Day 2 of Fandom Horrorfest 2019 where I’m celebrating Halloween by watching and writing about a horror movie every night of the month!
La Llorona is the latest entry in the extended Conjuring Universe, a cinematic universe consisting of the Conjuring movies and spin-off films like Anabelle, The Nun, and now La Llorona. While many of the movies in this universe are solid horror films, something that has always bothered me about them–especially the 3 main Conjuring movies–is their treatment of the Warrens. As a fan of paranormal and occult history and investigation, I cannot emphasize how inaccurate the Conjuring’s depiction of the Warrens really is. Rather than being some altruistic paragons of occult investigations, the Warrens in real life were massive swindlers who cheated scared people out of their life savings and knew about as much about the occult as Aleister Crowley knew about the concept of consent. That’s kind of my soapbox for the Conjuring universe, but all that to say, don’t glamorize the Warrens, kids. They were common criminals and deserve to be remembered as such.
Anyway, on to the movie. La Llorona is about the Latin folktale of the Weeping Woman, a spirit who during her life was betrayed by her husband and killed their children in a fit of jealous rage by drowning them in the river. According to legend, the woman haunts the earth looking for other children to call her own (whom she also inevitably drowns, so really the moral of the story is to learn from your murderous mistakes and maybe not kill your kids). La Llorona’s first half has some excellent jump scares, and the cinematographer really makes good use of the movie’s visuals and dominant color scheme to create great suspense. However, about halfway through, the movie begins to lose speed and starts to get very predictable. I believe that this problem has become characteristic of recent Conjuring-verse movies: terrific introduction that builds steam and throws some great scares, but they always end up following a distinct, recognizable formula. The haunted family reaches their breaking point, reaches out to the Church, the Church has some kind of cryptic line about “Well, we can’t help you because the Vatican takes 800 years to decide anything, but you can go to this sketchy guy who works outside the scope of the Church if you want; they’re quirky and somehow much better at exorcisms than we are.” Then the renegade exorcist (who in this case is so completely over the top that he’s the most endearing part of the movie) shows up, does something that doesn’t work, then the original protagonist takes care of the problem anyway with some funny little “but is it REALLY over?” quickshot to end the movie. It’s a common formula, and while it works narratively, I just get tired of seeing it. La Llorona is not bad by any means, and it has some great scares. But let me just say, if you watch, then you will feel like you’ve seen it before. At some point, Conjuring-verse, we need something new.
