McCoy de Leon was named Best Actor at the 74th FAMAS Awards on October 27. The next day, his horror anthology VHS (Viva Horror Stories) opened at SM Cinemas as part of Sine Sindak: The 7th Cycle, seven films at ₱100 a ticket.
McCoy de Leon won Best Actor for In Thy Name at the 74th FAMAS Awards on Tuesday, October 27, over Jericho Rosales, Piolo Pascual, Carlo Aquino and Earl Amaba. In Thy Name also took Best Picture, as the full FAMAS winners list shows. The next day, October 28, de Leon’s horror anthology VHS (Viva Horror Stories) opened at SM Cinemas as part of Sine Sindak: The 7th Cycle, the chain’s annual Halloween festival. Tickets are ₱100 per film through Tuesday, November 3.
McCoy’s Story in VHS
VHS is a three-story anthology directed by Darryl Yap, his first horror film, and part of Viva’s 45th anniversary. It is the only Filipino film among Sine Sindak’s seven, and the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board rated it R-13.
De Leon and Ella Cruz star in “Spoiled,” the second story, as a couple whose seemingly ideal romance hides a horrifying secret. The other two stories are “Dasal,” with Sachzna Laparan as a cheerleader, and “Wish,” with Sarah Lahbati and Kit Thompson as a married couple.
Yap has said that the scene between de Leon and Cruz took seven takes and that he was unhappy with it at first. He believed the two were trying to outshine each other instead of working together, and he stopped speaking to them for several days. After the footage was edited, he said, he saw that the performances complemented each other, and he apologized to both actors. He put his first reaction down to his theater background, where he is used to instant results.
The Other Six Films
The rest of the lineup is imported.
- App the Horror (South Korea). An anthology of short stories built around a mobile app that draws ghosts and evil spirits once it is installed on a phone.
- Never After Dark (Japan). A psychic is hired to perform an exorcism in a haunted house and finds that the danger comes from the living people inside it.
- Crawlers (United States). Police lock down a building after an attack by creatures, in this case spiders, and the people trapped inside, cut off from signal and power, fight back with improvised weapons.
- The Influencer Project (United States and Denmark). A found-footage film directed by Mike Nybroe, starring influencer Chiara King as a fictionalized version of herself. Her documentary shoot picks up a masked stalker. Eduardo Sánchez and Gregg Hale, who made The Blair Witch Project, produced it, and it opened in U.S. theaters on October 2.
- Cerita Lila (Indonesia). Directed by Bobby Prasetyo, it follows the spirit of a girl named Lila searching for her twin sister, Lili. It is adapted from a story investigated by medium Sara Wijayanto on her YouTube channel, Diary Misteri Sara. It opened in Indonesia on June 18, 2026, and is rated R-16 here.
- Phi Phong: The Blood Demon (Vietnam). Directed by Do Quoc Trung, it draws on the folklore of Vietnam’s northern highlands, where Phi Phong is a shape-shifting, bloodthirsty entity. Two rival folk healers try to save their mother and a village under its curse. It premiered April 24, 2026, and became the highest-grossing Vietnamese horror film on record. It is rated R-13 here.
Beyond the Screenings
Last year’s festival charged ₱150 a film. SM Cinema is running a Passport Promo nationwide, with rewards for watching all seven titles. A Midnight Survival Challenge marathon runs at SM Aura, SM Megamall, SM North EDSA and SM Mall of Asia. Sine Sindak Popcorn Box bundles are on sale at the Snack Time counters until November 15. Tickets are available through the SM Cinema app, its website and the ticket booths, and showtimes vary by branch. Monday, November 2 is a special non-working day, so the weekend runs long.