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Monday, October 31, 2005
Holywood Holloween
By Kara Mae Muga Noveda
Halloween owes its popular “bad publicity” to the celluloid experience of horror-- the genre of suspense, fright night films that which keeps the theater houses full and audiences eager for sequels and remakes.
At first, there is the original (Mary Shelley’s) Frankenstein, a pitiful, box-head of a man-made monster. In the later B-grade versions, we meet Frankenstein’s bride and his encounters with strange bedfellows of his kind.
The bloodsucking Count Dracula and his clan of vampires have earned their fictional rights to immortality. they continually hibernate and shake off sleep, seduce, stalk in the night and die-- (only when a wooden stake gets hammered through their hearts, of course), and get to do it all over again.
In the Friday the 13th tradition, the champion of the slasher films (so-called because portrayed victims are slashed to death), Jason mourns for his dead mother and continues to live in his vengeful existence from parts one to six (from 1980 to 2005).
For its familiar Roman Catholic spin, the Exorcist, and other demon possesion films, haunt in the classic apocalyptic conflict.
In the less-sophisticated Filipino films, the local legends are known to us by their generic names: the tobacco-smoking agta, the unlovable baby tiyanak, and the unsettled white ladies of ancestral homes, among many other images, affirming their existence not only in oral tradition but also in cinematic imagination.
Then again, Halloween itself is a reinvention, a rip-off of sorts.
An unsuppressed pagan holiday originally believed to be the singular occasion when spirits freely roamed the earth to do mischief, Pope Gregory (601 AD) moved “All Saints’ Day” to November 1 and gave religious credence to the night before it.
Hence, October 31st became “All Hallow’s Eve,” or the Holy Evening, now shortened to Halloween.
Again, we may blame it on the ancients.
(October 31, 2005 issue)
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