Honourable Mention: Hawaiian Ghost Stories

This was a 2020 film directed by Blake and Brent Cousins and, at the time of writing, has no IMDb page. I don’t know whether the fact that this collection of campfire tales, told to a group of kids by an elderly gentleman, have the transnational focus because Hawaii is multicultural or because there aren’t that many local ghost stories to chose from (the term ghost is stretched here also as many of the stories include corporeal creatures)?

It is within that transnational focus that we find out mention. A pair of ghost hunters are investigating an abandoned asylum and the thing that allegedly haunts it. However before going there, they have had a message from a nearby village.

interview

When they roll the footage that has been shot we get the story of a village whose population are of a Philippine extraction and the event is said to have been caused by an aswang. Now one could argue that, if a supernatural event occurs and is seen by a group from a particular ethnic background then they will name the phenomena from the lore that is available to them. In this case there is a belief that the aswang are also called draculas and suck blood.

footage

Sort of… so the video footage shows some goats, when a noise is herd and the adult son, carrying the camera, goes to investigate and sees his elderly father struggling with something. That something is very pixilated and when we see it in still it is still almost featureless, poor cgi modelling. He eventually puts the camera down and they go and beat it together but, we can assume, it gets away. In interview the father says that aswang devour livers but the interview does touch on them being draculas. It is no more than a fleeting visitation.

in the cave

So, some poor cgi, shaky footage (of the found footage variety) and the use of Dracula as a collective noun. How this then fits in with the asylum isn’t clear. The cgi was so poor that it may or may not be the creature they find later (if it is, the visitation is still fleeting). However they refer to the creature both as a deformed (former) patient – and throw in an establishment cover up and a buried cadaver – and also a yokai. It is interesting that they used the Japanese term as it is a collective noun just as aswang can be (aswang can mean a specific, sometimes vampiric, type of creature and at others a generic collective noun for monsters). The film itself is pretty poorly pulled together, with consistently amateurish acting, bad cgi and little in the way of either cinematography or atmosphere.