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. This is not an uncommon plot for a horror movie; it may in fact be the single most common plot of horror movies.
Another 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. 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 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.
