Or why the recent debut of animated series Trese should have our own version of ghosts and ghouls stirring in their graves
It’s a mystery that we have not made quite a global export industry of Philippine horror. Stretching the franchise Shake, Rattle, & Roll to 15 installments, each with three stories that range from ghosts to ghouls, has not done much to showcase our knack for the macabre and the supernatural in world cinema, where mostly on account of our portrayal of poverty we have amassed award after award after award at various film festivals, from Cannes to Berlin to Osaka.
And yet has anyone in the Philippines, even in the most progressive capitals, ever grown up without any close encounter with horror—demons, witches, haunted houses, nymphs, sylphs, gnomes, our version of The Walking Dead, giants and dwarves, and all sorts of weird creatures? I’m exaggerating. I, for one, have not had to run for my life from a ravenous zombie, but the stories my mother and grandmother used to tell me about the tiktik, a winged mythical creature that hunted pregnant women and sucked out babies from the womb with a long, vacuum-like tongue, was not just close enough, but too close an encounter for me with horror.
I caught the first Shake, Rattle, & Roll in the theater, in 1984, and I still remember how the second segment, Ishmael Bernal’s “Pridyider,” which starred Janice de Belen, sent chills up my spine and, for the first time, made something so scary out of a benign well-lit and hyperactive household fixture, the refrigerator.
The third segment was equally memorable—Peque Gallaga’s “Manananggal,” starring Herbert Bautista, the late Mary Walter, Pen Medina, and a “bold star,” then exotic sensation Irma Alegre, as the manananggal, the man-eating monster with huge bat wings so called because it would separate the upper half of its body on the hunt and leave the lower half just waiting so once the feeding is over, usually just before the break of dawn, the upper half could reconnect with it to disguise itself as human again. Manananggal is derived from the Tagalog word tanggal, which means “to remove” or “to separate.”
Supposing Shake, Rattle, & Roll were to go on and on ad infinitum, I don’t think it could ever be overstretched or even run out of good material, not when there’s just so much horror in our culture to mine.
Whether in Luzon, Visayas, or Mindanao, whether right smack in the middle of the metropolis or in the boondocks, there is something worthy of a good horror movie in the Philippines. As a culture, we also put so much faith in unseen forces, in the unexplainable, and though I have no figures to prove it, I’d say that more than we care to admit, when we find ourselves in strange places, say a patch of forest or a desolate creek or the peak of a hill or a long-abandoned house, we find ourselves muttering, “Tabi-tabi po (please excuse my presence),” in case an invisible sentinel is offended by our intrusion. I doubt we are oblivious to this. I mean, we were, after all, able to make two horror blockbusters (the first one the only Kris Aquino-starrer I liked, filmed by Chito Roño in 2004) out of a foreign concept, feng shui, whose mysticism is so enchanting that it has made Chinese New Year almost as much a tradition in Manila as “Pasko, Pasko Na Naman Muli,” replete with a wardrobe all in red, an exchange of gifts in the form of ang pao or red envelopes containing cash to represent our most fervent wishes for each other—health, wealth, peace, and joy! And it’s not just the Chinese among us greeting each other, “Kung hei fat choy!”
What I’m saying is if we put our minds to it, particularly the parts of our brains that sense or acknowledge the unexplained phenomena that lurk everywhere, such as the bed that nobody sleeps in, or the Manila Film Center, about which we still whisper among ourselves recalling the tragic accident that allegedly buried workers alive there during the hasty construction, or along Balete Drive in New Manila, we can have enough horror films to play on the primal fears of the world audience. All we need is a few good filmmakers and some fine young actors as well as screenplay writers (and producers who won’t scrimp on quality) to translate our cultural fascination with all things strange and spooky into a cinematic signature.
...And remember, the next scream you hear may be your own. –tagline to The Birds (1963), one of the best horror movie taglines of all time
And yes, Shake, Rattle, & Roll can keep going without tiring itself out. With its triptych of horror treats per film, it has every right to go on and on and on as Friday the 13th, more than Nightmare on Elm Street, even more than Godzilla, which is now a series of 30 films, stretching from 1954 to 2014.
The only reason, I feel, the concept of Shake, Rattle, & Roll appears overextended is because, like much of the rest of the Philippine movies lately, maybe over the past decade or so, the people who dish out the new installments have forgotten that while moviemaking is a business (where profit often succeeds in projecting itself as the all-important object of any business enterprise, its raison d’etre), its business is to entertain or, in the case of horror flicks like Shake, Rattle, & Roll, to scare the wits out of the audience.
To compromise on what you have to offer or to fail to deliver on your promise is to compromise the business. It’s as simple as that.
In my field, which is a business like any other, there is a frightening tendency to put advertising above all else. Ask your writer to compromise his objectivity or his creativity or his point of view in favor of advertising and you are sure to lose your readers, first a little, then a lot, and then enough to bring the whole business down. Without your readers, what does advertising need you for? Ergo, you lose the business.
Now, in a society that is getting more and more consumerist and profit-centric than ever, that’s scarier than Shake, Rattle, & Roll XXX!
Editor’s Note: Except for some minor tweaks and revisions, this essay was first published in Panorama in 2017.