The Film That Appeared Before I Had Time to Expect It
I found Shake, Rattle & Roll: Evil Origins in the least mysterious way possible. It appeared on my Netflix “Coming Next Week” list, sat there looking vaguely promising, and then arrived today. There was no long wait, no accumulated buzz and no childhood attachment pulling me towards it. Netflix put it in front of me, I had the time, and so I watched it.
This is how a lot of films enter our lives now. Not through posters outside cinemas, newspaper adverts, television trailers or somebody passing around a worn disc. They appear in a horizontal row beneath something else we have just watched. The algorithm clears its throat. Here is another one.
The film had already lived a fuller public life before reaching me. It opened in Philippine cinemas on 25 December 2025 as part of the 51st Metro Manila Film Festival, then arrived digitally on Netflix in the Philippines on 30 July 2026. It runs for 148 minutes, though there were stretches when clocks seemed to have become unreliable. Netflix describes it as three fights for survival across three timelines: 1775, 2025 and 2050.
That three-period structure was the main thing that kept me watching. Not necessarily because each part worked, but because I could sense a larger design waiting to reveal itself. An intricately carved box arrives in colonial-era Philippines. An evil called Malum escapes. Two and a half centuries later, a Halloween party becomes a cult ritual. Twenty-five years after that, the Philippines has become an aswang-infested wasteland.
In not so many words.
The trouble is that the film uses rather a lot of words, pauses, reaction shots, corridor walks, ominous silences and slowly approaching figures to get there.
An Anthology Trying to Become One Long Story
Evil Origins is the seventeenth film in the Shake, Rattle & Roll series, a Filipino horror institution that began in 1984. The original film offered three separate stories — “Baso”, “Pridyider” and “Manananggal” — and established the anthology format that became the franchise’s identity. Regal Entertainment produced the later instalments, using the series to move between urban legends, domestic hauntings, supernatural creatures and Filipino folklore.
This time, Regal wanted the three stories to be fully connected rather than simply sharing a title and a general interest in making people nervous. The concept came before the individual screenplays. Producers Roselle Monteverde and Keith Monteverde Teo have explained that the starting point was the idea of past, present and future, with the creative team working out how elements planted in one era could survive into the next. Shugo Praico directed “1775”, Joey de Guzman handled “2025”, and Ian Loreños took on “2050”.
It is a sensible way to distinguish the seventeenth entry from the sixteen before it. At this stage, simply producing three more unrelated monster stories would risk feeling like an annual filing obligation. A single evil moving through history gives Evil Origins the possibility of cumulative dread. The box is opened in 1775, the consequences widen in 2025, and by 2050 the country itself has become the aftermath.
On paper, this is the strongest idea in the film.
On screen, the connection often feels less like a chain tightening and more like three separate productions discovering they have been tied together with the same piece of rope.
The directors give each section a recognisably different genre. “1775” is religious period horror. “2025” becomes a Halloween slasher with rave lighting and cult imagery. “2050” shifts again into post-apocalyptic action, with monster hunters, barricaded communities and recognisable pieces of Metro Manila left to rust.
The variety should keep the film alive. Instead, the changes in genre sometimes make the larger story feel even less stable. Every time the film finds a rhythm, it replaces the entire instrument.
1775: A Convent, a Chest and a Great Deal of Waiting
The first segment takes place in a beaterio during the Spanish colonial period. A shipment recovered from a sunken galleon includes an elaborate wooden chest, part of a haul brought from Mexico. The box is taken into the convent, where somebody inevitably opens it.
One does not put a heavily carved, obviously sinister chest in a horror film because it contains spare candles.
The galleon detail gives the story more historical texture than the film fully explores. The Manila–Acapulco trade connected the Philippines and Mexico from 1565 until 1815, moving goods, silver, plants, beliefs and people across the Pacific. In 1775, such a shipment would still have belonged to a functioning colonial network rather than being a random bit of Gothic decoration.
There is an interesting horror story hidden in that history: evil travelling inside colonial commerce, arriving among religious wealth, passing from one empire-controlled territory to another and finally being locked inside a place supposedly devoted to spiritual safety. The chest could be more than a prop. It could represent the things institutions acquire, conceal and refuse to examine.
The film does not push the idea very far. The box mainly exists because Malum needs somewhere to wait.
