La Llorona (The Crying Woman) (Ramón Peón, 1933)

Widely considered the first Mexican horror film (these claims are always hard to prove with so many early films destroyed, deteriorated, or lost, but it's certainly one of the first), La Llorona gives its own spin on the legendary Latin American folk tale of the crying woman, a ghost who steals and drowns children. This particular film replaces drowning with stabbing and neglected wives with scorned mistresses while adding family curses and multiple connected storylines in multiple eras to the mix. It's a fun, creepy, atmospheric, occasionally clunky piece of film history.

Director Ramón Peón was a Cuban filmmaker from Havana, making several silent films in his native country until emigrating to Mexico at the dawn of the 1930s. La Llorona was his first full Mexican production after a Cuban/Mexican co-production, La virgen de la Caridad. For the rest of his long film career, Peón bounced back and forth between Mexico and Cuba, making several films in both countries. He directed his last film in 1963 and retired to Puerto Rico, dying in San Juan in 1971. 

La Llorona bears some of the hallmarks of that awkward silent-to-sound transition, with long gaps in the dialogue, some awkwardly paced scenes that lack focus, and limited movement from the actors, problems that wealthier film industries had moved past a year or two earlier, but there are also moments of great visual impact, rich atmosphere, and a fascinating story. It's also great to see Mexican artists telling their own stories when American films from this period (and long after) used white actors in Mexican roles, relegating Mexican and Mexican-American actors to bit parts and comic relief.

La Llorona begins with a man dropping dead on the street after seeing the ghost of a crying woman. His surgeon debates a young intern about whether it was run-of-the-mill cardiac arrest or ghost fear (the doctor is no superstitious fool), and then, for reasons that seem initially baffling but soon make sense, we have a long scene of a child's fourth birthday party. The birthday boy is the son of the skeptical surgeon, who is pulled aside after the party by his father-in-law for some private curse talk in the library. The boy's grandfather/doctor's father-in-law is extremely worried, because his eldest son and older brother both disappeared on their fourth birthdays and were found dead days later from stab wounds to the chest. The doctor seems remarkably unconcerned, so Gramps regales him with a tale from an ancient book about the la llorona curse affecting their family. Cue lengthy flashback scene about the curse's origin. Meanwhile, a creep in a hood and cloak spies on the men from a secret door in the library, a second historical flashback is shown, the doctor becomes worried, and all kinds of crying ghost, child kidnappings, murders, suicides of scorned women, and occult shenanigans occur. The various strands come together in the film's wild conclusion.

The four crying ghosts in the film have an eerie presence, and those scenes are particularly skillful. Peón also does a good job balancing his complicated narrative. It's easy to forgive the film's clunky moments when there is so much to enjoy. If you are interested in '30s horror and Mexican film history, I recommend La Llorona.