For Pinoy Halloween 2018 we dive deep into Pinoy culture with a Bangkay costume. What is a Bangkay? The rough translation would be a corpse. From what my Pinoy friends have taught me, a Bangkay is actually an old cultural practice which is a specific wake to prepare a corpse. The cotton balls and tissue are placed in the nostrils and ears with a cotton tie on the top of the head so nothing would exit from these places postmortem. This type of costume became quite popular in old Filipino horror movies. Characters often showed up as ghost or zombie-like and this is referred to as, Bangkay. There was even a popular TV actor, Nonong de Andres, who received the nickname Bangkay for appearing in a number of horror and comedy movies in the 1980-90’s. You can see his amazingly frightening photo here.

The boys signed up to be ‘Filipino Zombies’ for a day and these are the shots we got! You will see the realness in these. In terms of costumes, these are the least elaborate from the last three Pinoy Halloweens but still all in good fun I think. Plus, as the boys get older they want more opinion in the matter and zombies are a house favorite so it worked out well! Also, Well’s was not crying because of the costume, it was nap time and he was grumpy and pushing Oz and you know the rest.

The only items I needed to buy for this costume was a barong for Kuya and some face paint from National Book. National Book for sure as the best selection and the cheapest. I already had the cotton balls and toilet paper on hand. I didn’t want to distress their barongs because I want them to continue wearing them but that would have been a nice effect for the costume. The barongs were sourced from Kultura and Landmark.

Kuya Bangkay

Ozzie man feels with all the feels and is quite the actor! He was super into character.

A very grumpy Wells. What would family photos be without a few tears?

Bangkay!

I love Halloween, the Philippines and crafting so Pinoy Halloween really is something I look forward to every year. I learn more about our host country and the culture in a super fun way.