The Curse of the Crying Woman

The Curse of the Crying Woman (Spanish: La maldición de la Llorona, also released in Spain as La casa embrujada) is a 1961 Mexican black-and-white gothic horror film directed by Rafael Baledón, in which a young bride visiting her aunt's haunted hacienda discovers she is the descendant of the Llorona, the weeping woman of Mexican folklore, and is intended as the instrument of that specter's resurrection.^{1 • 2}

The Llorona legend and the film's use of it

The Llorona is one of the most widespread legends of Hispanic America: a woman who loses her children and, become a sorrowing soul or vengeful ghost, searches for them in vain amid terrible weeping and cries of agony, with versions differing from country to country.² In the most popular Mexican version, an indigenous woman has a romance with a Spanish gentleman, bears three children, and, when he marries a noblewoman instead, drowns the children in a river and then kills herself in grief and guilt.²

The film takes little more from this legend than the wailing figure and her omen of death. Reviewers have noted that it is more a witch story than a faithful telling of the myth: it omits the body of water and the colonial story of the real woman, and centers instead on an inherited curse passed down the female line and an aunt obsessed with resurrecting an ancient ancestor.^{8 • 9} A UNAM thesis on the origins of Mexican horror cinema treats La maldición de la Llorona as the last film of the twentieth century to incorporate the legend into the national horror filmography, closing a period that opened with Ramón Peón's La Llorona of 1933.¹⁰

Style and influences

The film is a work of the period later called the golden age of Mexican horror, produced by the actor and producer Abel Salazar following the success of René Cardona's 1960 film of the same legend.² Its opening sequence, a brutal stagecoach massacre with a woman in black amid swirling fog holding hounds on leashes, closely approximates the first appearance of Barbara Steele in Mario Bava's Black Sunday (La maschera del demonio, 1960), and critics have described the film as Baledón's homage to Bava.^{7 • 5} It draws on 1930s Universal horror and on the darker, more violent tone of Roger Corman's Poe adaptations of the same years.²

The film assembles the standard gothic equipment: an inherited curse, a decaying old castle, mirroring and doubling, a persecuted ingénue, a crippled manservant, and a madman in the attic, along with miniatures, trick shots, superimpositions, shock zooms, rubber bats, and fog.⁷ Selma's transformation into the Llorona at night, with her eyeballs vanishing into sightless sockets, is singled out as an effective makeup effect, and the film engages Mexico's colonial past through the petrified corpse of Madame Marina kept in the cellar of the crumbling hacienda.¹¹

Reception and restoration

Mexican film critic Emilio García Riera judged it "una película mal tramada, demasiado corta y realizada con evidentes pruritos de ahorro" (a badly plotted film, too short, and made with evident impulses of economy), while crediting certain scenes based on Carmen Toscano's play La Llorona as its one distinction.¹² Later English-language criticism has been warmer: Matt Bailey of Not Coming to a Theater Near You wrote that although nothing in it is original, its tight construction and consistently strange experience make it "a minor classic of its genre," and Rotten Tomatoes' critics' consensus quotes the same judgment.^{7 • 5} On IMDb the film holds a rating of 6.5 out of 10 from 926 votes.⁶

For decades the film circulated in poor television prints and public domain copies from the K. Gordon Murray era. It later received a restored, uncut DVD from CasaNegra, and in 2023 Powerhouse Films released an uncut Indicator Blu-ray, classified by the British Board of Film Classification on 24 April 2023 at 80 minutes, with both the Spanish and English-dubbed versions, a commentary by the Latin American horror specialist Valeria Villegas Lindvall, and interviews with Rita Macedo's daughters Julissa de Llano Macedo and Cecilia Fuentes Macedo.^{7 • 13 • 4}

References

1. La maldición de la Llorona, Alameda Films
2. La maldición de la Llorona, Judexfanzine, Hermenaute (2012)
3. La Maldición de la Llorona, SensaCine México
4. The Curse of the Crying Woman, British Board of Film Classification
5. The Curse of the Crying Woman, Rotten Tomatoes
6. La maldición de la Llorona (1963), IMDb
7. The Curse of the Crying Woman, review by Matt Bailey, Not Coming to a Theater Near You (2006)
8. "Curse of the Crying Woman" – Bad La Llorona Adaptation, But a Great Time, Bloody Disgusting (2025)
9. The Curse of the Crying Woman, review by Collier White, Letterboxd
10. Introducción, tesis sobre los orígenes del cine de horror mexicano, UNAM (2021)
11. Mendez, Baledon, Urueta: The Golden Age of Mexican Horror Cinema, The Film Magazine (2020)
12. Gaceta CCH 1,134, UNAM (23 April 2007)
13. Mexico Macabre: Four Sinister Tales from the Alameda Films Vault, 1959–1963, Mondo Digital (2023)

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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