The Thingy – Yves Sondermeier and Joël Rabijns interviewed by Ben Spurling
When thinking about horror films, Belgium doesn’t obviously immediately jump to mind as a hot bed of genre production.
Without question, there have been stand outs though, going all the way back to such films as the meager, but effective, late entry Old Dark House romp, Devil’s Nightmare (1971); Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness (1971), an adequate, if overly serious, entry in the typical lesbian vampire sub-genre that succeeds more with juvenile titillation than with scaring up proceeds; and more recently, Cub (2014) delivered a well-produced feral child take on the comatosed slasher movie school of filmmaking.
There have been the oddball examples, as well: Johan Vandewoestijne’s Lucker the Necrophagous (1986), a revolting film with all the nuance of an unventilated slaughterhouse in August, and Rabid Grannies (1988), Emmanuel Kervyn’s homage to balmy, over-the-top grindhouse. But, still, Belgium just isn’t known for its genre output as far as most horror fans are concerned.
However, that could all change if Yves Sondermeier and Joël Rabijns have anything to do with it. Their film, The Miracle of Life (US title: The Thingy: Confessions of a Teenage Placenta), is a somewhat previously overlooked exploitation/horror nonpareil from 2013 that takes the surprisingly varied, if not abundant, Belgian genre cinema world to a whole new level of freakishness by introducing a cognizant placenta as the main character.
The placenta, Luke, begins as an innocent baby then develops into a hopeful youth longing for love and acceptance and finally, in his teenage years, arrives at a sad awareness of exactly how powerful dysfunction can be.
While this might sound like any other direct-to-video slop-fest trying for a cash grab while delivering nothing beyond greasy effects and a proliferation of callousness, Yves and Joël have, instead, taken all of the typical trappings of cheap exploitation and salted their acutely bizarre narrative with scenes underscoring a thoughtful and sophisticated theme of insecurity.
With a miniscule budget, a good cast, a deep love of the genre, and refined implications, Yves and Joël have done something a cut above the common 42nd Street retro muck. Their film is now available for streaming via Amazon
Ben: What triggered the idea of using a sentient placenta as the lead character?
Yves: So, once, we were sitting with a friend of ours drinking too much coffee (let’s get this out of the way fast: we never take drugs and don’t get our inspiration out of that). At the time, Joël and I had already worked together a lot on each other’s productions, but we hadn’t truly made anything together, yet.
So that friend of ours, Shana, suggested we make a film in a collaboration; that’s why the movie starts with “For Shana”. We asked her if she had any ideas in mind, and she said, “Yes, a living placenta in a totally fucked up horror movie”. We found that idea so funny that it stuck; we kept on laughing about it and without a word on paper, the story basically created itself.
When we started writing “The Miracle of Life”, the horror element disappeared a bit into the background because we found it too easy to just make Luke kill things. Everybody thought about it, and we realized it was funnier to make him a gentle being and all the clichéd human beings around him the true “monsters”.
Ben: So, we can thank this crazy Shana person for planting the disturbing seeds. Is she a filmmaker, as well?
Yves: She’s not a filmmaker; at the time, she was studying psychology. She wanted to become a shrink
Ben: Wasn’t it Père Obhscure (is that a real name?) who created Luke? Zoë only operated Luke, correct? How did that go, and how was Luke created?
Joël: Père Obhscure is more of a collective name for everyone who worked on building Luke (mostly the two of us, Zoë, and Liesbeth Eeckman, who also animated the dream sequence). Zoë primarily did the art direction and costumes. She was with us on set almost all the time, plus, being part of the Père Obhscure team, she knew the ins and outs of Luke as well as we did. So, to ask her to do the puppeteering felt like the obvious thing to do.
Interestingly, creating Luke took us exactly nine months. We knew nothing about sculpting or painting or animatronics, so there was a lot of trial and error to get to something that was functional and had the right look. It was a process consisting of little sleep and (again) lots of coffee.
Whenever we were broke we had to steal expired bottles of silicone and resin (that no one else was going to buy, anyway). Yves probably lowered his life expectancy by a few years by always having to sleep in the same room where the chemicals in the mold were drying.
Ben: You’ve both said you grew up during the fading years of VHS in the late 80’s and early 90’s, and the video stores, with their stock of trash cinema, were a big influence on you. Can you delve deeper into that and describe that experience and how that impacted this film?
Yves: Because we both grew up in strange, but nice, families, the video deck gave us the chance to flee into a world of bodybuilders, steroids, car crashes, mutants, explosions, boobies, etc. In other words, it was the kind of world which would obviously be a huge influence on a little boy. Discovering and watching these movies, which our parents would have strongly disapproved of if they had known, still has a subconscious influence on what we create today.
