The Curse of La Llorona: The One They Pretended Wasn’t in the Conjuring Universe

The Conjuring treated this one differently. In that, they didn’t bother to tell anyone that it was part of the Conjuring Universe. Technically, you could figure it out before seeing the movie, but since you basically needed Loraine’s psychic powers to do so, I’m not counting that.

Since the Conjuring treated this one differently, so will I. Instead of the usually narrative explanation with occasional snarky comments, I’ll be much more directly translating my voice notes. Prepare yourself for chaos and, of course, spoilers.

If you haven’t seen the movie, check it out here.

Welcome to Mexico. In a year I’ll totally look up, 1673, and to the Conjuring movies they didn’t freaking advertise as a Conjuring movie at all. And there’s a mom, her two lovely boys, and a dad. They give her a beautiful blue necklace that I’m sure won’t have plot importance later.

I saw this movie once in theaters but clearly remember nothing. Who are all of you?

One boy took a nap in the tick infested field, opens his eyes and says where the hell did my family go? He’s searching for them through what I can only describe as nature. It’s not really woods. It’s kind of a meadow. And then there’s a lake where mom is drowning the other boy. Sorry it’s a creek. You can drown in like 2 inches of water so she didn’t need a full on lake.

Nap boy, Diego, is like oh my god no and he runs off. Mom isn’t into that. Diego is next.

We pop into LA in 1973. So times have changed, and so has location. Single mother, Velma…I mean Anna, chaotically gets her two kids ready for school, but they miss the bus. Apparently Anna works at CPS, which I would argue is a downgrade from her work with the Scooby Gang.

Her boss gave some of her cases to her coworker because she is too busy with family stuff. Anna is pissed. Donna has a husband. Who isn’t dead. So none of this is fair. Anna’s husband is dead. I feel like the dude is just trying to help her out here, but she is very offended.

She demands her case back and storms out to talk to Patricia Alvarez about why she isn’t sending her children to school. Things do not look superb at the Alvarez home. Patricia answers the door looking a hot mess.

The cop with Anna trying to strong arm his way into the apartment is not helping the situation. Anna gets in by leaving him in the hallway. Holy too many candles batman. This is a real fire hazard. There’s at least 150 of these babies. Patricia is real spooked. She’s a drug addict, so maybe she’s having a bad trip, but for sure she is scared.

Anna is snooping as social workers are required to do. The over candling continues in the other rooms, but we also find a door with a padlock and symbols carved into it. This piques the interest of our professional snooper. And of me. Patricia sees Anna near the door and flips all the way out. If you want to hide the things behind the door, be so much more casual.

So Anna is 100% that the kids are behind the door. Patricia attacks alerting the officer, looking for any reason to bust in, and gets dragged off. Anna snagged the key from around Patricia’s neck first. This, oddly enough, will be a thing Anna does. And of course, the kids are behind the door. They have weird burns and tell Anna ‘she’ did it. Like kids, Anna is going to think it’s your mom, you know. Anna drops them at an orphanage where they tell her they are not safe anymore. Anna disagrees. Let’s see who’s right.

Having one of Anna’s kids watch Scooby Doo in this movie is a mood.

Anna’s daughter is taking a bath and asks her to come help her wash her hair.

One of the Alvarez boys hears some lady crying in the orphanage. Which is upsetting. These are orphans, woman. They have enough going on; take your trauma elsewhere. Tomas leaves the room into a foggy hallway with green lights that flicker on and off at opportune times.

Carlos follows his brother out, but Tomas is booking it. Eventually, he stops and points for Carlos to look into a mirror. I see nothing. Wait. No sorry, there is in fact a creepy woman creeping down the hallway. The mirror even breaks from her hideousness. Poof, La Llorona appears and I assume horribly murders these children. Off-screen, of course.

Anna wakes up to a middle of the night call and is asked to come down to the river. Probably bad. And yep. It’s the dead kids from earlier. Anna brought her own children to the crime scene with her but told them not to get out of the car. This is responsible 70s parenting.

Patricia full on blames Anna for the kids’ deaths and technically, she’s right. Anna has no freaking clue what she’s on about. The police cart Patricia away for murdering her kids.

Anna’s son Chris gets out of the car, no surprises there, to check out the crime scene. He wants to be a cop like his dad was. This is basically an internship. Some lady is crying in the underpass. He decides to walk up to her. We do not walk up to randos in alleys in the middle of the night.

She moves in a way that I can only describe as demonic. He’s like, perhaps not, but gets the freeze reaction so she has time to grab his hand and burn him before he runs away. Back at the car, his sister is confused by his panic. But then La Llorona shows up and starts unrolling windows. Anna returns and looks at her kids, pretty unsure about why they seem to have been traumatized in her absence.

Although I think her work has concluded on this one, Anna is still investigating. She hits up the Alvarez boys’ funeral where some dude is doing a smudging to get rid of all the negativity. The priest from the first Annabelle movie is there too. He gives her some info on La Llorona.

To recap: Beautiful woman marries man. They have beautiful children. He finds a younger, more beautifuler woman. He does the sex with that woman. First woman goes into a psychotic rage and kills the children to get back at him. She returns to sanity, horrified that she killed her children and kills herself. She is cursed for her actions by…someone…and is forced to wander the Earth looking for replacement children.

As one does. Seems that the children she murders to replace her children are being more punished by this curse than her. But alas. Curses rarely make any sense.

Now it’s Anna’s daughter Sam’s turn to hear random crying. She doesn’t see anyone, so she goes back to playing with her umbrella IN A THUNDERSTORM. Really? This is truly the least of her problems because when she opens the clear umbrella, she sees La Llorona through it.

