Netflix Trese: Every Supernatural Creature Explained
4. Tiyanak
The Tiyanak is a monstrous, man-eating baby, or a creature that imitates the form of a baby, and is one of the most nightmarish creatures in Philippine folklore. They're mostly described as being vampiric or man-eating.
The original Tiyanak stories describe them as creatures that target pregnant women, with the men of the family stripping themselves naked and taking up shields and weapons to guard the child from tiyanak and aswang.
The most famous tiyanak tales describe them as taking on the form of an infant and copying their wails, luring people to them in the mountains and attacking them once they got close enough.
Tiyanak have a plethora of physical descriptions, including small old men similar to duwende or dwarves, but the most prominent of these is that of the monstrous infant.
While most stories describe Tiyanak as only copying the features of infants, some say they originate from lost or abandoned babies in the woods - any child "without a name" turning into a Tiyanak. With the rise of Catholicism, aborted fetuses became a popular origin of Tiyanak, though abortion wasn't as stigmatised among precolonial Filipinos.