The huge amount of movies that were produced during, and for the VHS-rental age, spoke to our imaginations. In part, the films themselves, and their presentation, were highly creative, but even when a film was boring, the fact that it was out there proved that we shouldn’t just limit our viewing behavior, thoughts, and dreams to whatever television stations and big theaters were showing. There was a whole other movie world out there to be discovered. It created this notion that if you can make it up, there can be a movie about it. That notion really broadened the range of things to make up.
Here’s an anecdote which makes the answer less theoretic and more personal:
When my parents divorced, my little brother and I stayed at my dad’s. In this time, we developed a slight addiction to television. My father decided to cut the cable, just keeping the video player, and he got a lot of movies he thought, for educational reasons, would be better for us to watch rather than television. No joke, he gave us De Sica, for example. He let me watch The Bicycle Thief at age 7 (which made me a communist for a short time).
Also, there were tapes with the films of Jacques Tati and Orson Welles. Even if I liked these movies, he didn’t know that the babysitter provided my little brother and me with a lot of sleazy video tapes to keep us silent while she made out with her boyfriend. No joke, the first movie she gave us was Halloween. Like that, I watched Predator, Indiana Jones, and Jean-Claude Van Damme films, etc. a million times. I loved this stuff a lot, and it was nice to watch these movies hidden from my dad.
Without a doubt, these movies had a huge influence on me. Not just in my own creations, but now that I am an adult, I drive a black sports car, always with sunglasses on (even in the winter), while listening to Jan Hammer.
Joël was always allowed to watch the sleazy stuff; the more violent the better. He now has a small collection of swords, but they aren’t really sharp.
Ben: Wow. De Sica, Tati, Welles. That’s far from trash cinema! Your dad was really giving you a top quality education in film! It looks like your babysitter was giving you the high-end stuff from the genre world. Halloween, Predator, Indiana Jones: that’s pretty high-quality genre filmmaking. Can Joël recall any of the sleazier titles?
Joël: The most insane one I remember is In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro, which is basically The Birds, but with baboons. Hundreds of actual living baboons. I rediscovered that one last year, but didn’t remember a single image of the film, just the VHS artwork (which was terrifying for a kid).
Many of the tapes we rented or bought at flea markets were dubbed in German or French, so, with my native language being Dutch, I wouldn’t understand a word of what was said. I liked martial arts films for a while, but I don’t think I saw a single one that wasn’t in German. One I remember was a Drunken Master rip-off, but I can’t remember what it was called.
Another one I remember vividly is The East is Red, probably because it had a transgendered villain (I think? the character was supposed to be male but clearly played by an attractive female actress) and a dwarf in a big mechanical samurai suit. But now that I look it up again, it actually seems like quite a classy arty film. Only the bigger productions were available with Dutch subtitles. I loved The Terminator, but they would only ever show Terminator 2 on TV for some reason. So I always had to borrow the (way cooler) first film from friends.
Ben: The concept for In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro reminds me a lot of another great film: Sands of the Kalahari. Similar situation with baboons, but the characters are stranded in a mini-oasis, battling a group of baboons over the limited supply of water-heavy melons. Sounds odd, but very well done.
The East is Red, with the male character being played by a female, is interesting, because I was thinking Pascal Maetens was a curious choice to play Marianne in The Thingy. When did you know you wanted a man (with definite masculine features) to play Luke’s mother, and what was the reasoning behind that?
Joël: Pascal was our first and only choice for Marianne. At first it was part of the joke, of course. What kind of person would eat her baby and raise her placenta? A feminist-without-a-cause power-mom who’s natural habitat was the neon-coloured 80s fitness hall. A female bodybuilder that had become so macho that giving birth was merely part of the workout. We didn’t have to think about it at all.
The moment we imagined what a movie about a living placenta would be like, we spontaneously (as if the entire picture came to us out of nowhere) decided that she would be a tough-ass female bodybuilder who only trained one ridiculously mutated arm and Pascal would have to play her.
We had worked with Pascal before, and he had become a good friend in the meantime. We knew that he was the only one who would have the skill and the balls to play the placenta’s mother. The one existing person who was certainly an influence for Marianne was Divine, especially in Female Trouble. He/she had the right kind of dominant energy and physical presence, while still keeping some genuine kind of femininity and glamour.
By the time we actually started writing the script, the character made total sense to the story. Her reasoning behind the arm, the way she’s forced to be a mother and a father for Luke at the same time. There’s a line of dialogue we sadly had to cut from the film for pacing; near the end, when Marianne has taken the steroid overdose, Luke tries to encourage her to hang on to life by saying “Soldiers are made for fighting. Show me you’re the man you always wanted me to be”. That line summed up Marianne’s character for us.
