Itim (aka The Rites of May)
Director: Mike de Leon
Year: 1976
Country: Philippines
The year after shooting and producing Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light, the legendary Filipino filmmaker Mike de Leon, who passed away earlier this year, made his directorial debut. With Itim, he carved his own cinematic confrontation of the realities in his country, using the horror genre to channel a cultural imagination where ghosts are commonly feared as vengeful, lingering presences linked to unresolved injustices or violent deaths. Released under the shadow of Ferdinand Marcos’s martial law regime, Itim (literally “blackness” or “darkness,” but the film is sometimes titled The Rites of May in English) combines gothic ghost story with national allegory of guilt and trauma. De Leon’s confident mastery of image and sound crafts a slow-burning atmosphere of dread, where claustrophobic interiors and shadows become metaphors for a society haunted by unspoken secrets that fester beneath surfaces of respectability.
The story follows Jun, played by Tommy Abuel (Julio’s close friend Pol in Manila in the Claws of Light), a young Manila-based photographer from an affluent family, who returns to his provincial hometown during Holy Week to visit his paralysed father, a well-respected former physician. Drifting between religious processions and candlelit church interiors, Jun fills his time by observing this now alien-to-him rural environment through the distanced lens of his camera (Image 1), and starts to photograph from afar a young woman named Teresa (Charo Santos, future great of Filipino film and TV here in her screen debut). In a second, less voyeuristic, encounter, he speaks to her and is invited into the tense confines of her home, where she has been living under the emotional dominance of her mother and the unspoken absence of her elder sister, Rosa, who vanished years earlier. What begins as tentative friendship (Image 2) gradually turns into something stranger, as Teresa becomes increasingly consumed, perhaps even possessed, by Rosa’s memory. Through family tensions, dream sequences, and two spiritualist séances bookending the film, Itim slowly pieces together a history of repressed violence and complicity that links Jun’s own family to Teresa’s grief. The darkness at the heart of the film is not just literal and visual but moral: a portrait of how private sins and public silences echo across generations.
The film is particularly striking in the way it meticulously weaves this web of echoes of sin, guilt, and complicity through editing as much as through image and sound. In the opening 20 minutes, as we still find our bearings as to how Jun and Teresa might be connected, the parallel editing often blurs spatial logic by cutting between Jun and Teresa’s homes, two space of vastly different size and social class but each equally stifling in their light-resistant wooden interiors, merged by the edits as if some mysterious force-field was already connecting them. Later, midway through the film, Jun becomes uncannily entranced by the sight of a man being flagellated during a Holy Week procession. As Max Jocson’s score swells into suspenseful, giallo-esque synths, Jun is seized by an urgent, irrational impulse to race home. De Leon’s cross-cutting parallels Jun’s frantic drive with his paralysed father back at the house, suddenly and manically trying to propel his wheelchair, both men simultaneously overtaken by an intangible surge of dread. It is as if a vengeful spirit, denied earthly justice, were exerting its only remaining agency from beyond the grave. Mute and paralysed, the father cannot confess or atone for his sins, and the film suggests that this unspoken, stagnating guilt is transferring itself onto his son, binding them in a lineage of inherited wrongdoing.
Though it remains lesser-known than de Leon’s later 1980s masterworks (Kisapmata, Batch ’81), Itim is an assured debut that deepens the visual palette the director helped define one year earlier as cinematographer on Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light. There, the inky blacks were the visual complement to Manila’s neon lights signifying the constant dialectical battle between seduction and moral corrosion within the big bad city. Here, the encroaching shadows, claustrophobic stuffiness, dust-choked wooden interiors (Image 3), and dimly-lit gloom (Image 4) evoke a decaying class structure built on unaired secrets. Beyond Jocson’s music, the soundscape is also meticulously created: reports of an acquitted rapist on the car radio serve as early omen of things to come, whispered prayers, distant bells, dripping water in the decrepit family home, together form an ambient unease.
Within this web of intangible dread, the film’s core is certainly Charo Santos, conveying with quiet intensity a young woman whose very body becomes the site where spiritual unrest and generational trauma meet. Her arc, from shy, young woman to trance-like vengeance incarnate, is haunting by the end, in more ways than one. But Jun’s arc is the one with the most lessons for us, for it is he who must learn how to do more than look. Jun, like many in the upper classes of Marcos-era Philippines, is a passive observer complicit through comfortable detachment. His camera becomes both a symbol of witnessing and a shield, a device through which he can observe but not yet act. Initially, he locks himself into the cocoon of his dark room and develops old negatives, but gradually he uncovers forgotten portraits and captures glimpses of Teresa and her world, and thus begins to assemble a picture not just of the past, but of his own family’s culpability in it. Light, that which exposes his films, develops his photographs, and pierces the dark, becomes a symbol of hope, as something that exists to expose the wrongs hidden deep beneath. Itim’s real question lingers after its climax and the final fade to black: what does one do with such knowledge? How does a current generation reckon with the sins of the previous ones?
Itim is a ghost movie in which the true horror lies not in the supernatural, but in how easy it is to live among the haunted and do nothing. In a time of national darkness, when serious discussion of history and politics was all but eclipsed, de Leon dared to suggest that reckoning — personal, political, and spiritual — begins by learning from the past and letting the dead speak.
Cinescope 