Disappearing aswang

Reading Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” (1897) in high school was a revelation. First, the novel did not translate accurately into the many film versions I have seen. Second, the novel was presented in epistolary form, or through a succession of letters and diary entries. Third, the blood-sucking, shape-shifting, 19th-century Transylvanian Count did not resemble the same character depicted in films: from Max Schreck in “Nosferatu” (1922), to Bela Lugosi in “Dracula” (1931), and Christopher Lee, who appeared in seven vampire films from 1970 to 1976. Fourth, the vampire is killed with a wooden stake in the heart, exposure to sunlight, or falling onto a cross with a sharp point that pierces the heart from the monster’s back. In the novel, Dracula is trapped in a circle formed with pieces of the consecrated host. Dracula’s head is cut off by one character, then another stabs him in the heart with a gleaming Bowie knife to ensure the undead remains dead.

Aside from “Dracula,” I also read Mary Shelley’s ”Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” (1818). To put things in context, I read erudite commentary and academic annotations on both works, because I planned to teach a comparative course on the Victorian vampire and the vampire in Philippine folk belief and folklore. The Filipino vampire is usually disguised as a woman, who doesn’t kill her prey right away; she takes on a husband and sips a little of his blood nightly until the victim dies. Coroners or forensic doctors then declare anemia as the cause of death. Sometimes the husband is not feasted on, but his home is used as the vampire’s base of operations. The Pinoy vampire does not hunt or feed near its home; it travels elsewhere to avoid detection. While the Western vampire uses two sharp fangs to draw blood from the victim’s neck, the Pinoy one is neater; it uses a pointed tongue to draw blood, then sucks fresh blood from the source. One would think the modern vampire need not hunt for food, because it’s easier to rob a blood bank.

In the 1969 article “The Aswang Syncrasy in Philippine Folklore,” Maximo D. Ramos classified “aswang” into three types: vampires (“mandurugo” in Tagalog, “amalanhig” in Visayan and “danag” in Isneg. I used to think the correct term was “vampira”); Viscera-suckers (aka “laman luob” or “manananggal” in Tagalog, “naguneg” in Ilocano, “kasudlan” or “abat” in Visayan. The Pinoy version of the European werewolf or “loup-garou” is a weredog (“kiwig” in Aklanon, “malakat” in Visayan, and “aswang na lakaw” in Tagalog. I would think “askal” is a better term; however, the Pinoy weredog can also take other shapes like a boar or a cat: witches (“mangkukulam” to Tagalogs and Kapampangans, “mambabarang” in Bikol) and last but not least, the ghoul (“balbal” in Tagalog, “kagkag” in Romblon, “segben” in Visayan and “wirwir” in Apayao). Then there are other creatures: “tianak,” “kapre,” demons, “bangungot,” etc., that are kept in our consciousness through film, komiks, and our yayas.

I read “Aswang Syncrasy,” an academic text, together with Ramos’ “Creatures of Midnight” (1967), a children’s book that instructed the reader on how to classify, evade, and dispatch 85 different types of aswang. What made “Aswang Syncrasy” terrifying to me were the ethnographic reports from different places in the archipelago. Most of these reports carried the names of the informants, making everything sound real. For example, one of the footnotes reads:

“The story is told of an American Fulbright researcher whose host begged him to sleep with his entire family, including unmarried maidens, instead of elsewhere on the floor. He was told that the family liked him too much to consign him to a separate bed. He could not understand why until he learned about the viscera sucker’s method of attack.”

Reading Ramos again for Halloween this year, I was struck by an angle of sympathy rather than fear of the aswang:

“A youth who finds that the pretty girl (or vice versa) he plans to marry, or has married, is a viscera suck or weredog can help her disgorge the chick [inside her body that makes her an aswang] by one or two standard procedures: (1) making her sit on a swing suspended from a high branch, winding the rope, then letting the rope undo itself, thus dizzying her, and repeating the process until she retches and expels the parasite from her stomach; or (2) lashing her upside down to a tree and smudging her till the smoke makes her regurgitate the parasite.”

Urban life has made life difficult for the aswang—the habitat is different, people are different—and consequently, the aswang has slowly become extinct and irrelevant to Gen Z. Aswangs still figure in some Filipino films like the “Shake, Rattle, & Roll” franchise. One might think there are other things that scare Filipinos today, like American slasher films, Japanese horror films, Pinoy romantic comedies, policemen involved in the drug war, and corrupt government officials.

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Comments are welcome at ambeth.ocampo@inquirer.net