Pitchy pitchy

Practically everyone I know wants to make a movie. They’re all writing treatments for their Cinemalaya and Cinema One applications, or raising funds to make independent movies, or taking screenwriting workshops with Bing Lao. Well, I don’t want to make a movie, I just want to go to Rome. I saw a documentary on the sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, and I want to see his masterpiece, “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa,” with my own eyes.

You want to make a movie, I want to go to Rome; there’s no reason why we can’t merge our plans. I’ve been observing the local movie industry for years, and I have some ideas about what the audience will pay to watch.

Horror is always a safe bet, especially during an economic crisis (i.e. always). People want to see characters having a scarier time than they are. It’s comforting. Plus horror movies are exportable — witness the international success of The Ring, The Grudge, The Eye, and other Asian flicks.

So let’s make a horror movie. Ideally our monster should be something foreign audiences have not seen before. What do we have that is uniquely freaky and exotic? Easy: manananggal. (Granted, I have a bit of a manananggal obsession. My friends and I were working on a graphic novel about one, but they seem to have forgotten it. Well, I haven’t.)

And since I have to go to Italy, our movie should be shot in Rome. The advantage of shooting in Rome is that there are hundreds of thousands of Filipinas living there, so we would have no problem finding locations, extras and volunteers.

Let’s make our protagonist an attractive young Filipino woman, and put her in a palazzo in Rome. What’s she doing in Rome? She’s a maid, she works for a rich Italian couple. Her name is Estrella, and she’s from a little town in the Philippines.

One day Estrella is in the park reading a letter from her sister. She’s crying because she misses home. Then a great big dog — a mastiff, because I just saw one — jumps on her and starts licking her face. The mastiff’s owner runs over to apologize. Of course he’s gorgeous and is immediately smitten with our heroine. Estrella has a mysterious, mesmeric quality that will be explained later.

The guy — we’ll call him Fabrizio — is a wealthy young Roman. Make that very wealthy and aristocratic, so we can bring in the class struggle angle that Pinoy audiences love. His snooty relatives, particularly his bitchy sister, will disapprove of his dating a Filipino maid, but love conquers all, blah blah blah.

So Estrella and Fabrizio fall madly in love, and he takes her to his villa. They have a romantic dinner, followed by a sex scene. The treatment of the sex scene will depend on the director’s box-office aspirations. If she or he wants lots of free publicity in order to draw crowds to the theatres and create a massive hit, the sex scene must be graphic enough to be denounced as pornography. The director must incur the ire of moralists, be burned in effigy in street protests, and get invited to TV talk shows where people yell at each other. If she wants to appeal to a broader demographic, have her movie shown at the SM Cinemas, and convince teachers to require their students to watch the movie, the sex scene must not go beyond the limits of R-13.

Back to our story. In the middle of the night, Estrella wakes up. She sees Fabrizio sleeping peacefully. Suddenly she feels weird and queasy. She gets out of bed and goes to the kitchen. That’s when it happens.

Estrella starts retching and convulsing. A pair of giant batwings grows out of her back. Fangs appear in her mouth, talons on her fingers. The monster is she. She’s a manananggal. Then the wings flap and her torso is ripped in two at the waist. The upper half flies out the window. The lower half is left standing in the kitchen. (We’ll need a good prosthetics and special effects team. Not to worry, I know some geeks.)

Naturally Fabrizio will not notice this, or her subsequent transformations. He is so enchanted by her, he never notices that she’s a monster. The actor playing Fabrizio must be so charming, it never occurs to the audience that he’s a dimwit.

Estrella flies to the Borghese gardens that night and spots a man walking by himself. She swoops down on him, snaps his spine, and eats his heart. Then, her hunger satisfied, she flies back to Fabrizio’s villa and reattaches herself to her lower body. She transforms back into a woman, washes off the blood, and goes back to bed with her unwitting lover.

Every time Estrella and Fabrizio have sex — and she is voracious — she transforms into the manananggal. She hunts and kills people. Police investigate a series of grisly murders in Rome and neighboring cities — people torn apart and their hearts eaten. There are reports of a giant bat flying around the city. There is a massive manhunt. (Okay, creature hunt.) Naturally no one suspects Estrella, who is now engaged to Fabrizio despite his family’s objections. The only person who identifies the serial killings as manananggal attacks is a young policeman of Filipino descent.

Meanwhile, Fabrizio’s nasty sister is doing all she can to get rid of Estrella. This sister is conveniently pregnant. So one night, the manananggal sits on the roof of her house and lowers its long,

thread-like tongue into her bedroom. The tongue fastens onto the woman’s belly and the monster sucks out the embryo as if it were drinking through a straw. Make it very gruesome. The Filipino-Italian cop meets Estrella while investigating the killings in the area. Will he uncover her horrible secret? Will she eat him? Will Fabrizio figure anything out? Maybe Fabrizio has known all along, but remains silent because he has a dark secret of his own...

I think it might work. Drop me a line.

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