The Saint on the Pillar, the Witch in the Mansion, and the Devil With Good Timing

Double Feature #4: Simon of the Desert + The Curse of the Crying Woman

by Buzz Drainpipe

for Crease Magazine

Some double features are conversations.

Some are knife fights.

This one is a theological vaudeville act performed in a thunderstorm beside an open grave.

Luis Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert and Rafael Baledón’s The Curse of the Crying Woman belong together because both understand that the sacred and the cursed are not enemies. They are neighbors with a shared plumbing problem. One film puts a would-be saint on a pillar in the desert, trying to outlast temptation through sheer vertical stubbornness. The other opens the door to a gothic mansion where La Llorona, witchcraft, family doom, and ancestral rot have been keeping the candles warm.

Different zones of Mexican cinema. Same bad moon.

One is holy absurdism.

One is folk-gothic horror.

Together they ask:

What if faith is theater, evil is inheritance, and every ritual is just a costume death recognizes?

I. Simon of the Desert: Holiness as Performance Art With Sand in Its Teeth

Simon of the Desert is Buñuel boiling Catholic sainthood down to a single ridiculous image:

A man standing on a pillar.

Not metaphorically. Literally. Up there. In the desert. Elevated above the world, or at least elevated above lunch.

Simon wants purity. Simon wants God. Simon wants the body silenced, flattened, disciplined, turned into a ladder for the soul. So he stands above everyone, praying, enduring, refusing ordinary life like ordinary life is a bad smell.

But Buñuel knows the trick.

The moment you turn holiness into spectacle, the devil buys a ticket.

The desert becomes a stage. Simon becomes an act. The crowd becomes an audience. His self-denial becomes weirdly theatrical, maybe even vain. The saint tries to escape the world by standing above it, but the world keeps gathering underneath him like hecklers at a miracle.

And then Satan arrives, naturally, because where else would Satan go?

Not to the obvious sinners.

To the man making a monument of resistance.

That is Buñuel’s beautiful little poison drop: the holiest man in the frame may also be the most absurd. Not false, exactly. Not stupid. But trapped inside a spiritual pose that has started to harden around him.

Holiness becomes architecture.

And architecture is always one step away from prison.

II. The Curse of the Crying Woman: The Mansion Where Motherhood Went Rotten

Then The Curse of the Crying Woman slams us from desert sunlight into gothic shadow.

This is Mexican folklore wearing a black dress and walking slowly down a corridor.

La Llorona is not just “the weeping woman.” She is grief that found a voice and never stopped using it. She is motherhood curdled into curse. She is the dead returning through water, bloodline, rumor, and panic. She is the old story that does not need your permission to enter the house.

And in The Curse of the Crying Woman, the house matters.

Of course it matters.

Gothic houses are not buildings. They are family secrets with windows.

This mansion is inheritance as trap. The past is not behind anyone. It is upstairs. It is in the walls. It is walking around in candlelight, muttering about doom. The film takes folk terror and puts it into the machinery of gothic cinema: fog, shadows, ancient curses, sinister relatives, occult rites, and a woman’s scream stretching across generations.

This is not clean horror.

This is ancestral weather.

III. The Pillar and the Mansion

Why do these two films fit?

Because one is about trying to escape the world by going upward.

The other is about being dragged backward by blood.

Simon climbs vertically toward God.

La Llorona pulls horizontally through lineage, land, and memory.

One man says:
“I will transcend the body.”

One curse says:
“The body remembers what the soul denies.”

That is the double feature right there.

The pillar and the mansion are both ritual structures. Simon’s pillar is chosen confinement, a public monument to spiritual refusal. The mansion is inherited confinement, a private monument to family decay. One is ascetic. One is gothic. Both are haunted.

Simon is haunted by temptation.

The mansion is haunted by grief.

The devil in Simon and La Llorona in Crying Woman are not just monsters. They are interruptions. They barge into human systems that claim to have control: sainthood, family, inheritance, religion, property, purity.

They arrive to say:

You built the stage. Don’t be surprised when the dead know their cues.

IV. Catholicism and Folk Dread Sharing a Cigarette

This pairing is where Catholicism stops being only church doctrine and starts becoming Mexican dream-material.

In Simon of the Desert, Catholicism is explicit: sainthood, temptation, asceticism, miracle, devil, sanctity. But Buñuel keeps puncturing it. He lets the holy image stand there in all its power and then lets absurdity crawl up the side.

In The Curse of the Crying Woman, Catholicism is less doctrinal and more atmospheric, braided into folk belief. Sin, punishment, motherhood, death, curse, soul, ritual, damnation. The supernatural does not feel imported. It feels grown from the same soil as confession booths, family graves, village warnings, and women whispering old stories while pretending not to believe them.

That is why Mexican horror is so good at this.

It does not have to invent the supernatural.

It inherits it.

Then it lights the candles.

V. Morning-on-Mute Verdict

This is a gorgeous morning-on-mute pairing because it gives you two kinds of visual extremity.

Simon of the Desert gives you the stark absurdity of a man turned into a religious monument. Sand, sky, pillar, body, temptation. The image is so strong it practically watches itself.

The Curse of the Crying Woman gives you mansion dread, gothic faces, nocturnal ritual, spectral femininity, and shadows with family names.

Put Simon first while the day is still bare and strange.

Then put on The Curse of the Crying Woman when the coffee has gone a little cold and the apartment starts feeling like it has inherited something.

Together they make:

Double Feature #4: Vertical Holiness, Horizontal Doom

Simon of the Desert
plus
The Curse of the Crying Woman

A saint climbs toward God.

A curse crawls out of the family line.

One film laughs at holiness from the desert floor.

One film lets folklore knock on the mansion door.

And somewhere between the pillar and the scream, Mexican cinema reminds us that the sacred and the monstrous have been sharing a dressing room the whole time. 🕯️🌵💀