‘The Crying Boy’ Movie Adapts a Comic Built on a Real Legend

In November 1985, readers of a British tabloid mailed their paintings to the newspaper so it could burn them in a bonfire. The picture they were afraid of was The Crying Boy, a mass-market print of a weeping child that hung in thousands of English living rooms.

Forty years on, it is becoming a movie. Carter Swan, producer of Zach Cregger’s...