After all, the signs of a haunting look an awful lot like child abuse from the outside, especially when the mother in question keeps her kids locked in a closet to keep them safe. Anna Tate-Garcia (Linda Cardellini) is a widowed case worker for Child Protective Services with two children of her own, who crosses paths with La Llorona in the course of an investigation. That spirit, La Llorona (The Weeping Woman), is based on a well-known Mexican legend involving a beautiful woman who drowned her two sons in a river after discovering her husband was unfaithful to her - and ever since, she’s been trying to snatch other people’s children. Otherwise all it shares with the franchise is a period setting (the 1970s) and the presence of yet another malevolent spirit hell-bent on terrorizing a family. Really, the only connective tissue to the Conjuring universe is the brief appearance of Tony Amendola as Father Perez - a character you might remember from 2014’s creepy doll spinoff Annabelle. La Llorona was directed by a relative newcomer name Michael Chaves (who has already been tapped for next year’s The Conjuring 3) and was written by Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis, the duo behind, of all things, Five Feet Apart - which I argued was an unintentional horror film anyway, so maybe it’s fitting? Unfortunately, this one didn’t wind up being an unintentional romance of any sort, much to my personal disappointment (although, like Five Feet Apart, I think the themes it touches on are far more gripping than the by-the-numbers plot it keeps returning to). A universe, it turns out, that includes The Curse of La Llorona.ĭespite Wan’s producer credit on this one, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s just a one-off. As a director, writer, and producer, he’s had a hand in some of the biggest horror franchises to emerge in the past 15 years, including Saw, Insidious, and of course the extended universe that’s spun out of 2013’s The Conjuring.
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Somewhere between high-concept horror ( Hereditary, Us) and the bottom of the barrel ( Slender Man) lies the profitable sweet spot of the genre - a sweet spot that’s been dominated in recent memory by one man: James Wan.