There's a red house in Pampanga that's the subject of ghostly rumors, and from the start of Haunted: A Last Visit to the Red House, it looks as if we've been thrown into a Koji Shiraishi film or a found footage movie. But the movie eventually shows its true colors - the ghosts in Haunted are the ghosts of the past, and the resulting story is something far more horrifying.
In 1944, the small village of Mapaniqui, Candaba, Pampanga, was raided by the Japanese. The men were tortured and executed, the houses burned, and the women - some even as young as thirteen, were brought to the Red House to be raped. The film cleverly introduces us to these women, now elderly grandmothers, during the "horror" segment.
The Malaya Lolas, an organization of comfort women and other sexual victims of World War II, begin to relate the story of the Rape of Mapaniqui, in heart-wrenching detail. The film explores the creation of the Malaya Lolas, their eventual struggle to get their stories heard and their journey towards reparation and justice. Aside from stories, there are songs of that day, songs that lament their suffering, songs that wish for these atrocities to never happen again.
Another factor to this tale is the fact that as the grandmothers of Mapaniqui grow old and die out, their organization - and their cause - is in danger of dying out as well, doomed to become a mere footnote in history. These stories will disappear unless the story is passed on, unless people never forget. And it's this notion that transforms Haunted into a critique of the documentary form itself as a tool to set memory in stone.
The last part of the film ends with the titular final visit to the Red House, where the original image of the place as a haunted house is recontextualized with what we have just learned. What then follows is a scene where the filmmakers contemplate on what just happened. They wonder about the veracity of the stories they've just heard, and note their repetitiveness. If you've read my previous review of Bundok Banahaw, it's usually wiser to avoid opinion and judgement and let the subjects of the documentary speak for themselves. Thus, this last scene may feel like it is unnecessary and undermines the subject a bit, but it does add a curious metatextual layer to the whole documentary.
Consider this: it's unclear whether the filmmakers were aware or not that they too were complicit in the creation of the repetition that they noted. These women have been visited time and again and were made to relive very painful memories for the sake of keeping these stories alive for the sake of justice. After all, stories told over and over again tend to coalesce, searing themselves in collective memory, so that the shared experience becomes relatively homogenous. If you note the way the documentary was edited, these stories seamlessly edit together, details from ones story flowing into the other, lolas finishing each other's sentences. It's an ordeal they've had to bear the burden of together for decades, a burden they will probably bear until the end of their lives.
To relive a harrowing experience again and again is but one horror; to know that the chance to receive true justice and reparations is fleeting and perhaps unattainable is another. And as time ravages both man and memory, in a dilapidated old house in Pampanga, ghosts both supernatural and of another kind roam free.
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