The Curse of La Llorona (2019)

Why do these screams matter?

Maternal grief isn’t always about the loss of a child. Sometimes, it’s about how the deep sorrow that comes from suffering a personal loss impacts one’s mothering. Such is the case in 2019’s The Curse of La Llorona. In the film, directed by Michael Chaves, recently widowed caseworker Anna Tate-Garcia (Linda Cardellini) is struggling to balance her grief against the caregiving needs of her children. When she is assigned the case of a mother who has locked her children in a closet in a bid to save them from the murderous spirit, La Llorona (Marisol Ramirez), events are set in motion that ultimately culminate in a showdown between mothers.

In our first scream, La Llorona has managed to breach the entry of the Tate-Garcia household where she has absconded with Anna’s daughter, Sam (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen). Knowing that La Llorona intends to kill her child, a frantic Anna follows the two into the water where a battle ensues.

On the surface, the screams informing this scene register as a guttural reaction of a mother attempting to save her child from a dangerous situation. But they also stem from an intersection of anger and grief. The audience knows that Anna is struggling in her role as a single parent, and part of the emotion fueling this scream is a hybrid of sadness and irritability that she alone is responsible for protecting her family. It is an obligation that weighs heavily on her and that prompts frequent doubts as to whether she alone is enough for her children. Interestingly, the complexity of the scene suggests that perhaps she is correct to be worried.

Although Anna and La Llorona have encountered one another previously, this moment marks their first physical interaction. This should be a moment that assuages Anna’s concern over whether her abilities alone as a mother are enough to protect her children. After all, her instinct to race into the water to save her daughter ties into our cultural expectation that good mothers are self-sacrificing (Thurer 194). The presence of water in this scene also reflects the film’s positionality of Anna and La Llorona by reminding viewers of the latter’s monstrous state. In a pointed moment of mirroring, the watery deaths of La Llorona’s children by her hand are contrasted against Anna’s desperate rescue of Sam from a similar fate. Water becomes the means by which La Llorona moves into an abject state while Anna does not. La Llorona’s decision to violate the expectation of safety between mother and child is a crossing of a boundary that immediately positions her as abject. In contrast, Anna’s desperate attempt to ensure her daughter’s survival solidifies that boundary and ensures that Anna remains a maternal example.

But complicating this scene is the arrival of Olvera (Raymond Cruz), a former priest Anna has enlisted to help her protect her family against La Llorona. As Anna battles underwater to free Sam, Olvera engages in a hybrid of ritual and prayer above the water that culminates in his placing his hand in the water and breaking La Llorona’s control of the situation. In this moment, Olvera reads as the paternal presence to Anna’s maternal one. Previously, Anna noted that her husband was the religious one and Olvera’s status as a former priest makes him the ideal husband surrogate. Anna is only able to save Sam with Olvera’s help and that reality amplifies Anna’s worries that she alone is not enough. Her screams are an awareness that she was right all along; she really can’t protect her children alone.

The idea that children fare better in two-parent households is an inherently patriarchal one. But is it an idea that might resonate with horror film fans? Research indicates that in 2014, among young adults ages 18-25, 55% of young men disagreed with traditional gender roles that cast fathers as the breadwinners and mothers as the homemakers, a substantial difference from the 83% of young men who disagreed in 1994 (Castile). If we consider that this demographic is also the core demographic to which horror films are traditionally marketed, Anna’s enlistment of a husband surrogate potentially reads as approval of traditional gender role norms.  It is a curious position for a genre built upon norm violation.

This quasi-nuclear family dynamic also comes into play in our next scream. Alone in the attic, Anna’s two children are stunned when La Llorona appears to them in her human form. Thinking she has finally found one of her lost children, La Llorona quickly resumes her spirit form when Anna and Olvera appear.

What is especially interesting about the female screams heard here is how they frame two entirely different experiences of maternal grief. The initial scream comes from La Llorona as she charges toward Anna. Having just mistakenly believed reunification with her deceased children was imminent, La Llorona’s scream is a powerful intersection of grief and anger-fueled in no small part by a desire to lash out at mothers who still have their children. La Llorona’s grief is complicated for the audience because while we see her sadness and yearning as she caresses the face of Anna’s son, we also know that her children died as a result of matricide. There is an implication that she deserves her grief in a way that Anna simply does not. For her part, Anna’s scream is a renunciation of La Llorona’s pain. As the mother with whom the audience is positioned to align, Anna’s grief is acceptable because she did nothing to deserve it, unlike La Llorona.

This issue of which mother deserves our sympathy is then complicated by the film’s explicit privileging of white motherhood. We know that in her human form, La Llorona is a Mexican woman. And we know that the only other mother the film introduces us to is Patricia Alvarez (Patricia Velásquez) who is also a Latina woman. Like La Llorona, Patricia’s arc is one of a mother who seeks to be reunited with her deceased sons (dead at the hands of La Llorona). But unlike La Llorona, responsibility for their deaths, which occur after Anna dismisses Patricia’s fears of La Llorona as a silly folktale and removes the children from her home, does not reside with Patricia. Rather, her monstrosity is connected to her willingness to sacrifice Anna’s children to La Llorona in return for her own children. No space of empathy is granted to the character until she reverses her decision and allows Anna the opportunity to save her children, an opportunity previously denied to Patricia by Anna. That the film depicts its two Latina mothers as menacing while casting its white mother as innocent reflects a significant and deep bias in how North American motherhood has historically been framed by whiteness (Doyle 201). In their qualitative study on the intersection of race and mothering, Hayes and Casstevens note, “Racism is intrinsic but often invisible within American culture” operating in such a way that assimilating into a dominant culture that privileges whiteness can come at the sacrifice of cultural norms and traditions (13-15). The casual and repeated dismissal of Patricia’s cultural beliefs throughout the film belie this sentiment and demonstrate how much harder it is for women of color to navigate institutional frameworks that leave no room for cultural difference. Also complicating the relationship between the women is the deeply patriarchal underpinnings inherent in how the story of La Llorona has been told historically in which the character becomes a warning “to the greater community of who not to become, reinforcing the male-dominated understanding of motherhood and love (Gonzalaz 60). By directing the audience’s sympathies toward Anna at the exclusion of La Llorona and Patricia, the film contributes to the erasure of their maternal suffering and perpetuates the association of white motherhood to good motherhood.

Throughout the film, screams operate as a means of identification between bereaved mothers. While the vocal performance of their grief might repel others due to its intensity, screams unite the film’s mothers by acting as a distress call of sorts in which only another mother who has lost or is at risk of losing a child can fully parse out the intent behind the scream. But how those screams are received is explicitly framed by whiteness. Patricia’s fear for her children in initially othered by her excessive use of religious iconography and her decision to place her children in a locked room. When one of the frightened children says, “she’ll hurt us,” Anna-and by extension the audience-believe he is referring to Patricia. Thus, when Patricia screams at Anna and attacks her to prevent her from releasing the children, the audience is positioned to see the act as harmful. It is only once Anna realizes the threat to her own children that Patricia’s behaviors become recontextualized and that her screams take on new resonance.

Works Cited

Castile, Eliza. “Millennial Values Can Be Surprisingly Traditional.” Bustle, 31 March 2017.

Doyle, Nora. Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America. The University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

Gonzalez, Tanya. Murders, Madness, Monsters: Latina/o Gothic in the U.S.A. 2004. University of California Riverside, PhD dissertation.

The Curse of La Llorona. Directed by Michael Chaves, performances by Linda Cardellini, Marisol Ramirez, and Patricia Velásquez, Warner Bros., 2019.

Thurer, Sherry. Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother. Penguin, 1995.