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Tiyanak |
Lotlot de Leon (Christy) for her part, assumes the persona of a mother figure to a helpless sister and medical student boyfriend, Jojo (Ramon Christopher), with a kind of gentleness that goes against the grain of patriarchal definitions of strength and authority. Janice de Belen's efforts at drawing up the character of Julie is of course, futile but nonetheless credible. It is strange how it took a long time for a film to finally realize onscreen a most original meaning of the tiyanak belief, that it is not really about a demon child but more about the metaphor of family/stranger and outsider/insider. That when all else fails to explain murder, deaths, disorder, even hate, there is always the unexplainable to latch onto. In one scene, Julie finds refuge in a movie house where the audience is engaged in watching an action movie unreel, but she just sits there as if apoplectic, whereupon the creature torments the moviegoers. That the cinema is revisited, creates havoc within the scenario as it finally implicates as party to the conspiracy of representation, of making a particular language of the real utterable at the expense of its impossibility which as we learn here, can never be abandoned. Tiyanak is able to maximize the creative powers of Philippine cinema and culture by infusing powerful metaphors and allegories into the concept of the demon child as site of struggle. Vividly translated into film medium, this distillation produces a rhythm momentum that hack the imperatives of social contestations which, because intelligently dramatic and horrific, are so very cinematic.
Directed By: Peque Gallaga And Lorenzo A. Reyes
Screenplay: Peque Gallaga, Don Escudero And Lorenzo A. Reyes
Director Of Photography: Eduardo F. Jacinto, FSC
Music: Dionisio Buencamino, Jr.
Editor: Augusto Salvador
Production Designed By: Don Escudero
Produced by: Regal Films, Inc.
Release Date: September 14, 1988