'KMJS: Gabi ng Lagim The Movie' aims to highlight social realities beyond the scares

Jessica Soho is not a fan of the horror genre, so “KMJS: Gabi ng Lagim The Movie” is actually the Kapuso journalist’s “love letter” to her KMJS staff. “My staff likes horror, so we do this every year on TV,” she said at the film’s Cebu press conference at SM Seaside, where Kapuso actors Miguel Tanfelix and Sanya Lopez joined her for the movie’s promotional stop in Cebu.

- By JANUAR JUNIOR AGUJA

“Gabi ng Lagim” has been a Halloween staple on Philippine television for a decade, debuting on Soho’s weekly magazine program in 2013, the show’s ninth year on the air on GMA Network.

According to Soho, the idea to adapt their popular TV special into a feature film came around in 2022. While she believes that a good story transcends platforms, creating a “Gabi ng Lagim” film for the big screen comes with its advantages.

“As a storyteller, it doesn’t matter which screen we are watching because it’s about the strength of your story,” she said. “But when you go inside that dark movie theater, and then top it with a sensory feeling from the speakers, it’s a different experience. That’s what makes this movie so special because on TV, you have a bit of detachment with our phones. But inside the cinema, you are immersed.”

As done annually, the KMJS team selected three stories from thousands of real-life horror accounts submitted by viewers. But for the movie, one key factor was that these stories needed to be worthy of a big-screen treatment.

The film’s first episode, “Pocong,” stars Miguel Tanfelix as Mark, an OFW seaman haunted by a disturbing ghostly figure aboard the ship where he works. A pocong is based on the Indonesian and Malaysian myth of a ghost wrapped in a burial shroud, trapped in the afterlife because its shroud was not properly untied after death.