Ang “Aswang” at “Tama(w)o” Bilang Sinematikong Kaalamang-Bayan at Diyalektika ng Bansa at Rehiyon

This essay attempts to construct and deconstruct the discourses of “nation” (bayan) and “region” (rehiyon) vis-à-vis “aswang” and “tama(w)o” embedded in the films of Negrense filmmaker Richard Somes – “Lihim ng San Joaquin” from Shake, Rattle, and Roll 2k5 (Monteverde, Monteverde, & Somes, 2005), Yanggaw (Arguelles, Montelibano, Montelibano, & Somes, 2008), “Tamawo” from Shake, Rattle, and Roll 13 (Monteverde, Monteverde, & Somes, 2011), and Corazon: Ang Unang Aswang (Calmerin, Kintanar, Samson-Martinez, & Somes, 2012). Using the horror genre, the four films present the quotidian lives from the nation’s peripheries through the depiction of the antagonized “indigenous belief systems,” imagined backward-ness of the bucolic landscape, and oppressive hacienda systems. These spatio-temporal dispositifs are deemed to result in the contested processes of the dichotomy and vicissitudes between rural and urban, margin and center, Self and Other, and nation and region. Finally, by considering Somes’s films as “filmic folklore,” the essay tries to configure and reconfigure the folk creatures “aswang” and “tama(w)o” as cornucopia and articulations of regional and national “history of emotions.”