Kampon is a new Filipino-language supernatural horror film streaming on Netflix that comes with the very creepy premise of a haunted child appearing to a couple one fine day. At the center of its plot are Clark and Eileen, who are often reminded by friends and society about having kids soon, before it is biologically too late. But the truth is that they have tried conceiving several times, to no effect, and so when a young girl appears at their doorstep, helpless and lost, they do not hesitate to take her in. However, mysterious and frightening events start occurring since then, and Kampon is all about these hauntings, along with a grim secret from Clark’s past.
Spoiler Alert
What is the film about?
Kampon begins on a dark night as a boy hurriedly runs towards a house with his elder sister on his back. The sister, Loreta, is clearly very sick and almost dying, because of which the brother is rushing her towards a local medic, Almera. Reaching the place, he puts Loreta’s suffering body on a bed, and Almera quickly gives her some medicines. However, these conventional means completely fail, as Loreta coughs up some green liquid, possibly the medicine itself, before seemingly losing her life. As the boy cries and blames Almera for failing to save his sister, the woman assures him that a different, more sinister method needs to be tried, for which she has to cover all the idols of gods and deities in her house. This use of dark magic does work wonders, as Loreta’s body contorts and levitates before she is finally brought back to life.
Thousands of miles away from all of this, in the capital city of Manila, a couple attends the baptism of their friends’ child. The couple, Clark and Eileen, have been married for eight long years and are still very loving towards each other, but there is an emptiness they constantly feel with regards to family. The two have not been able to become parents after multiple attempts, and they have consulted numerous doctors about the matter as well. All of them, and the medical tests, too, have made it clear that Clark is unable to have kids because he is infertile. Both he and Eileen have accepted this inability and try to live their usual lives without thinking about having kids, but their friends and family members constantly remind them to conceive before it is too late biologically. The well-wishers obviously do not know about the couple’s infertility, and so they are not aware that their friendly advice genuinely hurts the protagonists.
During such a time, when both Clark and Eileen have started to accept their fate and move on from the desire to have a child, something extremely strange happens to them. On the very night after Eileen’s friend tells her the power of very strong desire and manifestation, the couple hears a knock on their door. When Clark goes to check, he finds a young girl, about seven or eight, asking to come into the house. Eileen naturally brings the child inside and then also decides to keep her for the night since it is raining very heavily, and the girl is clearly lost. But unnatural mysteries start to take shape when the girl introduces herself as Jade Bitangool and keeps referring to Clark as her father. When the couple asks Jade about her mother, she only replies that her mother cannot be brought back. Clark and Eileen’s lives are soon ripped apart as serious secrets from the past haunt them, along with very real paranormal incidents as well.
Is Jade really Clark’s daughter?
After the emergence of Jade, especially when the girl starts to call Clark his daughter, he is unwilling to keep her in his house, as he is shocked by the claim. Both Clark and Eileen are quite confused by the claim and do not know whether to believe it, although it does shake up their relationship slightly. If Jade was indeed Clark’s daughter, it would mean that he had cheated on his wife, as her age was equal to or less than the duration of their marriage. As Eileen becomes concerned with this thought, her husband keeps reminding her about how he is clinically confirmed to be impotent. Therefore, as the couple takes the child to the police the next day, they decide to get a DNA test done between the samples taken from Clark and Jade in order to find out the real truth. Being a retired police officer, Clark still has friends working in the authority, and the officer who takes up this case, Jake Manabat, happens to be one of his closest friends. It is because of this relationship that Clark has saved a lot of embarrassment and trouble, at least for some time, as Eileen is not informed about the result of the DNA test. After all, the test report reveals that Jade is most certainly Clark’s daughter.
This discovery finally reveals a secret incident from Jade’s past, for the man had indeed cheated on his wife a few years ago. A few months after Clark married Eileen, in 2015, he retired from the police job to open up his own business of selling security and surveillance products. In 2016, when he got his first big client and went over to his property to finalize the deal, Clark was fascinated by the beauty of a waitress at the place, whose name happened to be Loreta. In a drunken state, he got intimate with the waitress and cheated on his marriage with her. But this was a one-off incident, and Clark forgot about it as well and never worried about having an illegitimate child, either. Not only had he consulted numerous doctors about his infertility, but he had also gone through a number of expensive treatments to cure his condition, none of which had worked. This was solid proof for him that Jade cannot be his child, no matter what, but the DNA test at present truly rocks his world. Although Eileen does not get to know about it for some time, she does eventually find the reports and understand that her husband cheated on her.
