The Curse of the Crying Woman (1963) (2024)

Original title: La maldición de la Llorona

La Llorona (“the crying woman”) is a popular legend in Mexico, the haunting tale of a woman named Xochitl who marries a rich ranchero or conquistador (depending on which version of the tale you hear) and has two children wit him. When she catches her husband with another woman, her rage drives her to murder the children by drowning them in a river. Consumed by guilt, she then drowns herself but is cursed to return to Earth to find her children and manifests as a sobbing spectre.

There’s very little of this in Rafael Baledón’s La maldición de la Llorona/The Curse of the Crying Woman (Ramón Peón’s La Llorona/The Crying Woman (1933) is a much more faithful retelling of the legend) which instead is a story about vampires (or something very similar at least) and curses, though it’s a rather intriguing one – it has its flaws but it’s a cut above the usual standard for 60s Mexican black and white Gothic horrors.

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It begins with that staple of the Gothic horror cinema, the coach being stranded in the middle of nowhere. The facially scarred Juan (Carlos López Moctezuma) attacks the coach, killing all aboard while a woman, Selma (Rita Manedo), holding three large dogs on leashes and with completely black, seemingly sightless eyes, “watches” from a safe distance. Selma’s niece Amelia (Rosa Arenas) arrives with her husband Jaime (Mexican horror regular Abel Salazar) on the eve of her birthday and is initially startled by a mirror in which she sees a black-eyed woman and a corpse. That night, she and Jaime hear a woman crying in the night Selma flies back into her hacienda like a bat (she exhibits many of the traits of a vampire though no-one ever refers to her as such) and stands near a blackened corpse that we later learn is her late mother Marina, supposedly the crying woman of the title. Selma plans to use Amelia top pass on the family curse and revive her mother who she has kept in a state somewhere between life and death by regularly sacrificing the descendants of the jury that condemned her to death for witchcraft and feeding her their blood.

In the original la Llorona story and even in the many variations on the theme that its mutated into in the years since, the eponymous woman was as much a victim as anything else, a tragic figure cursed to walk the earth in search of her dead children for an eternity. Here, her counterpart Marina remains an enigmatic figure even at the end, but Selma makes no bones about her evil intentions, spilling the beans about her plans to Amelie within minutes of meeting her.

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There isn’t really a great deal here that will surprise the seasoned horror watcher and indeed some of it will seem very familiar indeed. A shot near the very start of the film signals Baledón’s intentions – Selma is seen wreathed in mist in a patently artificial studio-bond “exterior” holding back three large dogs. The shot will immediately resonate with anyone familiar with the similar shot in Mario Bava’s La maschera del demonio/Mask of Satan/Black Sunday (1960). But while the shocks are all too often signalled by clumsy crash zooms and discordant musical stings from Gustavo César Carrión but you can cut the atmosphere with the proverbial knife.

There’s an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to Baledón’s free-wheeling screenplay, adapted from a story by Fernando Galiana, with so many genre trappings thrown in that you’re bound to find something to your taste here even if the plot itself doesn’t really hold together one jot. There’s a mad relative in the attic, an undead witch, a wolf man, an inherited curse, a magic mirror, a club-footed manservant and a Poe-like extended finale in which the hacienda slowly disintegrates around the warring antagonists. It often has the feel of 1940s Universal horror film at times (several of them, all rolled into one in fact).

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The special effects are crude but work well in a sort of dark fairy story sort of way and add to the often surreal ambience – there’s a memorably weird moment in which a tormented Selma stands beneath a sky full of eyes and elsewhere a flashback plays out, inexplicably, entirely in negative. It’s a very strange film, a mish mash of ideas and images largely lifted from elsewhere, but it’s moments like these and the pervasive atmosphere of dread that elevates it above the usual level for these Mexican Gothics of the time.

La Llorona had recently appeared in the René Cardona’s 1960 film simply titled La Llorona but although the legend has long been a popular one, she remained off screen until 2008 when she turned up in Rigoberto Castañeda’s Kilometer 31, which led to the creation of a mini-cottage industry of films featuring the crying woman. The River: Legend of La Llorona (2006), Revenge of La Llorona (2006), J-ok’el (2007), La Leyenda de la Llorona (2007) (an animated film that cleaves closer than usual to the details of the original folk legend), The Curse of La Llorona (2007) and La Llorona (2019) all followed in its wake. Her highest profile role to date is probably in Michael Chaves’ The Curse of La Llorona (2019) which turned out to be the sixth film in James Wan’s popular The Conjuring franchise.

The Curse of the Crying Woman (1963) (2024)

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