Carla Abellana plays Madre Clara, a nun troubled by prophetic visions. Loisa Andalio is Flor, Clara’s younger sister, who has fled an abusive home and a forbidden relationship. Janice de Belen plays Madre Juana, the convent’s severe Mother Superior. The ensemble also includes Ysabel Ortega as Rita, Ashley Ortega as Salve, Elijah Alejo as Ana, Arlene Muhlach as the compassionate Madre Josefa and Ara Mina as Madre Piedad, whose lingering attachment to wealth and beauty makes her vulnerable.
The structure suggests that Malum attacks through buried desires, guilt and resentment. Each nun carries some combination of shame, longing, vanity, obedience or fear. Their religious discipline has not removed these feelings; it has merely given them quieter rooms in which to hide.
That is fertile territory. Convent horror works because it places the supernatural inside an institution already organised around unseen powers, bodily restraint, confession and punishment. Corridors become channels of surveillance. Habits erase individuality. Silence can mean devotion, fear or enforced submission. The line between a vision and a temptation becomes dangerously thin.
Visually, “1775” makes an effort. The location has weight. Candlelight catches old walls and dark timber. The carved chest looks like an object that has crossed oceans and outlived several owners. The production searched for a structure that could plausibly stand in for an eighteenth-century beaterio, eventually finding a southern location and digitally removing modern features.
I can see the work.
Unfortunately, I can also feel every minute.
The pacing is glacial. Shots begin after their purpose is already clear and continue after the information has been absorbed. A figure approaches. The camera waits. Someone looks towards a doorway. The camera waits. Somebody hears something. The film waits on their behalf.
Slow horror is not automatically dull. Some of the most effective horror films are built from patience, empty space and the refusal to hurry. But slowness needs pressure. Every pause should tighten something. Here, the pauses often feel like missing edits.
Rather than wondering what may emerge from the darkness, I found myself wondering when the next scene would begin.
The performers are also asked to carry characters who have been outlined rather than properly developed. Clara’s visions give Carla Abellana the clearest dramatic function, and she brings a steady seriousness to the role. Janice de Belen has the authority required of Madre Juana, while Loisa Andalio gives Flor a useful emotional directness. But the script introduces the nuns’ wounds too briefly for their deaths to register as tragic. They become embodiments of temptation and punishment before they have had time to become people.
The segment has atmosphere, but atmosphere without progression eventually becomes interior decoration.
Malum Leaves the Box, but Not Much of an Impression
The evil inside the chest is called Malum, a name that sounds less like an individual creature than a label printed on a folder marked “Demonic Business”. He is the thread connecting all three periods, but the film keeps him vague for so long that vagueness starts to resemble absence.
The problem is not that Malum requires a detailed biography. Horror frequently improves when origins remain uncertain. Explaining exactly where every demon was born, what it ate as a child and why it chose a particular carved container can reduce dread to administration.
But an unknowable evil still needs presence.
Malum rarely seems to bend the film around himself. He does not accumulate a mythology through repeated signs, rituals, sounds or images. The chest recurs. The killings recur. His followers eventually recur. Yet the entity at the centre feels oddly interchangeable, as though another demon could have taken over between sections and few people would notice.
The first chapter is supposed to establish an origin, but what it really establishes is an incident. Box arrives. Box opens. Evil gets out.
History then does the heavy lifting.
2025: Halloween in the Underground
The second section moves into the present, where a Halloween event called Hellclipse is held inside an underground club or bunker. A large group of young people arrive in costume, carrying rivalries, romantic tensions, social divisions and personal schemes.
Faye, played by Francine Diaz, is the daughter of struggling caterers Malena and Bano. Her college plans have been delayed by money problems, and she enters the party with her adoptive sibling Sky, played by Sassa Gurl, hoping to steal from wealthier guests. Seth Fedelin plays Sean, the governor’s illegitimate son, while JM Ibarra is James, a bullied student with an interest in anime, manga and games. Fyang Smith plays DJ Elle, responsible for the music. Karina Bautista’s Callie arrives with a fascination for the supernatural that becomes considerably less casual as the night develops.
Hellclipse turns out not to be merely an ambitious Halloween party. Cult members are using it as part of a ritual to revive their master, who is naturally Malum. The costumed spectacle becomes a killing floor. Figures who initially look like performers or themed security reveal themselves as attackers. The guests are trapped below ground, the music continues, blood begins to spread and the film shifts towards slasher territory.
Of the three sections, this is the one with the most immediate energy. It has lights, bodies, noise, costumes, movement and a reason for people to panic in groups. The underground setting also gives the segment an appropriately sealed quality. Once the exits close, the party becomes a brightly lit tomb.
Regal created a concert hall for the sequence, transforming a school with clean white walls into a darker and rougher bunker. The filmmakers have also stressed their preference for physical blood, prosthetics and practical creature work rather than relying entirely on digital effects.
