Burbank, CA - Man, when Warner Brothers wants to scare you, they don't mess around. The press who were in town for a screening of The Curse of La Llorona last week were already rightly spooked by the big screen adaptation of the terrifying Mexican folk tale. After the movie, which I'll review later this week, WB gave us an entertaining ghost tour on the studio lot that included an eerie, pitch-black visit to the set of The Conjuring. But, the movie studio had more scares waiting for us on Friday night.
My interview with the film's stars (which didn't start until midnight!) took place deep on the WB lot. The press was ushered to a creepy cabin, where loudspeakers played the sound of a creaky door on a loop. There were more loudspeakers in the trees that played some of the scariest scenes from the film - screams and all. Oh, and a hologram of La Llorona herself was lit in the middle of the river behind the studio setup, à la Princess Leia in Star Wars: Episode IV.
Thoroughly terrified, I finally reached my three interviewees. Linda Cardellini, Raymond Cruz and Patricia Velásquez were sitting in front of the hologram, and I couldn't wait to chat with them about their experience filming the chilling thriller. According to legend, La Llorona, AKA "The Weeping Woman," drowned her children in a river after finding her husband cheating on her. She then drowned herself. In the film, she comes back to haunt the children of both Cardellini and Velásquez's characters. I was fascinated to know if the ghost in the film is how Velásquez and Cruz had always imagined La Llorona. They were very familiar with the tale and said yes, the prototype created for the film is "absolutely" how they had pictured her.
"We believe in her," Velásquez said. "She's an entity. So, therefore, we are very respectful of her."
La Llorona is portrayed in the film by Marisol Ramirez, who was on set for most of the film.
"She's beautiful but when she had the makeup on she looked terrifying," Velásquez remembered.
"We were so lucky to have her there," Cardellini noted, as opposed to CGI. "It was nice to have an actress there working with you, grabbing you, screaming in your face. She could be terrifying when she wanted to."
The movie required some serious stunts. Cardellini didn't have action scenes like her costars in the Avengers: Age of Ultron, but she got plenty of exercise in La Llorona. I asked her about one particular scene in which she dives into a pool to rescue her daughter from the apparition.
"I think that was my hardest night," the actress said.
The script warned her that she was going to film an extended fight in the water where she was going to be dragged around by the ghost. But she still wasn't quite ready for the workout.
"We shot it for hours and hours and hours in the pool," she recalled. "What I didn't realize was how physically grueling it would be on that night. I knew it would look cool, but I didn't realize how hard it would be.""I got tired just standing there watching her," Cruz quipped.
I noted how parents used to use the tale to terrify their kids out of breaking curfew and asked whether the actors would ever use the same strategy to keep their children in line.
"It works, so it is effective," Cruz laughed.
It's a story that has been passed down for generations, so in a sense, "you have to tell your children," Velásquez noted. But, she said she's "not going to scare" her daughter with it.
What else scares these guys? The actors named Freddy Krueger, Mike Myers from Halloween series, Frankenstein and those creepy dolls Chucky and Annabelle as the movie characters who used to keep them up at night.
I'd like to add La Llorona to my own list.
The Curse of La Llorona is in theaters Friday, April 19.
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