The umbrella keeps being blown away from her. Let it go, girl. It’s obviously demon-infested. She finally grabs it out of the pool, but La Llorona is there to give her the same burn her brother got the other day. Anna finds poor Sam hiding in her curtains with this crazy burn but is really not as interested in asking follow-up questions as she should be.

Anna continues her investigation while her kids sleep, noting the similarities between Sam’s burn and the Alvarez kids’ burns, but really does nothing about it. There’s some door slamming from downstairs, so we need to check that out. It’s one of those saloon-type swingy doors. Seems fine, I wouldn’t worry about that. Oh, now a different door is slamming. Chris is sleepwalking and opening and closing the front door. There’s a chain, so he can’t open it all the way.

Anna is waking him up when the door blows open, breaking the chain. The wind out here is wild. Anna gets him to bed and finds all of her investigation papers are strewn across the floor. Why do demons do this? You aren’t here for papers. FOCUS. I see open windows in this room. Maybe it was actually the wind this time.

La Llorona is totally here though, because we see her reflection in Sam’s mirror. The cinematography in this otherwise banal horror movie is top-notch. Anna, unsuccessfully, attacks La Llorona with a bat. Never bring a bat to a ghost fight.

Anna meets up with Patrica. Patrica is sticking with her story. La Llorona killed my kids because this dumb B Anna let them out of the protection closet. Then she adds a little extra spice. Patricia tells Anna that she prayed for La Llorona to take her kids. This is too much Patricia. La Llorona is never going to trade you for your kids back. That ship has sailed.

Chris is at home thinking he hears Sam crying behind the curtains again. Things are hard when a supernatural demon is following you. But whoops it is not Sam. La Llorona was just playing some tricky games. She pushes Chris down the stairs and he busts an arm. At the hospital, the doctors see the arm and the burn that Chris claims he got falling but…not possible… and they get very suspicious.

Sam is taking a bath again when La Llorona shows up to help with the hair washing. When Sam goes under to rinse La Llorona figures, she should just stay there. Anna thankfully hears the kicking from downstairs. She gets there in time to save her, but La Llorona is still hanging out. The demon screams, a favorite pastime for this lady, and grabs Anna so she can have a matching burn.

Now we are legit scared. Off to church we go! Father Perez is like, ah love to help, but the church needs several weeks. That’s aggressively unhelpful. Annabelle has to be mentioned in every one of these, huh? Is this in her contract? Perez sends them to an ex-priest, now a faith healer, who did that smudging earlier. His name is Rafael.

Rafael isn’t totally up for helping but Sam says please so… His hands are tied. Also, you can’t move away from the evil cliche in full effect.

They go to the house and rub eggs everywhere. The bloodier the eggs get than the eviler the house is. Rafael cracks one open, and it is basically red goo. Anna isn’t really impressed with his trick until the other eggs dance a bit and then explode into red goo. Now we know this house is the maximum evil.

Rafael whips out a bunch of candles. All the lights go out. But the fam is in a circle of safety candles so we don’t need to worry about electric lights. Just fires. Rafael feels the presence of La Llorona. She screams because it’s all she has, and blows all the candles out. These do not work as advertised.

La Llorona throws Anna out of the way to go after the kids. Rafael makes himself real scarce and for a moment I wonder if he’s working with Llorona. The kids hid under a table and perhaps, much like video game villans, Llorona doesn’t know about under, but I wouldn’t count on it. She finds them and goes for Chris. Anna is trying to get him, but she’s still a little brain damaged from the fall. Rafael uses some tear based anti-venom then sprinkles flowers at the door, locking La Llorona out.

So he used the family as bait. Sometimes it’s good when everyone knows the plan. So if the seed line is unbroken, La Llorona will be stuck outside. I was taught to do this with salt.

Sam’s little doll is on the front porch, beyond the seeds. She’s 100% going to be stupid about this and get the doll. She breaks the seeds dragging dolly inside, gets grabbed by La Llorona, and dumped into the family pool. Anna jumps in to save her, but fighting demons underwater is hard. Rafael comes in with the same idea I had in the Nun and turns the pool into holy water, sending La Llorona packing. I would be amazing at demon banishment. Probably. As long as every location was indoors and had ac.

Anna snagged, call back to the beginning, a necklace off of La Llorona. Sam is a little messed up from all this nonsense and La Llorona is still coming, so we put the kids into a safety closet. Then Anna and Rafael go downstairs instead of watching them.

I guess we are all chill and having some tea. La Llorona stands outside, thwarted. Or…not. She steps over the seeds, walks straight to the safety closet, and pulls Chris out. Chris’ screaming brings the adults to the room, stunned there was any concern because SEEDS OF SAFETY! And plot twist! It was Patricia! She shoots Rafael and swipes away the seeds. She locks Anna into the basement, inviting La Llorona to come take these kids and give her kids back.

Chris and Sam hid in the attack. La Llorona totally saw them go up there. She finds them immediately. Chris offers her back the necklace, which kinda works. She turns back into a normal-looking person. The demon is gone. Chris leans a little too far back and pulls down the sheet covering a mirror and La Llorona sees herself. This is a huge mistake. For some reason. I don’t know what the problem is, but she is a demon again. She attacks them.

Patricia heard those kids screaming and is feeling stupid as hell about sending them to their death. There’s a moral quandary here. She lets Anna out. Rafael gives Anna a cross that she stabs La Llorona with. And the demon poof’s into sizzling black goo.

Rafael leaves with the bandage for his gunshot wound on the outside of his clothing. You say he’s a healer? He may have missed some critical lessons. The kids go back inside to their now demon free home, and Anna looks into a puddle. What does the puddle mean? Am I to take some meaning here? Like Anna is now a puddle based demon? Or we have water related PTSD? It isn’t clear and there was no sequel so…Choose your own ending.

See you all next week for Annabelle Comes Home. We can never get away from her for long. The post is up here!