Manila is not a place I would have associated with good new cinema, and Filipino ghost and horror stories have never really caught my eye, never mind that of the cinema going public, even that of the Filipino public themselves!
However, things appear to be changing according to this story from Variety through Yahoo. With the Asian cinema market growing strong with audiences there (well done them) their film creators are starting to be inspired by the likes of Ringu and The Eye. A recent homegrown film that did just that grossed a large figure for it’s Manila release.
Star Cinema’s “Feng Shui,” starring Kris Aquino, daughter of former President Cory Aquino, beat local and foreign films at the B.O. when it opened in September.
Playing in Manila until late November, it grossed P100 million ($1.8 million) in its first five weeks…the success of “Feng Shui” has encouraged local filmmakers to come up with more Filipino ghost tales.
I see they’ve done the decent thing and rather than just remake all the Asian films they have been influenced to create their own instead. How clever, if only Hollywood could think of such great things. The British Government could also learn a thing or two from their Governments investment in their film industry!
The Metro Manila Film Festival (Dec. 25-Jan. 9), which used to be peppered by fantasy flicks and superhero stories, is screening two horror pics this year. The fest shows only Filipino films — part of the city government’s scheme to support the Filipino movie industry.
Festgoers are looking forward to “Spirit of the Glass” by Jose Javier Reyes and “Sigaw” (Scream) by Yam Laranas. “Spirit” is about a group of young people whose beach resort trip goes awry when they inadvertently summon a gang of malevolent spirits on a Ouija board.
Some of the movies on offer sound very interesting:
Regal Films’ “Sigaw” is about a haunted apartment building where the residents are as trapped by their own human frailty as they are by the confined space, and the ghosts that haunt the place.
“I want the audience to bring home their fear,” Laranas says, “to be afraid of being left alone in their house or in their room, to feel a chill when they walk in empty dark corridors.”
It sounds like the Director here has hit the nail on the head, it’s something you can hear from many Directors and Writers, that the most effective tool in a horror is to enable the reader or viewer to connect with the fear. To be afraid of something they experience day after day, either as a fear they already experience or something they had never thought to have been afraid of before.
Still, there’s the fair share of films that sound like stinkers, let’s not be under the illusion that all mainstream is bad and small foreign movies are wonderful.
There are two films set during the Japanese Occupation in 1941: “Aishite imasu 1941” is a gay love story between a cross-dressing Pinoy and a fierce Japanese captain.
…I’ll not go on!