Ben: That line is fantastic! It’s a shame it didn’t make it in. You mentioned having worked with Pascal before; you’ve both done short films in the past with him. Can you tell me how the process was different doing the feature?
Joël: We wrote the script in such a way that we could keep the production realistic for our limited resources and experience. Actually, we shot the film as if we shot several separate short films. We would prepare everything for a certain setting, shoot for three or four days on that location, with those actors and then we’d work odd jobs for a couple of weeks to earn money to produce the next scenes on the next location with the next batch of characters/actors for a few days.
Since the story spans Luke’s entire youth, it was appropriate that characters would come into his life and move on again. So, except for Marianne, obviously, we managed to wrap up every character’s scenes in one to four shooting days, max.
For Pascal, it was a huge commitment. He had about 30 days of shooting, scattered over a six month period. At the time, he didn’t have a girlfriend or any steady income, and running around with bleached hair and traces of nail polish on his hands didn’t really help him much.
But aside from how much more patience, energy, and sacrifice a feature film demands compared to a short film, it was totally worth it for everyone involved, we think. Actors get a lot more room to give some depth to their characters and literally be part of something bigger.
Every one of the cast and crew was genuinely excited by the film’s concept and approach. They were contributing to a movie they actually wanted to see. Without that energy (especially from people like Pascal and Zoë, Koen who played the bully, David and Tom who worked on the lighting), we’re not sure if we would have pulled it off.
Ben: So, it took about six months to shoot? That’s some real commitment on everyone’s part! Sounds a little rough, especially for Pascal!! And there was never a time when anyone thought the movie was just too strange to make? No one had second thoughts?
Joël: We had the impression that for almost every actor there was some point at which, for just a moment, they would stop and ask themselves “what the hell am I actually doing”. But a minute later, without us having to say anything to them, they’d just see the humour in all the absurdity and just continue working.
For example, Renato, who played the fitness doctor, was perfectly fine with the entire birth scene. The bodybuilders, the placenta, the blood, the screaming, he had no problem with any of it. Then a new take came up and we told him, “OK, Renato, now you put the baby in the plastic bag”. He just stood there for a moment, giving us an unmistakable “are you fucking kidding me” look. He knew it was in the script, but actually standing there with the fake baby, with the umbilical cord dangling from it, and the nurse standing next to him with the shopping bag, seemed to make him realize how weird the entire situation was. But when we started rolling, he got back into it without a problem.
We would like to add that the script was kind of a casting filter by itself. Most actors we approached said no from the start; one of the best answers was: “It is not in my nature to beat up a placenta… No thank you….” The ones which joined the team were enthusiastic from the start. Karel Vingerhoets (the priest) said to us: “Nice for once I don’t have to play the disappointed father or uncle or something like that. It is the first time I can play something like that in Belgium”…
Ben: Karel stood out immediately; he’s amazing in the movie. Extremely talented actor. It sounds like everyone who was cast wound up getting the joke and having a great time in the end. I understand you’ve started scripting your next project, American Juice. Isn’t it inspired by the Blaxploitation movies of the 1970’s? How close to filming are you, can you give me a few details about it, and will anyone from The Thingy be in it?
Yves: While finishing The Miracle of Life, the idea for American Juice came up and it’s still vividly alive in our head, taking shape and growing every day. But it is definitely for a later point in our lives. Currently, we are busy with the preproduction of our next feature called Baldis Beans, which takes all our energy and time. If everything ends up well, we start shooting next year; familiar faces from earlier work will be in it, for sure.
Ben: So, American Juice is on hold, but you’re doing a feature called Baldis Beans? Where did that title come from?
Yves: So, we think it’s the easiest if we just give you the pitch:
Doctor Umbaldo Uribe Jr., a forty-year-old virgin, is forced by his tyrannical mother to open an illegal gynecological clinic. He’s longing for a normal life, love and recognition, while she only seeks the perfect woman to carry her grandchild. When Umbaldo falls in love with his new neighbor, Hildegard, all hell breaks loose in the Uribe family. So Baldis Beans is short for Doctor Umbaldo Uribe Jr. Beans…. Even if the short pitch sounds more down to earth than the last film, we have a couple of surprises up our sleeves and will not disappoint the fans of The Thingy.
Ben: That sounds right up The Thingy alley. I look forward to seeing it, and I do very much appreciate you taking the time to do this interview. Thanks again, and thank the cast and crew for me! It’s been a pleasure.
Yves and Joël: For us, as well.