Eileen feels more hurt and betrayed than she is angered by the truth, and she accepts this news as evidence of her being infertile rather than her husband. She lovingly turns all her grief and frustration into care and motherly affection, all of which she showers on little Jade. Eileen sees the girl as her chance to be a mother and thus keeps no inhibitions in their relationship. This is also largely helped by Jade calling her mother very effortlessly, and so the mother-daughter bond flourishes, gradually making Clark feel like he is truly alone in his fight against the supernatural. Despite being proven to be his biological daughter, Jade is still a very haunted child, and soon she starts putting such effects on Eileen, like having her contort her body in unbelievable ways and even seemingly getting the woman pregnant, simply by rubbing on her belly.
What is the mystery behind Jade’s supernatural abilities?
The entire plot of Kampon is built around the mysterious existence of Jade, and so her supernatural abilities and the whole backstory about her become very important to the narrative. It all began many years ago when Loreta Bitangool was a teenage girl afflicted with some serious ailment. In fact, this is the very scene that the film began with, in which her brother was seen rushing her to the local village medic, Almera. As the medic’s conventional ways had failed to save the girl, she had used dark magic and the help of the supernatural to cure Loreta and bring her back to life. Although this method did work, and Loreta was back to a normal life, the process left a very physical mark on her body in the form of a sign on her belly. When Loreta is seen getting intimate with Clark, this mark is very visible on her body, which the man naturally mistook for a tattoo. This proved that when Clark had his one-night affair with Loreta, she already had the powers of the paranormal, as this took place quite a few years after Almera saved her.
While Kampon does not explain the exact workings of the paranormal or the exact meaning of the mark, it is evident that the powers had made Loreta extremely fertile as well. Therefore, even after a single night of lovemaking, she became pregnant with Clark’s child, while Clark was cursed and made impotent for not having started a family with her. It is most likely that Loreta had nothing to do with the curse, but it was the paranormal living inside her that took such revenge. When Loreta gave birth to a baby girl, Jade, the daughter, had even more paranormal spirits inside her and thus had incredibly supernatural abilities. Jade is a child completely possessed by the paranormal, and so she is able to heal dead beings back to life and jump unnaturally high against the laws of gravity, even being able to survive falls from high buildings. Despite these powers, Jade still lived a normal life with her mother and uncle, and also with Almera, who became like a grandmother to her. But a tragic accident tore apart this whole family, leaving the child lonely and clueless, because of which she came over to Manila.
A few days earlier, Loreta and her brother were traveling on a public van along with Jade and twelve other passengers. The van met with a horrific accident, as it was hit by another truck, and almost everyone inside it died in the crash. Jade naturally survived the accident because of her supernatural powers, and as she had the ability to bring dead beings back to life, she tried doing the same to everyone around her. But this ability, when used on human beings, could not actually bring them back to normalcy and instead turned them into zombie-like monsters with no soul left inside. However, Jade could not bring her mother back to life, as Loreta had been decapitated, and so she needed a new body for her mother. It seems most likely that Jade and her paranormal family suddenly wanted to reunite with Clark now, after all this time, to ensure that the girl would still have some living family members. The ultimate plan was to bring Clark back with them and also to get hold of Eileen’s body so that Loreta’s soul could be transferred into it or so that certain body parts could be used to revive Loreta back to life.
What happens to Clark and Eileen?
The other passengers of the van, who had all been transformed into zombies, were now stalking Clark in order to bring him back to the spot of the accident, where an occult ritual to revive Loreta was still going on. Finally, Clark and Eileen are successfully kidnapped and taken to the ground, where Jade starts to perform some dark magic on Eileen’s body in an attempt to bring back life to her mother. When Clark wakes up, he spots this scene and is almost instantly helped by his police officer friend, Jake, but the latter is also killed by Jade very soon. In his attempt to save his wife, Clark is also shot dead by Loreta’s brother, who has also turned into a zombie, before he too drops dead. Clark had also managed to shoot a few bullets at Loreta’s unnatural and decapitated torso, with no head or limbs, but it did not obviously kill the paranormal being.
During Kampon‘s ending, Eileen is seen alive, waking up from a long slumber and finding herself in the spot of the accident inside the jungle. At first, it seems like Jade has completed the transfer of souls, and it is Loreta who wakes up inside the body of the woman, but then the dialogues at the end of Kampon seem to suggest otherwise. When Eileen expresses her confusion and bewilderment at her current situation while also looking around for her husband, it definitely seems like she is still alive. Therefore, at the end of Kampon, Jade had seemingly decided not to go through with the transfer of souls or bodies and had instead chosen to keep Eileen alive. After all, the little girl was only in search of a mother who would love her and care for her, which is why she wanted to use her supernatural powers to revive Loreta abnormally. However, Jade had found all the love and care in Eileen, and the girl had started to accept the woman as her real mother, because of which she chose to protect her. Kampon ends with Jade and Eileen, who are still extremely confused, driving away towards Manila. Meanwhile, the torso of Loreta gradually becomes lifeless, as Jade no longer needs it, as she has found a new mother in Eileen.
