As Halloween rolls around, many of our references come from the West: vampires, ghosts, witches, and ghouls. Rarely will you see folkloric costumes of aswangs or manananggals. Meanwhile, in the contemporary Philippine art world, it’s not uncommon to see art styles that are dark and grotesque—perhaps echoing the bleak, socially striated world many Filipinos face. Terror is often visceral, confronting trauma or societal perversions with undercurrents of existential dread.
One can’t not mention curators like Norman Crisologo, who often brings uncompromising visual voices to the fore and, in effect, gives space to artists who aren’t keen on painting pretty pictures.
One can’t not mention curators like Norman Crisologo, who often brings uncompromising visual voices to the fore
So this Halloween, if you’re looking to take a trip down the darker corridors of local visual art, here are a few Philippine artists whose styles demand your unblinking attention.
Jojo Legaspi
Let’s start with an artist who has always given me chills. His distinctive style features pale, bloodless figures, often in empty rooms, almost always in unnerving positions. They sit or stand or float in states of silent anguish, painted with garish hues or muted, bruised tones.
One of the most unapologetically provocative Philippine painters, Legaspi’s work delves deep into the taboo, from sex to religious repression. His art doesn’t rely on jump scares but unnerves the viewer by forcing them to confront society’s darkest perversions.
Like a nightmare you can’t wake up from, his work pulls you to peer closely into the very vulnerable human body, showing psychological horror in oil and charcoal. Is this what repression looks like when it explodes?
Igan d’Bayan
Self-taught painter and writer d’Bayan draws inspiration from literature, philosophy, and horror cinema, creating eerie visual worlds populated by mutated dog-men, sap-green creatures, caged skeletons, and grotesque bodily deformities.
His work is distinctive for paintings of skeletal bones, ribcages protruding amid skulls and teeth. Sometimes, they have devilish horns.
“Most people tend to walk past paintings of flowers, still lifes, and sterile Filipiniana, and not feel a goddamn thing,” the artist remarked in an interview with Artes De Las Filipinas. “Art should grab you by the scruff of your neck.”
He quips that his dark works are never meant to function as home decor. “None of my paintings can match couches or complement carpets. I don’t consider myself an interior decorator. An ‘internal decorator,’ maybe.”
“None of my paintings can match couches or complement carpets. I don’t consider myself an interior decorator. An ‘internal decorator,’ maybe”
Dennis Occeña
This Bacolod-based artist creates positive and negative spaces through shading, with intense hyperrealist work that highlights the contrast of lightness and darkness, making the canvas ever more otherworldly.
You might not immediately notice the macabre in his work, but take a closer look, and you’ll find a head in the closet, flies floating faintly above it. Another work may show a young man looking at his reflection, expression blank, as the viewer becomes hyperaware of their own sense of dread.
By stripping away light and color, the young artist visualizes raw vulnerability, so viewing his canvases kind of feels like peeking into someone else’s recurring nightmare.
READ: Of freaks and frequencies
Yeo Kaa
Yeo Kaa introduces a completely different—and uniquely insidious—flavor of macabre art, with horror deceptively wrapped in candy-colored pastels. At first glance, her bright pinks, turquoises, and innocent, wide-eyed cartoon characters (like her recurring persona Krinini) may seem like innocent enough pop art.
But look a little closer, and the anxiety quickly reveals itself, as Yeo Kaa depicts serious topics—from severe psychological trauma and self-harm to dismemberment and depression. The contrast between neon sweetness and occasionally bloody imagery can disorient you, making your skin crawl in a way that shows how horror sometimes lurks behind a neon smile.
Ryan Jara
Jara’s style always splices together human faces, sacred icons, or animals. The final painting often shows uncanny, mosaic-like constructs like glitching spirits. There’s an undeniable sense of the macabre through his deconstructed figuration, maybe more so in his earlier works than in recent shows.
In an exhibition curated by Crisologo last year, 2025, “Tagpi-Tagpi, Dugtong-Dugtong,” Jara explored how Catholic faith, folk superstition, and artificial intelligence intersect—evoking the fear of losing one’s soul in our world caught between ancient dogma and modern technology.
READ: Norman Crisologo curates yet another f*ed up but brilliant show
Doktor Karayom
Russel Trinidad—known by his moniker Doktor Karayom—has built an unmistakable aesthetic centered on the color red and anatomical distortion. Starting as a street and graffiti artist, he developed a signature style using red ballpens, bloodied resin sculptures, and massive murals.
His Thirteen Artists Award-winning installation “Isla Inip” featured a 13-foot corpse of Jose Rizal whose disemboweled entrails served as an interactive board game, surrounded by swarming red mini-figurines.
Doktor Karayom’s work treads the fine line between fascination and disgust—using gore, amulets, and severed body parts not just to shock but also to serve as a cathartic release for social anxiety and inner turmoil.
Ian Fabro
Fabro creates colossal, haunting works that combine precise, feverish drawing with physical violence toward the paper itself. Fabro sketches intricate scenes of agony, torn bodies, swarming beasts, and martyrdom. He then tears, layers, and obsessively stitches the paper together using thousands of sharp staple wires and pins.
He has also created sculptures, as his art has a textured, tortured quality. Pierced by the signature pins and staples of Fabro’s practice, these densely detailed material layers slosh, snake, and slough, connecting the ancient to the earth-bound in an alchemical cycle of life and death.
Shedding light through darkness
What makes these Filipino artists stand out—especially during Halloween—is that their frightening imagery is never superficial.
Whether through Legaspi’s raw taboos, d’Bayan’s abstract horror, or Yeo Kaa’s deceptive pastels, scary art styles are vehicles for truth. It forces us to look into the darkness we usually try to ignore and finds strange, cathartic beauty in the macabre.
