Erik Matti brings Pinoy perspective to Folklore horror anthology
Interior. Dusk to dawn. Two persons in a frame.
A woman tightly embraces her son, whose youth has been consumed by some bout of unimaginable internal pain. Feeling perplexed over the situation, she tears up as he seeks for help.
Then the frame fades out and fades in to someone else’s stern eyes, an extreme close-up, and mouth, with full lips, chanting some unintelligible speech.
Quickly, a cut-in to a voodoo doll with pins on it.
Then, the basic plot and the revenge theme of a horror movie have been given a proper exposition.
Given his mastery in filmmaking, auteur Erik Matti will pull out all the stops in narrating what has been described above. Proof is the Folklore Season 2 episode, 7 Days Of Hell, in which he will expose some truths about witchcraft and evoke fear that comes with it.
Airing on Dec. 5 on HBO Go and HBO, the director took on the challenge of bringing a Filipino perspective to the HBO Asia’s original horror anthology.
Erik, who was in Paris at the time of the virtual press conference, along with his actors Dolly de Leon and Mon Confiado, readily jumped into the discussion about the central point of the film, and the cause of the characters’ conflict.
“I think the things we explored for 7 Days Of Hell (were) really how fear could build up with something that you really don’t understand,” Erik, also the man behind the On The Job (OTJ) series and On The Job: The Missing 8, the film, laid down the groundwork of the content coming from the Philippines.
“I think right now, not just because of the pandemic, but generally, how the world functions, is there’s a lot of fear that goes around that you can’t totally explain. The inexplicable is the one fueling the fear itself.”
Fear, added the director, will be seen in the characters of Dolly and Mon, who play police officers Lourdes and Jong in the story. This basic human emotion is personified in them as they initially gather leads about a supernatural case and chance upon a baffling resolution.
“They are confronted by something they couldn’t explain,” Erik described his characters’ plight. “As policemen, they rely mostly on evidence, on proof, on nothing ambiguous.” But when all this becomes futile, the lead characters will be pushed against the wall to abandon the science and the logic in handling a case. “They end up thinking about, ‘Maybe this is the work of the supernatural,’” added he. “They try to veer towards illogical stuff, veer towards gut instinct, and intuition rather than provable evidence.” This abandonment of reason adds a mystic charm to 7 Days Of Hell.
The folklore story shows how colorful Philippine culture is, added Mon to the conversation.
He liked the authentic feel of it and considered mangkukulam (witch or sorcerer) a scariest local mythological creature.
“It’s not just a myth,” reflected Dolly on witchcraft as a theme and the reason why the Philippine episode could be considered scary. “Pangkukulam is actually a reality for a lot of Filipinos. It’s a known phenomenon of healing and destruction, yun ang maganda dun, kasi may katotohanan siya. So, pwedeng mangyari sa kahit na sino (There’s truth in it. Anyone can be a victim of it.).”
7 Days Of Hell will put viewers on the edge of their seats by using mangkukulam as a means to scare, but present them a “personal context” to why people engage in such practice.
“We haven’t seen like a story told in film that explores how the mangkukulam(s) look at things,” said the director. “More than just horror, parang we’re trying to understand the reasons for them doing it.”
Speaking from the stance of her character, Dolly said, “Mas nakakatakot talaga ang tao… because some spirits are powerful, but the problem is, with people is, we really can’t control them or their presence in your life. I think that’s the value here also in 7 Days Of Hell, it’s about navigating around in a world of people who have twisted values and (are) trying to survive and making sense of everything, despite yung katiwalian ng mga tao… Bukod pa dun sa may spirituality and mga elementals na tinatawag in the episode, it’s also really the people that cause the conflict here. That’s the scarier thing for me.”
Her character’s dilemma will revolve around “trusting her own police instincts or (trying) to understand the bizarre, which is happening to her family,” said Erik, who worked on the film earlier this year.
Asked how the director set the horror tone in 7 Days Of Hell, Erik said, “There would still be moments, mid-way into the story, where we kind of (brought) in a tongue-and-cheek feel to it and then, of course, going back into the tone.” But the approach to filming a horror is about “mixing (the genre) with different tones so that you highlight the more serious one later on,” added he. “But I think what’s exciting about the story now is that we’re trying to go into more than just the supernatural, but also the fear of the unknown with humans in general. That’s what the story is trying to talk about… It has a more dreadful tone to it rather than out and out scary.”
After Erik wrapped up the final part of the conversation, one couldn’t shake off the thought of taking the road to rediscovering fear through 7 Days Of Hell.
(Stream or download Folklore Season 2 on HBO GO.)
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