Kris Aquino and the/as a Philippine Horror Genre

Abstract

This paper discusses Kris Aquino as text vis-à-vis as a unique horror genre, within the context of her title as the “Philippine Box Office Horror Queen.” While foregrounding comprehensive arguments about Aquino’s textuality, the essay also reveals her cinematic history, which has crowned Aquino as the queen of the genre, which the author calls, pelikula ng lagim [translation]. This cinematic history is used as a narrative guide in constructing an in-depth scrutiny on the concepts of genre, lagim, and the pelikula ng lagim. The author strategically plays with these concepts, thus heightening their meaning, while revealing the rich, covert discourse of Aquino as a genre that has launched itself as “a culture of kasarian” [literally, gender, but by way of a Filipino root word, sari, variety, or more appropriately, polysemy], highlighted in the two franchise Feng Shui movies (Roño, 2004, 2014), where she played the heroine. While these movies may be said to have placed the Philippines into the realm of Asian Horror Films, they also present Aquino as a text that is “becoming a complete genre.”