Balaraw: Blood Island — Netflix’s Filipino folk horror reunites the Babae at Baril team

The last time Rae Red directed Janine Gutierrez, the film was Babae at Baril, the story of a department-store saleswoman who finds a gun on her doorstep, and it took Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress at the Gawad Urian, the awards handed out by the Filipino critics of the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino. The two are working together again on Balaraw: Blood Island, a Filipino-language folk horror series made for Netflix. Gutierrez plays Sabina Tejeros, a woman who has spent years looking for a mother who vanished, follows a new clue to an uncharted island, and finds supernatural entities drawn from Philippine myth waiting there, along with secrets that belong to her own family.

The company behind the camera is part of the reunion. EpicMedia, which co-produced Babae at Baril with Cignal Entertainment, produces the series. Agot Isidro plays Rebecca, Sabina’s missing mother, and Charlie Dizon plays Bulak Bernabe. Around them the ensemble includes Romnick Sarmenta, Ronnie Lazaro, Nonie Buencamino, Teroy Guzman and Archi Adamos. Netflix’s own pitch for the show describes an ensemble story with shades of Lost that stays grounded entirely in Filipino sensibilities.

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That sentence is the whole commercial bet in miniature. Lost is the reference a global subscriber recognizes in half a second: strangers, an island, a mystery that keeps widening. The second half of the line is the part Netflix is actually paying for. A mystery-box island is a format anyone can make. An island filled with creatures out of Philippine folklore, written for Filipino viewers first, is something only a Filipino team can deliver, and it is the kind of specificity that has let Korean and Spanish originals travel on the service.

Start with the title, because it is not a place name you will find on any map. A balaraw, spelled balarao in most reference works, is a pre-colonial Filipino dagger with a double-edged, leaf-shaped blade and a grip that ends in two horn-like projections. It was a status object among nobles and warriors, often worked in precious metals, ivory and horn. The series gives the weapon’s name to an island. Some editions make the blade explicit: in Turkey the show is called Hançer Adası, Dagger Island, and the Chinese title, 血刃岛, reads as Blood Blade Island.

The marketing so far sells the trap more than the monsters. In the teaser, the tagline warns, in Filipino, that you can leave Balaraw but you cannot escape it. Philstar’s account of that footage picks out mysterious phone calls, strange inhabitants and drawings on a cave wall. A separate clip from Netflix Philippines, as described in coverage of its release, stays on the crossing: Sabina on a boat heading toward the island in search of her mother, where a passenger’s altercation with the captain turns physical.

Red’s record explains why the pairing matters beyond nostalgia. She has said Babae at Baril grew out of her own childhood search for women on screen she could look up to, and that the film was a way to let out her anger at what women go through each day. Much of that film followed a woman worn down by the men around her. The new premise moves the center of gravity inside a family: a daughter, a missing mother, and whatever the island knows about both. On paper, it reads as the same director turning a genre engine toward the question of what women hand down to one another, and what they keep back.

Gutierrez carries the weight of that history into the lead. Babae at Baril earned her the Gawad Urian and the FAMAS for Best Actress, and later the Rising Star Award at the New York Asian Film Festival. Isidro, known for independent film and theater work, brings a FAMAS and a Metro Manila Film Festival award of her own, plus five Gawad Urian nominations. Dizon broke through with Fan Girl, a Metro Manila Film Festival entry, and has a Gawad Urian of her own. Casting three actresses with that kind of standing in the central roles is a statement that the family story, not the creature work, is meant to hold the series up.

The calendar is the last piece of the plan. Netflix drops Balaraw: Blood Island in Halloween week, and in the Philippines that stretch runs straight into Undas, the days when families crowd the cemeteries to visit the graves of their dead. A folk horror series about a mother who disappeared, arriving the same week a country talks about its ghosts, is a scheduling choice with an obvious logic. Whether the international audience follows the Lost comparison through to the Filipino material is the real test of the release.

The premise leaves one question sitting under the horror, and nothing in the marketing hints at an answer. If Sabina finds her mother on that island, what does she learn about the woman who raised her that she would have preferred never to know?

Balaraw: Blood Island premieres on Netflix on October 29, 2026. The first season runs eight episodes. Rae Red directs, and EpicMedia produces. The cast is led by Janine Gutierrez, Agot Isidro and Charlie Dizon, with Romnick Sarmenta, Ronnie Lazaro, Nonie Buencamino, Teroy Guzman and Archi Adamos. The series is fiction rather than a true story, built from Philippine folklore, and it is a Netflix original, so it streams only on Netflix.

Cast

Photos: The Movie Database (TMDB)

Tags: Netflix, Arisa Nakano, folk horror, Agot Isidro, Balaraw: Blood Island, Charlie Dizon

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