(An Exclusive Interview with Enrico Santos)
The former vice president for ABS-CBN Films for new media, concept development and production, also a filmmaker Enrico Santos revealed some stuff about the upcoming Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF) 2023 entry–MALLARI.
Mentorque Productions, in cooperation with Clever Minds Inc.–the creators of the horror and suspense-thriller Mallari made history as the first Filipino film distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.
Santos and the director of Mallari, Derick Cabrido have worked on several projects together like Clarita (2019), U-Turn (2020), Wish You Were the One (2023), and Deadly Love, a TV mini-series (2023); before they collaborated on the MMFF entry.
Santos revealed that the idea of Mallari germinated in 2018 after he and Cabrido did Clarita.
“We enjoyed true-to-life stories so much that we decided to go for Mallari, a story we often heard.
“For our early research, we sourced Kapampangam history books, and connected with regional historians. When we found a producer for it, our research intensified. I even asked friends in Madrid to countercheck if the court case of Mallari was real.
“We even got copies of Mallari’s calligraphy. His hobby was calligraphy, which we showed in the film.”
To further establish their story on Mallari, the true story of Fr. Juan Severino Mallari, Santos and Cabrido went to Magalang Pampanga, now partly in Concepcion Tarlac, to see the place for themselves.
“Our guides were two Kapampangan historians, Professor Bartolo of the local academe and Professor Dizon of the National Historical Commission (NHC). We [actually] stepped on the land where the Severino church used to stand.
“It is now an idle field with mango trees. The last people who dug it got blisters on their hands. Di na namin ginalaw. Also, may kapre daw.”
They also visited Baleng Melacuan, better known as the Forsaken Land (the hometown).
“We saw for ourselves the original San Bartolome of Severino era. The one we used in the movie is a fiberglass version, not based on Magalang, but on Bartholomew in Vatican.
“We collected all possible related stories and built our movie from there.”
Mallari is a partly fictional, partly true-to-life account inspired by the true story of Fr. Mallari, a parish priest in the 1800s who killed 57 people before being caught, thereby becoming the first and only recorded Filipino serial killer ever, antedating Jack The Ripper by more than 60 years.
When asked (as creators of the film) why they opted to do a half-fictional and half-factual story, Santos stressed, “There is no other way but to partly fictionalize because there is simply no existing details to go with.
“We cannot even find the name of Severino’s mother, but we do know from his confession that he believes his mother has been cursed o nakulangan o namatanda so he killed her as barter for her life.
“From there, we built a supernatural explanation. As for the 1946 and 2023 Mallaris, wala kasing direct descendant kasi pari–so the story had to be created. The final product–consolidates the Mallari story with myths and legends from Luzon, Bicol, and Iloilo.
“It is actually a combination of both—horror and mystery suspence thriller. Filipinos love horror stories, so it is the ‘clickbait’ to a deeper and richer cinematic experience. It is simply more fun to explain what Mallari did in supernatural terms than in plain psycho terms. No one knows what happened anyway.”
“But of course, I tried to go beyond entertainment. Sa mahal ng tickets, Syempre sulit dapat. So there are the trappings of horror and mystery suspense thriller, but the core is love.
“Yes, it is in its heart a tragedy of love: Severino’s love for his dying mother, Johnrey 1946 love for his pregnant wife, Jonathan 2023 love for his girlfriend. So the last line of the trailer is right—love is the greatest curse. Sabi ko nga sa team, my thesis for the movie is: love is the greatest horror.”
Mallari stars the Philippines’ ultimate heartthrob Piolo Pascual as Fr. Juan Severino Mallari, the first Filipino priest executed by the Spanish colonial government since the execution of the GomBurZa (Fr. Gomez, Fr. Burgos, and Fr. Zamora) took place only 32 years later, in 1872.
The film takes pride in its high-quality production and high-caliber team, which earned the nod of Warner Bros. and promises to be the scariest movie this Christmas season during the nationwide MMFF 2023 run in cinemas starting December 25.
Apart from Pascual, the cast includes Janella Salvador, JC Santos, Elisse Joson, Gloria Diaz, Ron Angeles, Tommy Alejandrino, and many more.
