While most of the vampires I’ve researched have humanoid forms, the penanggal is only partially human, in fact, only partial. By day the penanggal appears as a beautiful woman, but, at night, she detaches her head from the rest of her body. With her intestines dangling from her neck stump and her heart flashing like a light, she swoops through the darkness in search of placentas or baby’s blood to drink. 

In my attempts to make a digital penanggal, I’ve run up against two problems. 1) It’s hard to divide a digital model of a complete person into realistic pieces with bloody stumps. Since digital models are basically hollow balloons in the shape of whatever they are supposed to be a model of, removing a limb or body section from a human model lets you see the model’s empty insides.

2) It is very hard to find digital intestines for casual use. I found some commercial digestive systems, but they were way outside my budget. I am not going to spend $350.00 on something that is not even in a format that I can use!

I also have an aesthetic problem with the penanggal. Dangling viscera are just disgusting, not to mention unsanitary. Therefore, I decided that I would make a variant of the penanggal with an entire torso, including arms, and the viscera dangling below her waist. Because some of the dangling viscera are partly “protected” by her torso [even though it’s open at the bottom], the fact that my penanggal variant has at least 50% of a body makes her more aesthetically acceptable to me.

Then I discovered the manananggal, clearly related to the penanggal, but better for my purposes. The manananggal, a Phillipine vampire, is a female creature that detaches herself from her waist and legs and flies about on bat wings to suck blood. She also has a long proboscis-like tongue, which she uses to drain blood. To my mind, a legless character with bat wings and a butterfly tongue is a lot more interesting than a pile of guts with a head on top.

I also found a source for guts. Over on Renderotica, the marketplace for Poser porn, Davo sells something called the Gore Pack for Vicki, which supplies realistic-looking stumps for limbs and also some intestines. Plus it’s on sale for 50% off until the end of March! I’m gonna go get it. Guts are pretty useful to have around, even beyond the purpose of rendering a mananangal. Stay tuned for pictures of my manananggal.

She would be a pretty amusing character for LHF. “Can you get off my carpet, please? Your viscera are, uh, staining my rug….”