Night of the Split

Night of the Split is Filipino folk horror with investigative grit, where journalism meets a monster that never left the stories.

Manila reporter Elena Navarro follows a missing-person tip into Barangay Malas, finds a bloodied sandal in a dead-end alley called Kalsada Demonyo, and hears an inhuman shriek split the night. The old word comes back in a whisper: Manananggal, a splitter that leaves its lower half steeped in vinegar, takes wing, and hunts hearts and unborn children.

As Elena digs, her trail cuts through flooded slums, cramped newsrooms, and midnight wet markets that reek of brine and blood. She meets Mang Ruel, a weaver with a stingray-barbed whip and a wife the stories never gave back, and uncovers a family secret that began in San Isidro, 1978. Each interview peels back another layer of silence. Each scream the city tries to swallow makes her own ribs ache like something inside her is trying to wake.

The more evidence she gathers, the less the case feels like a story and the more it feels like an inheritance. To end the killings, Elena must choose between protecting her bloodline and exposing a truth that could turn the whole barangay against her.

Night of the Split is Filipino folk horror about journalism, inheritance, body horror, and a monster whose rules were never just superstition.