The work is visible here too. There are moments when the coloured lights, masked attackers and crowded corridors produce the lurid pleasure the film has been promising. The practical gore gives several deaths a heavier, stickier presence than polished digital splashes would have done. Sassa Gurl brings some welcome comic movement, and Karina Bautista gives Callie a sharper edge than many of the surrounding characters.
But the segment remains longer than its dramatic material. It repeatedly confuses repetition with escalation. People run, hide, regroup and discover another part of the same trap. Slow-motion bloodshed interrupts momentum rather than intensifying it. Reaction shots hang around as though waiting for applause.
The music, which should drive the section, often becomes noise laid over action rather than part of its rhythm. A club massacre needs choreography: lights, cuts, bass and movement should lock together. Here they sometimes seem to be working from adjacent rooms.
The younger cast are given clear labels — thief, rich boy, bullied gamer, DJ, loyal friend, supernatural enthusiast — but not enough time to move beyond them, despite the segment’s length. The paradox of Evil Origins is that it is almost two and a half hours long yet repeatedly feels as if it has skipped the scenes that would make its characters matter.
By the end of “2025”, the ritual has produced something much larger than one night’s massacre. Malum’s return leads to the Hellclipse: an apocalyptic spread of monstrous violence that will reshape the next twenty-five years.
The film wants the transition to feel enormous.
It lands more like the end-of-level screen before another game loads.
2050: Lara Croft in the Aswang Wasteland
The final section arrives in 2050, where the Philippines has become a decaying battleground ruled by Malum and his aswang forces. Metro Manila is emptied out. Bridges, factories, transport systems and other pieces of ordinary urban life remain as abandoned shells. Human survivors live in defended communities and organise hunting parties against the creatures outside.
Richard Gutierrez plays Rosdan, an orphan raised by Malena who has become the leader of one such community. Dustin Yu is his younger brother Riel, Matt Lozano plays Rosdan’s right-hand man Dong, and Celyn David is Dong’s sister Drea. Manilyn Reynes returns as the older Malena, providing one of the film’s clearest human bridges between 2025 and 2050. Ivana Alawi plays Edris, a determined fighter investigating what happened during the Hellclipse and searching for survivors whose blood may provide the key to destroying Malum.
Edris enters dressed like somebody has rebuilt Lara Croft from a damaged hard drive: fitted survival gear, weapons, determined expression and surprisingly manageable hair for a world overrun by flying predators.
Ivana Alawi certainly looks the part. She carries herself with enough confidence to make Edris credible as a survivor, even when the costume seems designed more for a promotional poster than a wasteland. Richard Gutierrez has the calm physical authority expected of Rosdan, and Dustin Yu brings useful urgency to Riel.
The visual ambition is clearest in this section. The filmmakers used an abandoned factory complex and deliberately opened the spaces out after the claustrophobia of the convent and bunker. The ruined city, decomposing infrastructure and practical aswang prosthetics are intended to show a Philippines in which industry and commercial life have become useless remnants.
Some images work. Empty Metro Manila is unsettling simply because the real city is so rarely empty. The sight of familiar structures stripped of traffic, advertising and human noise creates a specific local unease. The best production-design decisions are not the largest monsters but the ordinary things left behind.
The creatures themselves are energetic, quick and physically present. The University of the Philippines describes the aswang in folklore as a feared shapeshifter that may appear human by day and become a grotesque predator at night. Evil Origins turns that broad folk category into an apocalyptic horde.
That should distinguish the film from imported zombie fiction.
Instead, the aswang often behave and are photographed like upgraded zombies. They charge in groups, overrun settlements and occupy the narrative space usually filled by infected mobs. Calling the event an aswang apocalypse is a good local reframing, but the film’s imagery frequently defaults to The Walking Dead, Resident Evil, The Last of Us and assorted post-apocalyptic video-game cutscenes.
The world looks borrowed before it looks lived in.
Costumes are too clean. Characters who have supposedly survived decades of monster rule still appear carefully styled. The weapons, barricades and community spaces often have the feeling of props placed for a scene rather than objects repaired and reused over many years. The production sometimes resembles an ambitious fan film with access to recognisable actors and several good prosthetic artists.
That sounds harsher than I intend, because I can see the effort. But effort and conviction are not the same as finish.
