TIYANAK... Evil As Fairytale

Tiyanak

Peque Gallaga and Lorenzo Reyes' Tiyanak (Regal Films, Inc.) made us realize that the tiyanak as found in Filipino folklore is very much a reality and a source of danger to unsuspecting citizens. Tiyanak accomplishes what is difficult to accomplish, embedding the symbolic and the metaphorical in the actions and processes of film. Gallaga and Reyes' propensity to visualize the nightmare world of Philippine mythology and Don Escudero's research and knowledge of the arcane in Filipino culture have produced a well-made movie that tackles the theme of supernatural evil as it makes its presence known in present-day society that considers evil as fairy tale. Tiyanak succeeds because Gallaga and Reyes used the magic of cinematography and editing to give shape and reality to creatures of the imagination which continue to create anxiety, fear and horror in the consciousness of Filipino moviegoers. Filmmakers since the earliest days have been fascinated by the genre. To quench their thirst for the unknown, to slake their frustrations over the unseen, the abstract which the senses cannot verify and the mind can only point at, Filipinos are hysterically fond of mythological creatures such as the aswang and manananggal. We like hearing stories of women giving birth to babies with fish or snake as twins. This need to verify a mental construct makes the Filipino feel that we can control the unseen and thus not be totally powerless.  But a horror movie is not easy to make. The screenplay has to invest the material with several levels of of meaning to satisfy not only the childlike but also the mature viewer who secretly longs for verification of his deepest fears. The horror movie also needs a technical mastery which requires that the filmmaking team understand cinematography, editing, musical scoring, optical effects and other celluloid manipulations.

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