Engkantos

I recently had a conversation with a poet friend about the concept of “horror.” Another friend had written a novel she wanted to pitch as Filipino horror, and my poet friend insisted that horror is a Western concept, as ours is more mythology and folklore than it is horror. Our “monsters” are magical creatures and entities, much too different from Western horror movie staples like Jason Voorhees and Freddy Kreuger.

I have a lot of reading to do before I can argue for or against his statement, but as I’ve said before in this space, Filipino folklore is rich in elements that would make for a delicious, shivers-up-your-spine-inducing, original piece of work.

The tikbalang, manananggal, kapre, engkantos and the like have appeared onscreen—last I remember, it was in Nieves in Shake, Rattle & Roll X—but I have yet to see an unforgettable contemporary film that really explored their world in a deservedly creepy light. Chito Roño’s T2 is a step in that direction.

T2, starring Maricel Soriano, Derek Ramsay, newcomer Mika dela Cruz (the younger sister of Angelika dela Cruz), and Erik Fructuoso, tells the story of a young orphan girl being pursued by mysterious elements. Soriano is Claire, a volunteer worker who helps place orphans in adoptive homes, and, in the middle of a collapsing marriage, she decides to escape the chaos by taking over the task of bringing a child to Samar—via a long road trip.

As a viewer, I am baffled as to why they didn’t take the plane, especially because Claire complains loudly about gas prices in one of the scenes. However, the long drive from Manila to Samar and back, with a stormy ro-ro trip to boot, is essential to the film’s narrative. Anybody who’s heard an engkanto story before knows that the creepiest things happen when you’re traveling on the road or on foot, and, predictably enough, it is during the road trip back that things take a creepy turn. In a confluence of otherworldly events, Claire and her driver Elias (Fructuoso) end up bringing an eight-year-old Angeli (dela Cruz) to her aunt’s tenement building, T2 or Tenement 2, in Metro Manila. Later, they would realize she is being stalked by engkantos.

I have to commend Roño for his subtle handling of some of the scenes, where he doesn’t go into the typical heavy-handed explanations you can expect from most popular Filipino films. I can still remember the laughs Roño’s Feng Shui got with its too literal interpretation of zodiac deaths, where Lotlot de Leon’s character, who was born in the Year of the Horse, died on top of a case of Red Horse Beer.

T2, however, is not totally free of that, and the characteristic heavy drama, which, unfortunately, bit off huge chunks of the fear and dread I had expected to feel, with the rest being watered down to blandness by bad CGI. Nevertheless, if only for—at last—familiar strokes of scary that really hit close to home, T2 is a good watch. Salt as a weapon, body-turning-into-banana-trunks, moving coffins, shape-shifting wild boars, going around in circles, eccentric women who know the world of engkantos, the all spine-tingling “Psst!” that never occurs three times—it’s all there. It didn’t take more than a huge, felled tree blocking the highway to scare me, really.

Of course, when you go into another world, it’s best to enhance popular beliefs to help anchor the fear even more solidly, and in some aspects, T2 failed in this area. One of the common stories about engkantos is that they would entice you with rich-looking food, but once you succumb, it would be tasteless. There’s a scene in an engkanto-owned canteen, but none of that anti-salt red flag. Then there’s the matter of the physical appearance: engkantos are said to have no fold on top of their upper lip. Finally, and most important of all, everybody knows that if you’re going around in circles, it helps to wear your clothes inside out and frontside back.

All in all, T2 is one of Roño’s better horror films, with Soriano nothing less than stellar and holding it up well against the younger Ramsay as her husband. Tetchie Agbayani is a stirring onscreen presence, as is the young dela Cruz. It is my belief, too, that Roño brought out the actor in Fructuoso.

Let’s have more of the Filipino flavor in horror—with even better storylines.

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