The Curse of the Crying Woman

“The Curse of the Crying Woman” is an interesting example of a Mexican B movie directed with a keen sense of the macabre by Rafael Baledón who, reworking the age-old legend of “La Llorona” – in a rather twisted way, to tell the truth – manages to translate a genuine nightmare scenario into celluloid, and he does it on a tight budget.

The prolific Fernando Galiana came up with the story idea which certainly doesn’t lack in macabre imagination: ancient curses, an undead witch awaiting resurrection, vicious attack dogs trained to rip hapless intruders to shreds, a deformed butler who seems to have stepped out of a Jesús Franco film… all of it steeped in the misty, dusty, gloomy atmosphere of a sempiternal night.

Although visually engaging and featuring a slew of endearingly disturbing dialogue (such as Aunt Selma’s cosmological vision that seems to take inspiration from Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal recurrence” which holds that “all events in the world repeat themselves in the same sequence through an eternal series of cycles”), the film suffers a bit on the acting front. The newlyweds in particular aren’t terribly convincing: Rosa Arenas – whose performance is exceedingly theatrical – nonchalantly flits between scenes where she seems absolutely terrified of her aunt and others where she’s aggressively giving her the third degree, and Abel Salazar, brother of screenwriter Alberto Salazar and popular leading man in Mexican horror films of the 1950s and ’60s, seems like he’s less than thrilled being relegated to a secondary, background role, definitely a step down from his starring turn as no less than “El Barón del Terror” (1962).

But those deficiencies don’t really detract that much, given that with such a dark, menacing story, it’s the “villains” that take center stage, and from that point of view, the wide gamut of disturbed and disturbing characters is well rendered by a cast equal to the material.