The Curse of the Crying Woman (1963)

 

Director: Rafael Baledón

Screenplay: Rafael Baledón and Fernando Galiana

Cast: Rosita Arenas as Amelia, Abel Salazar as Jaime, Rita Macedo as Selma, Carlos López Moctezuma as Juan, Enrique Lucero as Dr. Daniel Jaramillo

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Moody atmosphere immediately introduces you to this Mexican horror film, referring to the legend of La Llorona, a vengeful ghost who mourned the children she drowned, in a rage due to her husband's infidelity, at bodies of water whilst being a symbol of death or misfortune who hear her weeping. Be it 1933's La Llorona, or The Curse of La Llorona (2019) for the US film industry, this figure has returned over and over the decades, and here in a period drama, we immediately see an alternative take on her as an evil figure. A horse drawn carriage with two men and a young woman make the ill advised decision to drive in the middle of the night in an area where murders have been credited to a beast, and in reality, it is a knife throwing older man, with throttling hands of steel, and his mistress he works under who are the real threat. They neither waste time killing the occupants and draining all the blood from their victims.

This immediately points to a huge virtue of Rafael Baledón's film. The law are naturally concerned it is a madman without real knowledge of the culprits, whilst the film does not hide from the viewers that Aunt Selma (Rita Macedo) is the same person from this prologue, awaiting her niece Amelia (Rosita Arenas) to visit her, on the eve of Amelia's birthday, that naturally plays an integral part of the narrative. A piece of pure Gothic cinema, of an old mansion and a fog shrouded dark nights, it is the worst place for our lead and her husband to be, especially obvious when the mirrors are all covered up, which should be an immediate alarm bell. It is also a delight for a film not to waste time with pointless mystery - we know from get-go the place is cursed, and the greater concern is having found yourself stuck there trying to survive as her aunt wants Amelia to help resurrect the Crying Woman.

The resulting work is a haunted house in filmic form in the best of ways, cobwebbed cellars with torture devices and ghouls on pulleys charging to the camera. Cool production design is here in swathes - corpses attached to wheels of torture, rubber bats, or the cutest rats possibly seen in a horror film in the foreground even if they are meant to represent decay.  Madame Marina, the Crying Woman, is the decayed figure on the wheel of torture here, a figure who sacrificed people for magical powers and who Selma's late husband was researching. She is not even hiding to her niece Amelia that she is taken Marina's lead for power too. Obviously, this is all a metaphor for the idea of trying to cheat death and the immortality that can come from this, to cheat death by sacrificing others. It is an obvious story trope, and honestly a conservative way of seeing things, as horror over the decades has been complicated by stories, even if comedic, which offer witches to vampires to be actually nice people and potentially immortal. A much more interesting modern reading is to interpret Selma as representing a blinded devote who is trying to convince her niece to join a cult, even if it means sacrificing others and her own empathy.

There is also a literal curse where, even with the conclusion of this, the story leaves Amelia with the sense that nothing will be the same for her, adding the more tantalizing and spooky undercurrent to the plot. The set up with Amelia being convinced by Selma to help is a ghoulish mortality tale with the additional advantage that director Rafael Baledón will bring in moments to make an already sumptuous looking period horror film have memorable scenes. Be it German expressionist touches, like the night sky suddenly becoming glaring eyes when Amelia may be turning into a Crying Woman, or the flashback to Selma's past done in reverse negative images, the film is giving an incredible style to what is a rollicking spectacle. It is the kind of production with this careful sense of being well made with a sense of fun, where in that flashback we get a random wolf man in a suit, with no further context, just to add spice to the proceedings without feeling pointlessly random.

This is also factoring in that The Curse of the Crying Woman is still a gruesome film decades after its creation, such as the man left decrepit and incarcerated in a jail cell to be continually punished, only to finally get his revenge on his captor. Or dogs sent to maul police officers even if, cutely, they were clearly shot in some images encouraged to lick a glass screen which the camera is behind to represent rabid dog attacks. It still has a sickly sense of the macabre even in the non-gruesome scenes like this to its advantage. Even on a base pleasure level, with the roof literally coming down in the finale, this older film gets far more spectacle and shock into its length than films made decades later that could have the gore and perversion, but wasted time on plot padding and a lack of style, whilst this flexes its production muscles spectacularly. Its director Rafael Baledón was a veteran of countless genres - comedy to luchador films - with the advantage he had been an actor too, which allowed him to engage with his casts. He was also a prominent figure in Mexican horror cinema, and it is clear with this film alone he had the right idea of how to treat them in productions style and without losing his audience in dull exposition.