her brother does, because she wants to keep her life orderly. Ricci keeps that stubbornness funny without turning it into parody.
The character also has to carry the mystery. Ellie suspects who is behind the attacks, and the script uses her to separate the real threat from the one she thinks she is facing. Her trust in Jake is what Williamson’s twists lean on, and Ricci lets the doubt show only gradually. By the final fight, Ellie is struggling with a werewolf side that surfaces only in bursts. Ricci plays that as a matter of nerve and timing.
What the plot asks of her
The story builds toward a face-off at the siblings’ wrecked home. Jake reveals that he is the one who bit them and asks Ellie to stay at his side. She refuses, and the film turns into a physical fight. Ellie ends it with a silver cake server and a shovel. The humor in that finish is deliberate, and Ricci handles it without winking at the camera.
How the film and the performance were received
Cursed did not please critics. Bullz-Eye argued that it began as classic Craven and Williamson and then collapsed into B-movie junk, and others complained that it was too eager to be Scream with fur. Ricci was often treated as the best part. From the Balcony graded the film B-, said she was far above the material, and added that she was clearly having fun. Others found the movie’s absurdity oddly refreshing.
The film premiered in theaters on February 25, 2005, nearly two years after production started, and it has since found a smaller audience of horror-comedy fans. Part of that is simple curiosity about a Craven and Williamson reunion that did not turn out as expected.
What came after
Ricci had already moved between independent films and studio work, so Cursed was one stop among many. Her later credits include the animated series Batman: Caped Crusader, in which she voiced Selina Kyle, and the comedy Guns Up, released in June 2025. She is best known now as Misty Quigley in Yellowjackets, a role that has earned her Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. The show’s fourth and final season is airing in 2026. She also appears in the science-fiction heist film The Dresden Sun, which is dated 2026.
Ellie remains an odd entry in that list. She is a woman with a steady job and a plan, and the film puts her in the path of a monster, which suits Ricci’s screen persona well.
