Raise your hand if you were ever personally victimized by la llorona as a kid. Maybe not in person — because if so, chances are you would not be here with us today, reading these words — but having your parents or an older cousin threaten you with her story totally counts. And if you thought her reign of terror upon your childhood was tough, I have bad news: Hollywood has gone and made a movie about her called The Curse of La Llorona because some people just don't listen to reason.
For the uninitiated, la llorona is a totally real story Mexican folktale about a woman (known as the "weeping woman" in Spanish) who was driven to madness when her husband left her and drowned their children in the river. As the story goes, she also drowned herself when she realized what she had done, and is now cursed to spend eternity searching for her lost family. Parents especially use the story to spook children when they misbehave because la llorona is really into haunting kids; if she mistakes you for her own children, or if you hear her cries, well... it was nice knowing you because she'll take you to replace what she has lost.
The trailer for The Curse of La Llorona gets into this backstory slightly. The movie takes place in 1970s Los Angeles, and in a part of the city with a heavy Latinx presence. The trailer has everything your abuela loves to talk about, including a priest offering grave omens, and a woman wailing in aggrieved Spanglish. But by far the most terrifying aspect of this clip is the whole, entire minute featuring two little kids trying to keep la llorona from attacking them in a locked, isolated car in the dark. In short, it's two minutes and 15 seconds of "oh, hell no," and while I personally will not be playing with this kind of fire, you can watch it and decide for yourself if you'd like to see the movie on April 19, 2019.
