The aswang is the most controversial creature in Philippine folklore, a shape-shifter that turns up as a young woman, a black pig or dog, a corpse-eating ghoul, or the Manananggal, a self-segmenting witch with a long tongue that feeds on unborn fetuses. Canadian filmmaker Jordan Clark spends the film asking where the word comes from, why the myth has so many regional variants, and why the Visayan province of Capiz is singled out as its heartland. Animated sequences by Denver Jackson recreate pre-Spanish folk stories, while historians and folklorists lay out how the legend got used as a tool of control: Spanish colonizers and the Catholic Church spread aswang stories to suppress native healers, the postwar Philippine administration and the CIA revived them as psychological warfare against communist insurgents. Over four hundred years the creature keeps getting rebuilt to serve whoever is telling the story. The film treats the myth itself as the real evidence, tracing how fear of a monster shaped real social and political behavior across generations.