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[REVIEW] “Conan, A Barbarian: Inside Bulong, the Filipino Obsession” by William Carlo Antonio Sanchez

❀ Chito S. Roño (director). Bulong, 2011. 105 min.
❀ Curry Barker (director). Obsession, 2025. 100 min.

Curry Barker’s Obsession is a hit, to say the least. Almost half a billion in profit on a budget of less than a million dollars? Not to mention a cast and crew on their way to even bigger things? Safe to say, the world is obsessed with Obsession.

That said, Philippine cinema had its own go at the whole “innocent young woman gladly living her own life until a loser male casts a cursed love spell on her” narrative over a decade earlier, in fact.

Released in 2011, Chito S. Roño’s Bulong (“Whisper”) is a surprisingly rarely discussed Filipino horror film. Well, not exactly. It’s a horror comedy, which means it has all the slapstick shticks of your average Filipino blockbuster comedy. The film follows Conan, a nurse desperate to win the affections of his colleague, Ellen. So naturally, we first follow Conan letting patients in wheelchairs fall down the stairs, with knives casually being pulled during screaming matches in the emergency ward. Slapstick comedy is not for everyone. However, Bulong is a horror-comedy film designed to entertain, and it does exactly that. When Conan whispers into the ear of a fresh corpse on the slab (and the corpse jolts awake!), you can practically hear the laughter inside Filipino cinemas even all these years later.

The film’s premise is built on the folk incantation of the same name: whisper your greatest wish to a recently deceased person, and their spirit will have to fulfil it if they want to cross over to the other side. After Conan’s first attempts at the incantation fail (one corpse turns out to be alive, and the other deaf), he witnesses an old woman die violently in a hit-and-run, then wishes for Ellen’s love over her still-bleeding corpse. Both Bulong and Obsession open with awkward young men who win over their unrequited loves through the forbidden power of magic. Both films follow these selfish young men as they try to reverse their respective spells, but only after the spells cause them physical harm, as though the young women being stripped of their autonomy were not enough cause for alarm.

Obsession maximises the disturbing implications of its premise to deliver chilling and grotesque scenes from the end of the first act to the finish. There are some special effects, certainly, but the film mostly engages you through lighting (or the intentional lack thereof in select scenes), practical effects, and effective framing. Bulong, by contrast, suffers from poor monster effects in its opening and especially its climax, and instead relies on humorous dialogue and set-ups to carry you from scene to scene.

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The biggest problem with Bulong is the overcomplication of its plot. Without spoiling much, it turns out that the old woman to whom Conan whispered his wish just so happened to be some form of witch, who just so happened to have had a client before dying, who just so happened to curse someone this so-called witch knew, and this so-called cursed person just so happens to be pregnant and in an entirely different province, conveniently justifying a sudden change of scenery by the final act. In just a few scenes, Conan’s attempt to undo his love spell on Ellen becomes a cross-country race against time to save the unborn grandchild of a literal witch from the literal devil, who looks like a literal centipede for some reason. Bulong could easily have benefited from a tighter script that removed the overtly supernatural elements, thereby mitigating its technical weaknesses.

Bulong is a time capsule of the maximalist plots and wonky effects of some early-2010s Filipino blockbusters. It is a worthwhile watch nonetheless, one to learn from both technically and culturally. The mistreatment of women in Philippine cinema, from the posters to the films themselves, is nothing new. In Bulong, Ellen is conveniently sidelined early in the second act and conveniently has amnesia by the end, when everything has returned to normal, sparing the film from ever having to explore Conan’s brief (but explicit) violations of her. Most stories are journeys of change, but the lack of thorough reflection or genuine comeuppance for Conan means that he learns nothing by the end. The film even rewards him with a new romantic interest, his ex-fling Oprah, whose aunt just so happens to be sufficiently knowledgeable about the supernatural for the plot to advance.

In the modern-day Philippines, there are films on countless taboo topics, such as abortion and open sexuality, once thought impossible to tackle in Philippine cinema. In the same vein, films like Obsession prove that the horror genre is, and always will be, an avenue for safely exploring the cruel, inhuman, and outright barbaric treatment of people, including and especially women. Bulong’s treatment of women, however, is itself purely cruel, inhuman, and outright barbaric. Therein lies the difference.

^{How to cite: Sanchez, William Carlo Antonio. “Conan, A Barbarian: Inside Bulong, the Filipino Obsession.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 25 Aug. 2026. chajournal.com/2026/08/25/bulong.}

William Carlo Antonio Sanchez is an aspiring novelist and lifelong horror fan from Butuan City, Philippines. His surrealist poetry and prose have appeared locally and internationally, notably in The Archipelago Press (California), Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine (Hong Kong), CultureCult Magazine & Press (India), TAKÓS: An Anthology of Gendered, Queered, Literary Genres, and Heritage Youth in his home country. He graduated magna cum laude with a BA in Communication from the University of the Philippines Cebu in 2024 and currently works full-time as a layout artist and production staff member at Father Saturnino Urios University. [All contributions by William Carlo Antonio Sanchez.]