Gabi ng lagim (1960)

aka (4) Nights of Horror

There’s little known outside of the Philippines about this early local horror film. Apparently, the anthology movie of stories directed by Tommy C. Davis, Larry Santiago and Pablo Santiago initially consisted of four stories, but the first is lost to us now (apart from a bit of its credits) unless some heroic archivist drags it up some day. Given how much of Filipino cinema made before the 1980s or so is as gone as most of the films of the silent movie era here, I wouldn’t hold out hope it’ll ever surface again.

So it’s an even greater pleasure that the other three segments of the film still exist, even if it’s only in a beat up version that looks more as if it had been shot in the 1920s than four decades later. In the case of Gabi ng lagim, the bad state of the film material actually adds a bit to the first two segments’ mystique, emphasizing the visual elements already related to expressionist horror of the silent era just that decisive bit more.

Plot-wise, the first segment left to us concerns a very classically dressed vampire leaving his bride in a peaceful Filipino village to do what vampire brides are wont to do. She’s daylighting as a beautiful but reserved lodger in the house of an older farmer and his kids, but by night, she’s taking care of the parts of the population already rather overexcited by the mysterious beauty living among them. She aims to finish on the farmer’s virginal daughter, though. One hardly needs to mention there might be a teensy bit of a subtext about class in form of the city/country divide and an expression of sexual anxiety very much filtered through Catholicism going on here. It’s a fine piece of work in any case, with a spirited vampire performance, and a lot of extremely moody shots of graveyards and our vampiress prowling by night that contrasts nicely with the segment’s naturalistic portrayal of country life.

The next segment is even better, for it concerns the ghost of a murdered man taking his vengeance on the vile pimp who killed him; another man who looked on and let the murder happen is exempt on religious reasons and because he thought the victim was the actual vile pimp. That’s not how this stuff works in Daredevil!

Despite my theological confusion, I am very fond of this segment. It has the same mix of naturalism and expressionism as the first one, but it goes just a bit further with the latter, turning the nights of the ghost-haunted characters truly unreal. But let’s talk about the story’s most excellent ghost for a second. He comes in two part: part one are his hacked off arms and hand floating about, the second part is the – also floating – talkative rest of him, something that really adds a folkloric feel to a creature whose motives could come directly out of an EC comic. It also enhances the unreal aspects of the whole affair further – there’s something strangely disquieting about these floating arms, even though the special effects are primitive when looked at today.

About the final episode, the less said the better. A bunch of idiots run through a haunted house while making the kind of jokes that had me thinking fondly of Abbot and Costello; so true horror.


However, the middle segments are so strong even the last one can’t ruin anything about Gabi ng lagim as a whole.