Ghostly Allegories: Haunting as Constitution of Philippine (Trans) National (Cinema) History

Abstract

By reading through the con–texts of Yam Laranas’s The Echo (2008) and Kelvin Tong’s The Maid (2005), the essay considers three Filipino genres that ironically gathered momentum at the time of the Philippine film industry’s crisis and decline in the 1990s up to the 2000s – the historical drama, the OFW (overseas Filipino worker) film, and horror. In the process, the essay constitutes an alternative map of Philippine cinema premised on inter-national transactions across states and film industries, on the one hand, and on the nodal and spectral bodies of Filipinas that network these states and industries, on the other hand. Dwelling on multiform hauntings, it ultimately focuses on how nations/cinemas – through (de)localized genres – are constituted and called into account by specters of (cinema) histories.