Old Faces, New Blood and Characters Who Needed More Room
The casting is designed as a celebration of the franchise’s history. Janice de Belen and Manilyn Reynes appeared in Shake, Rattle & Roll II in 1990, with Reynes starring in the much-remembered “Aswang” segment. Carla Abellana and Ara Mina had also appeared in previous entries. They are placed alongside younger stars from current television, cinema and reality-show culture.
There is genuine cultural logic in this. Shake, Rattle & Roll has survived long enough for one generation’s frightened young performers to become another generation’s authority figures, mothers and keepers of memory. The cast itself carries time.
Manilyn Reynes is the most important piece of that arrangement because Malena survives across periods. She begins in the chaos of 2025 and becomes part of the 2050 community’s living history. Her presence suggests a stronger film in which trauma, ageing and memory are the real connective tissue.
Instead, the screenplay mainly uses her as confirmation that the timelines join.
Carla Abellana gives “1775” its most stable centre, although Madre Clara’s visions never become as psychologically rich as they might. Janice de Belen has an instinctive command of religious severity. Sassa Gurl provides badly needed elasticity in “2025”, while Karina Bautista makes Callie’s supernatural enthusiasm feel genuinely unsettling.
Francine Diaz and Seth Fedelin handle the more conventional young-lead material competently, as do JM Ibarra and Fyang Smith. The film gives them enough individual traits to be recognisable in a crowded room but not enough interior life for the relationships to deepen. Richard Gutierrez and Ivana Alawi make effective visual anchors for the final act, though their characters are closer to action figures than complicated survivors.
It is not a problem of weak casting. It is a film full of performers waiting for better scenes.
Production Design: The Effort Is There, Which Makes the Problems Stranger
The production background complicates the easy accusation that nobody tried.
The team built substantial sets, searched widely for the “1775” location, transformed a school into the Hellclipse bunker, used an abandoned industrial complex for “2050”, and invested in prosthetics that sometimes required actors to spend hours in make-up. Producers publicly encouraged the directors to think at a larger scale rather than trimming their ideas before production began.
The film also won Best Visual Effects at the 51st Metro Manila Film Festival, while receiving nominations in cinematography, production design, sound, musical score and original theme song.
There are individual shots that justify the attention. The carved box has texture. The convent possesses real depth. The underground club uses colour aggressively. The empty city contains a few memorable widescreen images. Several aswang faces benefit from being physically present under the lighting rather than floating above the actors.
Yet the overall production often feels oddly amateur. Blocking can be stiff. Extras do not always seem to inhabit the same emergency as the leads. Compositions linger beyond their useful life. Some effects sit awkwardly against the live action. Costumes announce character types instead of suggesting lives.
The film is ambitious in pieces but rarely seamless.
As a former art director and designer, I tend to notice when an image has all its intended components but the hierarchy is wrong. The objects are there. The colour palette is there. The faces are there. The effect is technically complete. But the eye does not know where to settle, or the shot does not know when it has finished communicating.
That is how much of Evil Origins feels. Designed, but not always directed towards a clear point.
A Musical Score Fighting Three Different Films
The credited composers are Mikhail Ali Hooshmand, Paulo Almaden and Jose Antonio Buencamino. The production received an MMFF nomination for its musical score, while the songs “Balak sa Dilim” and “Dugo” were among its original-theme-song entries.
The music has three separate jobs. It must create religious dread in 1775, nightclub energy in 2025 and action momentum in 2050. That is a considerable tonal spread.
There are moments when the score gives the film shape, particularly when low tones settle under the convent imagery or the club bass becomes part of the threat. But it also has to compensate for scenes whose editing has not created enough pressure. Music cannot turn every long look into suspense.
The 2025 section is the missed opportunity. A ritual concealed inside a rave offers a natural merging of diegetic music and horror scoring. The beat could gradually reveal itself as an incantation. Lighting cues could synchronise with the cult’s movements. The party could become a machine that the guests realise too late they have entered.
The ingredients are present, but the sequence rarely becomes that precise.
Filipino Horror Wearing Imported Clothes
The most culturally interesting thing about Evil Origins is its movement from colonial Catholic horror to contemporary cult violence and finally to an aswang apocalypse.
That progression contains an argument, whether or not the film fully understands it. Evil enters through colonial trade and religious authority. It returns through spectacle, privilege and mass entertainment. It ends by consuming the infrastructure of modern life.
The convent, club and wasteland are three different systems of control.
In 1775, the characters live under religion, class and colonial power. In 2025, they live under money, social status and performance. By 2050, those systems have collapsed, leaving brute survival and inherited consequences. Each generation receives something the previous one failed to contain.
This is stronger than the film’s explicit mythology.
