Sunday, March 13, 2016

Margot Sings of the Aswang

Hey! Remember when I told you about aswangs in the works of Norman Mailer and Lynda Barry? Go on, "click" on it, it won't kill you. But an aswang will! I was watching THE FORBIDDEN ROOM last night and up popped a title card: "Margot sings of the aswang - the jungle vampire" - and, reader, that's just what she did, that title card wasn't messing around. There's Margot above, singing of the aswang, accompanied by hiccups and seizures, mystical or otherwise. Nor were we done with aswangs after Margot's descriptive song on the habits of aswangs. Just as one example, Margot is later menaced by what I think another title card calls "blackened banana figures." These are talking rotten bananas, or "ASWANG BANANA!" as a third title card shrieks. Doing the bare minimum amount of research on the semi-reliable websites most readily available to us, I see that the aswang does supposedly leave a "banana trunk" in its victim's place... "a banana trunk carved in the cadaver's likeness" elaborates another website, but who's to say which website has the most reliable aswang information? I'll tell you what that reminded me of, though: faerie lore! Like, when the fairies spirit away a human baby and replace it with a block of wood. I remember some scholarly interpretation I read somewhere, something about the block of wood being a psychological representation of the coffin... but I walked all around the house last night and I couldn't figure out which book I was thinking of, I opened a lot of books, it occurs to me I might have too many books of faerie lore.