Horror Actressing: Rita Macedo in "The Curse of the Crying Woman" (1963)

by Jason Adams

Happy Cinco de Mayo, everyone! For this week's edition of our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series we're tackling the five-century-old Mexican folk-tale of "La Llorona" aka "The Weeping Woman," who's become perhaps the most iconic of all their legends and whose terrifying presence has graced the screen at least a dozen times, up to and including last year's middling Blumhouse production (part of their ever expanding and worsening Conjuring Universe) titled The Curse of la Llorona. 

We will not be talking that most recent version though, because despite perfectly acceptable screaming from a slumming Linda Cardellini (an actress I very much like)...

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Take Three: Barbara Steele

Craig here with this week's Take Three: Barbara Steele

Barbara Steele in Federico Fellini's immortal 8 ½

Take One: Black Sunday (1960)
In Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (also known as  La maschera del demonio or The Mask of Satan) Steele plays Princess Asa Vajda, a woman put to death by her brother in Moldavia, 1630 only to be resurrected 200 years later as a vampire-witch. Steele also has a second, key role, as local woman Katia Vajda. Princess Asa’s eager to wreak the long-promised revenge upon her descendants – thus proving Sunday is far from a day of rest for the undead. Black Sunday, highly influential and memorable to future horror like Bloody Pit of Horror, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Sleepy Hollow, features some of Steele’s best work.

That's particularly true in the film's gory opening prologue where she meets her first death. Many horror fans recall with wicked grins this moment that most likely lead to Steele favouring the horror genre throughout much of the ‘60s. (See also 1965’s Nightmare Castle where she also played dual roles and 1966’s The She Beast, where she’s memorably possessed by the titular lady-ogre.) She conveys an immense sense of terror with impeccable assurance. More crucially, she does so with formidable levels of hysteria apt for a future grande dame of horror cinema. Her cries resound in the prologue like guttural shrieks from beyond the grave, but she manages to rattle off a thrilling, yet oddly wordy, pre-death warning to her condemners

My revenge will strike down you and your accursed house!”

[Two more takes, one of them Cronenbergian, after the jump...]

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