The Scariest of Them All

By Pennie Azarcon dela Cruz, Executive Editor Sunday Inquirer Magazine SOME people don’t scare easy. I’m not one of them. If you were watching a horror movie and heard someone hyperventilating at the back just as the background music swelled to the inevitable horrific climax, that would be me. If you caught “What Lies Beneath” in a Makati theater and recall hearing someone squeal during that crucial bathtub scene, that would be me. That click of teeth biting cuticles into a bloody pulp during the “Sixth Sense” premiere? Yup, me! Now you know why I don’t watch scary movies all that much; I don’t fancy having a cardiac just as the bug-eyed zombies catch their prey. I can imagine people discreetly kicking my prone body to hide it under the cinema seats while they relish the gory scenes that they’ve paid good money for. Even my kids would be annoyed. This is the best part and you have to die now? Blame my yellow streak on a potent imagination fueled by generous doses of mythical monsters from Pilipino komiks, the “Gabi ng Lagim” TV series of the mid-60s and a succession of chatty househelp from the South who regularly threatened us with sanguine tales of kapres, aswang, manananggal and other local ghouls to get us to finish our food, take our naps and keep still. The Taong Tuod of Mars Ravelo’s Darna novels similarly haunted me years after they chased the townfolk of Barangay Puntod. Just when I thought I’ve wrestled them down to oblivion, they resurrected themselves in my dreams. I remember how I once had a spider plant hanging on my bedroom window that I had to banish after a week-long series of nightmares. In nightly succession, the plant morphed into a giant octopus about to attack me, a hairy spider crawling towards my bed, a cauldron of writhing snakes, and an alien life form whose blood-sucking tentacles were slowly circling my inert form. I don’t know what psychiatrists would make of these Freudian images, but they scared me enough to swear off exotic plants forever. Then there was the time I caught “The Blob” on Million Dollar Movies, shuddering as the red amorphous gel from outer space gobbled everything on its path. I don’t remember how the lead characters managed to rid the planet of this menace, but the image of the voracious monster stayed with me when I went to bed that same night. Covering my head with a blanket, I managed to doze off awhile when suddenly, I felt something crawling up my leg. I almost screamed when I saw The Blob heaving its massive form at the foot of my bed. But as I shook the blankets off to make a run for it, I was suddenly jerked awake. I looked down and found -- not The Blob, but my knitted maroon sweater lying crumpled on my bed. As for “Gabi ng Lagim,” the mere howling of a dog to herald the start of another episode was enough to have me bury my head into the nearest sofa, occasionally peeking at the TV screen through the parted fingers curtaining my face. This was how my siblings and I got to know the White Lady at Balete Drive, the tyanak, the form-changing giant bat, the headless nun -- all staples of Philippine ghost stories and horror movies. Having an impressionable subconscious that absorbed every thought, wish and fear and regurgitated them hours later in the form of dreams and nightmares made the dark a fearful and mysterious force. And so us siblings would approach our darkened bedroom with bated breath, clutching each other tightly and sticking close like compound Siamese twins, with one of us bravely reaching out a hand to grope for the light switch. Only with the lights on could we breathe easy again. As we grew up, we graduated to the more sophisticated chills offered by the likes of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Wait Until Dark,” “Psycho,” and “The Birds,” fighting off the urge to hide every time we espied birds clumping together on a neighbor’s roof. “Carrie” was as memorable, with the whole theater erupting into a surprised scream at the twist towards the movie’s end. Today, “The Ring,” “The Grudge,” and similar Asian horror movies make much of the fact that horror flourishes even in this techno-savvy age and that evil resides even in the most quotidian items -- like the cellphone. The scare, I hear, are just as cathartic, the imagination given free rein as the darkened screen suggests shadows, foretells death and deals out thrills and chills in labyrinthine surprises. It is this element of suggestion, the powerful nudge to the imagination and its endless stock of wraithlike creatures let loose in our mind at the slightest hint of malaise that I find sorely lacking in the slew of slasher movies, those bloodfests that feature serial killers on the loose and zooming in to show them stab, torture, stuff and/or eviscerate their victims. Not just gory but utterly predictable: you know the ditsiest cheerleader will go first, while the rest follows until only one manages to escape, or help finally comes when a maverick cop or a nerd finally figures out the cryptic message left by the pattern of macabre killings. Sure they scare me; but it’s disgust that keeps me away. If I wanted to be traumatized by real-life characters, I only have to read the news, open the tabloids or watch the news. Unscrupulous politicians, junketing police generals and their wives, rich thrill killers who get premature pardons, bandits and kidnappers who prey on humanitarian workers -- why, it’s a regular rogue’s gallery, a veritable collection of monsters who have apparently made a Faustian bargain. Like zombies, they’re the undead who cannot be slain and they visit and revisit us, relentless in their bloodlust, shameless in their greed. Now that’s real scary. To unearth more tales from the darkside, check out the Sunday Inquirer Magazine on Oct. 26, free with your copy of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.