![the curse of la llorona fmovies the curse of la llorona fmovies](https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/Heda04a1198f24eea987124140eb74dd24/2019-Horrible-Movie-The-Curse-of-La-Llorona-Cosplay-Costume-Female-Women-Wedding-Dress-Gown-Robe.jpg)
#THE CURSE OF LA LLORONA FMOVIES TRIAL#
If one had to make an educated guess at the specific dictator most implicated in Bustamante’s film, the 2015 decision to declare José Efraín Ríos Montt mentally unfit to stand trial for the genocide of Mayan Ixils is extremely close to the bone.
![the curse of la llorona fmovies the curse of la llorona fmovies](https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/max_1200/51c7ce81455551.5d00135de2f3e.jpg)
Guatemalan viewers will immediately recognize the most specific reference point as the 1981 La Llorona/El Estor massacre, in which a village populated by Q’eqchi’ peoples was ransacked by military forces and large landholders, but the greater losses and disappearances of this time period, the complicity of American intelligence and foreign companies such as the American United Fruit Company, and the particular suffering of Indigenous civilians and activists inflicted by the military allow for a literally incalculable number of tragedies to come to the forefront of memory. The long shadow of the three-decade-long Guatemalan Civil War falls over his characters. The antagonist is instead the broken human personification of the force of genocidal actions that took everything from her.Įver-present is the memory of historical violence committed against Indigenous Mayans.Įver-present in Bustamante’s La Llorona is the memory of historical violence committed against Indigenous Mayans. The antagonist is not the woman who has lost everything, as we have come to expect. No one in Bustamante’s La Llorona has anything explained to them. That film’s protagonist, a white social worker, has to be told a simplified version of the myth-ghost lady lost her babies, ghost lady wants your babies-before it engulfs her.
![the curse of la llorona fmovies the curse of la llorona fmovies](https://img.vxdn.net/cover/1200/the-curse-of-la-llorona-28489.jpg)
Although this La Llorona has found an audience on Shudder, AMC Networks’ add-on channel pitched at the streaming and screaming demographic, it’s a weightier undertaking for a viewer than most other interpretations.Ĭase in point: In the same year Bustamante’s film came to audiences, James Wan’s Conjuring universe brought a specifically Mexican American La Llorona to a Los Angeles setting in The Curse of La Llorona, directed by Michael Chaves, which managed to gross $123 million on a $9 million budget.
![the curse of la llorona fmovies the curse of la llorona fmovies](https://images.moviesanywhere.com/9def116287044c7659f17ec2a7c84381/80750a91-1d23-4498-bffc-d9a9eff570a1.jpg)
Bustamante’s La Llorona, whose painstaking and atmospheric scares have been outpaced at the box office by recent contenders that have mined the myth for jump-scare gold, is perhaps the most creative and chilling of its kind. There have been at least 10 films that specifically allude to La Llorona, including the first Mexican horror movie, Ramón Peón’s 1933 La Llorona, and Rafael Baledón’s 1963 The Curse of the Crying Woman. The myth has spread far: Susan Hill’s 1983 novel The Woman in Black is itself fundamentally a “La Llorona” tale, lifted out from its cultural context and deposited in the English Gothic tradition. She appears in Aztec and Chumash legend, while Venezuelan interpretations tend to portray her as a mother whose children have been lost in wartime (usually, again, by her own hands out of immense frustration).
#THE CURSE OF LA LLORONA FMOVIES MOVIE#
This is not an uncommon plot for a horror movie it may in fact be the single most common plot of horror movies.Īnother familiar trope in horror is that of the weeping woman who has killed her children and now demands yours, the best-known of which is “La Llorona” of Latin American folklore, variations of which are told across Central and South America. La Llorona, Jayro Bustamante’s 2019 Guatemalan horror movie on the short list for Best International Feature Film at this year’s Academy Awards, tells the story of a crumbling aristocratic family in a crumbling home as things fall apart and the chasm of the past opens underneath them.