The decades of the Fifties and Sixties are today considered the “golden age” of radio drama in
Philippine broadcasting. In the forefront of this thespic wave was DZRH, the key station of the
Manila Broadcasting Company, which introduced many dramatic genres into the mainstream of
Filipino urban culture: soap operas, adventure thrillers (Kapitan Kidlat), and detective mysteries
(Johnny Davao). But supernatural fantasy was largely unknown to island listeners until 1959
when a young man named Froilan Villegas created the very first Filipino horror series,Gabi ng
Lagim. “I thought of this wonderful new direction in radio,” he remembers, “and it was a great
opportunity to be a pioneer and go first. But what should be the name of the program? I
remembered that I had possessed an English book with the title ofNight of Terror, and for that
reason I thought ofGabi ng Lagim. But that was not enough. The title needed to stand out and to
draw the listener’s attention at the very opening... So I worked out the beginning words ofGabi
ngLagimfrom the Bible.”
The series was first aired on August 18, 1959 on a Tuesday evening at 8:30. It was an instant
success and, according to Villegas, by the second week of broadcast the program was number one
in the ratings charts.
Gabi ng Lagimlast broadcast for radio was in 1984. The TV series was first shown in 1963 on
Channel 11 on Wednesday at 7:00 to 8:00. It was a live show then as there were no taped shows at
that time. The last broadcast for the TV series was in 1966.”
The sources for theGabi ng Lagimscripts were as diverse as the many horror traditions of the
world, but Villegas reworked them all to place them squarely within his own milieu and that of his
listeners. He recalls that he did adaptations of “stories from Europe like Dracula and other known
horror stories but they all revolved around Filipino characters and the Filipino way of life.” And of
all the supernatural manifestations that he portrayed in his scripts, the ones that elicited the
greatest audience response were the ones that drew most heavily on the native folklore. “It was
the stories,” affirms Villegas, “from the remote barrios in the Philippines aboutaswang,kapre,
manananggal, andduwendethat were the favorites of the listeners.”
The mythology of the islands boasts some of the most fearsome monsters of any in world
folklore—what has been called “the whole underworld of Filipino lower-class mythology.” And
chief among these beings is theaswang.
“The aswang concept is most usefully understood,” asserts folklore scholar Maximo Ramos, “as
a congeries of beliefs about five types of mythical beings identifiable with certain creatures of the
European tradition: (1) the blood-sucking vampire, (2) the self-segmenting viscera sucker, (3) the
man-eating weredog, (4) the vindictive or evil-eye witch, and (5) the carrion-eating ghoul. Thus
when Philippine folk speak of theaswang, they generally refer the physical traits, habitat, or
activities of these five types of mythical beings, and sometimes also of other mythical entities like
the demon, dwarf, and elf.” Ramos refers to “the formidable tangle of beliefs about the lower
mythical beings known by a wide variety of local names in an archipelago like the Philippines’
seven thousand islands and some eighty-five native language—languages, not just dialects, since
the speakers of one tongue cannot communicate with those of any other…”
Ramos: “The belief that ghouls were scared off by noise and loud talking may have contributed
to the vociferousness of Filipinos when in groups… It is often quite easy to spot groups of Filipino
students abroad, because they are usually the most boisterous at gatherings. Filipino art forms
like television shows, radio plays, and stage presentations seldom have quiet moments.”
And in the backwaters and far-flung villages of the islands, belief in these creatures still remains
strong. As recently as 2003, three men were arrested in a remote part of Negros Occidental for the
beheading murders of an elderly husband and wife whom they had long suspected of being
aswang. Claiming in their confession that they wanted to put an end to the couple’s “evil powers,”
they had also originally intended to take the heads of their victims to the river nearby and “bury
them to ensure they would not return to their bodies.”
“‘Aswang’ have a way of materializing in times of want,” comments Conrado De Quiros in
describing how anthropologists view the situation. “It’s the people’s way of coping. They project
their fears to the outside world, in the form of unholy creatures, which despite their fearful
countenance were capable of being destroyed… Maybe so. But anthro-pologists themselves,
particularly in the godforsaken places of this country, of which there are plentiful too, have been
known to glance behind them on a dark and lonely road in the witching hour.”
As with many other classic radio spine-tinglers, fans ofGabi ng Lagimliked to listen to the
program in the dark, as a means of increasing their goosebump quotient. Oftentimes, though, the
darkened setting was not a deliberate choice but rather an expected (but no less annoying)
occurance of routine household life. In the days before ??? idwest ly the power system,
electrical failures and outages were notoriously frequent. People who were stuck in the dark had
to find something to do, and, for many, tuning in to a good creepy ghost story on a transistor
radio was a preferred option. “As a kid,” one former listener reminisced recently inPinoy Central,
“I remember listening [during the blackouts] to radio horror dramas likeGabi ng Lagim. Of
course, I never dared do this alone. The studio production seemed all too real to me that they did
give me a scare.” “With Ben David’s abysmal voice,” declaresBusiness Worldwriter Doy Ariola,
“that program scared me witless as a kid when I was alone in bed during a blackout.”
“My love-hate relationship with AM radio began early,” recallsManila Timescolumnist Ruben
D. Canlas Jr., “when as kids we used to cling tightly to our pillows, bedsheets pulled over our
heads and sweating rivers as we listened to the classicGabi ng Lagim, a horror radio drama that
always scared us till our hair stood on end… Today, there are hardly any radio dramas. And if
there are, they are more in the ‘realist mode’, no more fantasies and horror, which is a pity since
fantastic themes are easier and cheaper to produce in radio (you only need sound effects, not the
expensive computer-churned visual effects).
“The things that really scared me out of my wits when I was a kid,” recalled listener Conrado de
Quiros in 2001, “were not the movies I saw and thekomiksI read but the radio programs I
heard… I still remember one radio program that brought a chill to my heart, which was ‘Gabi ng
Lagim.’ From the moment Ben David—yes, the guy with the big voice and exaggerated way of
talking—introduced the program, along with much unearthly noises and the distant baying of
dogs, you were glued to the spot. And not get much sleep the rest of the night. It would of course
have been so much easier not to listen to the program, but all the boys at school would be talking
about it next morning, and the truly horrifying prospect of being left out, or worse being the butt
of jokes, would be sufficient fortification for enduring the terrors of the night. Though barely,
each squeak and sighing of the wind, particularly on dark and rainy nights, bringing much news
of foreboding.”
De Quiros (2004):Gabi ng Lagim“featured some pretty awesome voice talents. What made the
radio horror stories more terrifying than the movies was that it relied on the power of
suggestion… Doors creaking, wings flapping, wild noises in the night—all these, or the simulation
of them, terrified more than the sight of nocturnal denizens creeping up on the hero and heroine
in the movies.”
DZRH, Manila (MBC).
August 18, 1959-ca. 1984.
Ben David (announcer), Froilan M. Villegas (scriptwriter, producer).
CASTS: Jose Chua, Julie Fe Navarro, Mario O’Hara, et al.
Unknown.