If you’re anything like me, you spent your childhood glued to the screen when any ghostly horror movie or tv show was on regardless of the massive nightmares that they inevitably caused. I never actually saw The Night of the Living Dead movie but had nightmares about the preview for weeks after seeing it. My love of horror movies was further flamed by The Amityville Horror house being just a ten minute car drive away from where I grew up in Long Island, New York. In short, I grew up with creep all around me and I loved it. But it wasn’t just terrifying horror and ghost stories that kept my attention. I adored the funnier horror moments like in the children’s tv show Scooby-Doo. Except the Scrappy period, of course.
Scooby-Doo was special because it wasn’t just a spooky story where everyone died due to an evil curse or something similar. Scooby-Doo, Shaggy, Fred, Velma, and Daphne were a cohesive group of friends that were super fun to watch. They were, in cartoon form, Friends before the Friends tv show existed, only with a kind of supernatural focus. They solved spooky mysteries, kind of, but I would have watched them do anything or nothing at all: they were that relatable and entertaining. Recently I’ve been enjoying the Hi Nay podcast and the oddest thing started to happen. I found myself humming the Scooby-Doo theme song after I listened to an episode. It surprised me at first because I haven’t watched Scooby-Doo in years. But after thinking about its likeness to Hi Nay, it started to make sense.
Both the Scooby-Doo tv show and Hi Nay podcast have:
But I’m getting ahead of myself. You need to know what Hi Nay is about for this comparison to be fully comprehensible. Hi Nay, which means hi mom in Tagalog, a language spoken in the Philippines, is “a supernatural horror fiction podcast about a Filipina immigrant Mari Datuin, whose babaylan (shaman) family background accidentally gets her involved in stopping dangerous supernatural events in Toronto.” As we learned in a background episode, Mari’s mother and aunt started teaching her their magic skills when she was 7 years old. “I’m human but with extra bits” is how she describes her abilities early on in the story.
Read more: A Case for the Mundane
The Creators of Scooby-Doo were Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, they were working for Hanna-Barbera in the 1960’s but from different locations. And that’s how they met. Similarly, the Hi Nay Creators are also in different locations now but they grew up together in the Philippines. Motzie Dapul is a queer Writer, Artist, and Animator and Reg Geli is a Medical Student. Motzie, like the Hi Nay main character Mari, moved to Canada but kept strong ties with her Filipino roots. In fact, Motzie moved to Toronto at the end of August 2018. A fun fact is that even though Joe and Ken started Scooby-Doo, they only worked on it for the original 25 episodes but the Hi Nay podcast is already on episode 16 with the end nowhere in sight.
But that’s where the comparison ends because now we’re going to focus on a few of Motzie and Reg’s favorite supernatural moments in Hi Nay. It’s important to note that there are two spooky places often referenced in the podcast: Toronto, Canada and various locations in the Philippines. There is a very special episode of Hi Nay that takes place at the University of Toronto where the character Evelyn encounters more than she expected. And although this side of Hi Nay is very interesting, we’re instead going to focus exclusively on the Filipino cultural moments from the podcast. Even so, you should check out University of Toronto haunting websites, like this one. They’re creepy!
(Editor’s note: The following segments contain horror media appropriate spooky scary topics. Tread with caution! Specific content warning for infanticide in the first segment.)
I had the pleasure of chatting with Motzie and Reg about some of their favorite supernatural moments from the podcast recently and am delighted to share these moments with you.
“Anytime there’s an opportunity to reference something from our own culture, even in like a tiny little way, we always take the opportunity for that.” Reg admits. And this is apparent in her favorite supernatural episode, episode 3. In this episode Mari rescues her neighbor Laura from a time loop. During this adventure, Mari is reminded of Tiktik.
“Back home, there’s a thing, a creature. It makes this creepy ticking noise. When it’s far away it’s louder but when it’s closer, it gets real quiet. Also, it eats small animals and has a thin, long tongue.” Mari explains to Laura when they were debating what the ticking sound in the room they were in was.
Tiktik is also known for hunting down and eating unborn babies. “We have a lot of monsters that like unborn babies.” Reg added. A quick Google search reveals creatures such as Mananangga, Aswang and Tiyanak (that eat newborn babies not fetuses, but still). Reg goes on, “but tiktik is different because of the sound thing.” Contrary to normal sound behavior, Tiktik’s back of the throat clicking sound gets quieter as it gets closer, not louder. Motzie chimed in, adding that “it’s popular because in the mountains, sound is odd. Sound is a little weird depending on where you are.” This legend probably originated in a mountainous area where sound seems to play tricks on the local population. They shared that Tiktik is a popular tale that’s told to children to scare them into going to sleep. It sounded like the Bogeyman to me. But Reg and Motzie grew up in a city of 3 million people on the Guadalupe Plateau, just northeast of Manila, where sound behaved itself. Needless to say, they weren’t scared by the Tiktik story, they just thought it was cool.
