The Girl Who Cried Her Eyes Out

The Girl Who Cried Her Eyes Out pulls off maximum horror on a minimum budget, pulling the fright right out of thin air. Film students should study this to see where financial limitations can result in highly effective creative choices. The ghoulish gasoline that keeps this ghost show going is the high-octane screenplay by Bellida with Fabrizio Fante and Deborah Rickey from a concept by Tess Rickey. You cannot get more primal in horror than the tradition that started it all: the campfire ghost story.

And this has a really good ghost story, too. And we get some great witch action. Plus, there is this classic stretch of dialogue in the rain about trying to bridge the generation gap on The Monster Squad. Real rain, too, which is a lot more rare in pictures than you would think. It isn’t a gore fest, but that doesn’t stop it from having two scoops of shudders through deft moves. The twist at the end hits you literally like a knife in the gut. This is as good as those outstanding 70s made-for-TV horror movies that were so damn scary. It doesn’t get more top-drawer on a low budget than that, as that was how Spielberg started out.

“Most of the time, we only see Caroline’s deathly pale arms or white legs with frozen black toes.”

Bellida employs excellent bread-and-butter filmmaking that sets stylization to the side in favor of letting the story take the wheel. For the reveal of the monster, he uses a savory slow burn that scorches the movie’s marshmallow, creating a center filled with the sticky sweet stuff nightmares are made of. Most of the time, we only see Caroline’s deathly pale arms or white legs with frozen black toes. When we finally see her with the black tears, all that build-up explodes into a confetti of screams. Caroline is a very scary-looking child slasher. The outstanding ghost makeup by Aurora Athame is genuinely horrifying.

But horror makeup is like race cars in that all of them are fast but require a skilled driver to really blast off. Hallie Ruth Jacobs is the magnificent race car driver for her horror makeup, as she knows how to use it to break spines with an expression. As an actress welding the power of her disguise, she reaches the same levels of spooking out that Robert Englund did with his makeup. The Girl Who Cried Her Eyes Out will pull your eyes out and play jump rope with them. It is the kind of high-quality cheap thrills that keeps the subterranean market glowing in the dark.