It also fits the larger Shake, Rattle & Roll tradition. The franchise has always been able to place Filipino anxieties inside familiar spaces: houses, schools, kitchens, provincial roads, televisions, shopping centres and family gatherings. Its monsters work best when they intrude on daily life rather than existing in abstract fantasy worlds.
Evil Origins moves in the opposite direction. Its settings are deliberately heightened: an isolated colonial convent, a vast underground Halloween event and a fully collapsed future. The scale increases, but recognisable life decreases.
The further it travels into its connected mythology, the less specifically Filipino it sometimes feels. The aswang become zombie substitutes. Malum resembles a composite of Western screen demons. Edris arrives through Tomb Raider imagery. The wasteland looks assembled from internationally familiar apocalypse parts.
There is nothing wrong with influence. Filipino horror has never existed in isolation, and the galleon chest itself is an image of cultures and objects moving across borders. But borrowing works best when the material is transformed by local experience.
Here, the local mythology is sometimes merely relabelled.
The Ending Connects the Plot but Not the Experience
By 2050, the film finally explains how much of what we have watched fits together.
Malum escaped from the chest in 1775. The Hellclipse ritual in 2025 restored his power and unleashed the wider catastrophe. Some of the dead from the party return among his creatures. Malena survives into the future. Edris searches for people connected to the massacre because survivor blood may be the weapon capable of ending Malum.
The links are there.
The difficulty is that most of them become clear only after the film has asked us to sit through long sections without a strong sense of what is accumulating. Watching “1775” on its own, I did not feel the shape of a 275-year story beginning. I felt a convent episode ending. The second part expands the incident, but the final section still has to perform a great deal of retrospective stitching.
A connection revealed late can be satisfying when it changes our understanding of earlier scenes. Here, it mostly confirms that the three titles were not decorative.
The eventual confrontation with Malum is also too easy relative to the size of the apocalypse. This creature has survived centuries, built a cult, destroyed civilisation and commanded an army of aswang, yet his defeat lacks the weight of a force that has shaped generations. The blood solution functions as plot mechanics, but not as an emotional culmination.
The film has spent nearly two and a half hours preparing a final battle that feels shorter than several corridor walks.
There is also an awkward imbalance in the ending’s attention. The film uses characters from 2025 as historical evidence, then moves quickly past the human cost of what happened to them. The 2050 survivors inherit a catastrophe, but we do not feel twenty-five years of survival in their bodies, relationships or environment.
The ending closes the circle.
It does not make the circle feel inevitable.
What Worked, and What Kept Me Looking at the Time
I do not think Shake, Rattle & Roll: Evil Origins is careless. Careless films rarely contain this much visible labour.
The three-era concept is worthwhile. The decision to connect the anthology is at least an attempt to move the franchise somewhere new. The production design has moments of real scale. The practical make-up gives the creatures texture. Carla Abellana, Janice de Belen, Manilyn Reynes, Sassa Gurl and Karina Bautista each find something useful inside characters that could have used more development. The empty-Manila imagery is more effective than the generic post-apocalyptic action surrounding it.
The carved chest is a strong central object. It crosses oceans, institutions and centuries. It belongs in this franchise.
But the film needs a ruthless edit.
Nearly every section could lose material without losing meaning. “1775” should tighten its silences and deepen two or three relationships rather than briefly sketching an entire convent. “2025” should turn the party into one escalating mechanism instead of a series of chases and pauses. “2050” should spend less time imitating apocalypse imagery and more time showing what twenty-five years of this particular Filipino catastrophe has done to people.
The glacial pacing is not a minor irritation. It changes the experience of the horror. Instead of feeling trapped with the characters, I felt trapped behind the editing.
Tension asks us to stay because something may happen.
This film often asks us to stay because the next shot has not arrived yet.
The Box Closes, Eventually
I watched Shake, Rattle & Roll: Evil Origins because Netflix told me it was coming next week, and then told me it was here. No nostalgia was required. No cinema crowd shouted around me. I saw it at home, where a pause button is always nearby and patience is less communal.
Perhaps the film played differently during the Metro Manila Film Festival, surrounded by people laughing, shouting and reacting to every kill. The producers clearly designed parts of it for that shared experience. On Netflix, the spaces between those reactions remain empty.
What remains is an ambitious horror anthology that wants to become a generational epic but does not have the narrative pressure to support its length. It travels from 1775 to 2050, from religious repression to cult spectacle to aswang wasteland. It shows me the box, the party, the bloodline and the apocalypse.
I can see how everything connects.
I just wish it had got there sooner.
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