Episode 3 is special for Reg because Motzie and her not only drew from their own experiences but also from Filipino folklore to connect the character Mari to a supernatural memory from home in a time of crisis. I can’t reveal if the ticking in that room with Mari and Laura was Tiktik or something else because that would ruin the fun of you listening to it! But this Mari reflecting on the Tiktik legend during this stressful moment made me think about how we cope with stress. Sometimes familiar things from home help us feel better, safer, etc, even if they’re scary things in and of themselves. And there’s no quicker way to reflect and learn more about your own culture than to share it with others so I understand exactly what Reg is saying here. In that episode Mari mentioned that she sensed that “something bigger was at play” than just one ghostly or supernatural encounter.
And this was an understatement!
The outward and inward horror story layers are complex. Inwardly, early in the episode Mari calls her mom and talks about her homesickness. Outwardly Mari and Laura encounter not one but two ghosts when they wrestle with a time loop. Impactful supernatural stories often have this internal/external conflict to connect us to the other worlds explored in them. And the possibility that Tiktik’s clicking sound is, as Reg put it, “messing with you because what you think it’s farther away, it’s actually very close by” fits this horror story criteria perfectly.Yet in some wa, I lost track, is she talking about Tiktik’s sound or Mari’s identity struggles?
If Tiktik’s story is up your alley, then you’ll want to dive into episode 13.5 also. This is where Mari shares the experiences of her cousin Nia and her fiancé Nigel when they went back to the Philippines to take care of Nia’s mother’s home while she cared for her ailing grandmother. Just don’t, you know, listen with the lights off.
The painting dripping madness of Hi Nay’s episode 6, Larawan (Portrait), is one of Motzie’s favorite supernatural episodes of Hi Nay. They wanted to do something different for this episode, so they incorporated the languages of the Philippines in a really interesting way. Motzie asked many people who could speak different Filipino languages to translate a chant that she had written down in English.There are over 165 Filipino languages, not dialects, but actual languages there, so she had quite a few to choose from for this task!
To set the scene of when Mari, the Babaylan (shaman) main character, had to use this chant/spell, it’s important to know that after Mari rescued Laura in episode 3, they became friends. Laura loved shopping for items in antique stores in Toronto because the city’s long and complicated past bled over into its artifacts. This excited Laura’s adventurous side. And after Laura learned about Mari’s abilities, she invited Mari along often. While shopping in one of these types of shops, they came across a ring that was not activated yet. Mari secured the ring but then had to “use it” (and the spirit in it) when they were then attacked by a, let’s call them a person in a painting in the same store. That’s when Mari uses the chant.
Motzie and Reg decided to combine different parts of the chant as one language, and other parts as other languages. “If you asked any single Filipino what it meant, it’s highly doubtful that they would know,” Motzie admitted. And that point, that Mari is channeling her culture and her people during many dangerous moments in the Hi Nay story, is a beautiful thread that runs throughout. The community aspect of Hi Nay is not just in the gang of spooky investigators but in Mari’s larger cultural community as well. Mari even tells Detective Donner at one point that she realized early on that she could not fight off these demons on her own. She had to call in backup. And this back up are her ancestors, gods, and so on from her Filipino family, culture and connections. In essence, the combined languages of Mari’s culture created a protective shield for her new friend family.
There are other ways that language is skillfully added to Hi Nay. One of the most obvious but easily overlooked ways are the episode names. They are all in Tagalog, with an English translation after them. WIth other podcasts I usually read episode titles and then quickly forget them once I start listening. But with Hi Nay, I pay more attention to them because they share not just a hint as to what will happen in the story but because the words used give a language feel for the episode. The sounds of the Tagalog words said at the beginning of the episode add to the atmosphere of that part of the story. It’s an auditory moment of Filipino culture at the very beginning of the episode. The sound of a language is powerful and I feel like these moments are very strategically placed, similar to setting an elegant dinner table before an important meal. Here are a few episode titles for the first few episodes to give you a nibble:
Episode 1: Bulok (Rot)
Episode 2: Ginaw (Cold)
Episode 3: Oras (Time)
Episode 4: Multo (Apparation)
It’s also worth mentioning that this episode has a fan favorite scene where Detective Murphy and Ashvin, an “Indian”guru (who’s really from Mauritius) meet in person for the first time in a bar and flirt extravagantly.
These are but two moments in this delicate and heart warming yet sometimes scary tale. I’ve listened to all 16 episodes twice now and can safely say that there are many more cultural moments carefully placed into the podcast. I’d like to leave you with one more such moment, if I may.
While I was writing this piece I started to wonder about the intro music to the podcast. It’s a short, one instrument clip that hints at contemplation and groundedness. I began to think that this music might be from the Philippines as well, so I emailed Motzie and asked. Spoiler: it is.
Motzie and Reg commissioned Monching Carpio, a well-respected classical guitarist from the Philippines, to write the intro and outro music for Hi Nay. “It was the first bit of money we spent on the podcast other than the Podbean subscription.” Motzie admitted. She also mentioned that the song is a folk song called “ili-ili tulog anay”, a Bisaya lullaby about a mother being away. Monchng did the opening on a kalimba and the ending on guitar.
This attention to detail is a large reason why Hi Nay is an amazing supernatural story/podcast that you need to add to your cue immediately.
Motzie and Reg also were kind enough to recommend other Filipino supernatural podcasts, movies, etc for you.
Happy Halloween!
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