Baring her Soul
Soul Sucker creator, writer and star Bat Hen Sabag tells DQ how her own relatives inspired this Israeli horror comedy about a woman who attempts to escape a deadly family curse.
By her own admission, Bat Hen Sabag’s latest series is a “wild” ride that throws family drama, horror and elements of folklore and the supernatural into a blender and infuses it with her “very twisted” sense of comedy – and bodily fluids.
The result is Soul Sucker, an eight-part Israeli series described as a modern fairytale about witches and curses among mothers and daughters. It follows three generations of an oppressive matriarchal family (grandmother, mother and daughter) in a story that explores the emotional scars that are passed from parents to their children.
Creator and writer Sabag stars as Avishag, a washed-up reality star who is forced to return home to live with her mother – who believes any man who loves her will end up dead. Once back in the city, Avishag starts to investigate the supposed curse, wondering whether it might be real and, if so, is she turning into her mother?
Meanwhile, police officer Claudine (Kinoret Limoni) begins to investigate a spate of suspicious deaths, believing a serial killer is on the loose.
“I think it’s every woman’s nightmare to become her mother,” Sabag tells DQ about Avishag’s underlying dread. “This is the universal fear and the prophecy we cannot escape from, that all of us are going to become our mothers. Every family is cursed in its own way. It can be a psychological curse… there are a lot of types, and this is what the series talks about.”
From Dori Media Group, Abot Hameiri and Israeli broadcaster Hot, the series is partly inspired by Sabag’s own life and her real family, which has gypsy roots in Romania. In particular, she was keen to focus on how women take up the roles handed to them from childhood – and each one carries a curse from which they need to find a way to release themselves.
The series was co-created by director Daphna Levin, who previously created, directed and exec produced Euphoria, the original Israeli series adapted for the US by HBO, and co-wrote BeTipul (In Treatment). “I read the scripts and I loved them,” Levin says. “I thought they were brilliant, the way she [Sabag] merged the comedy and the horror and the family. It’s almost like a family sitcom in a way. I loved it.”
Sabag worked up the scripts with script editor Aharon Keshales (Rabies, Big Bad Wolves), with the pair coming together after both suffering from “professional break-ups.” Sabag then pitched him Soul Sucker as “Twin Peaks in Ashkelon,” a beautiful but “broken” city in Israel 50 kilometres south of Tel Aviv.
“When she said, ‘Let’s do Twin Peaks over there,’ I said, ‘Well, that’s a good idea,’” Keshales remembers. “Then we started talking about the characters and her character Avishag. Then she told me about another character, the female cop, and we decided to make it into a two-hander where you have two investigations running at the same time.
“One is about the reality star who goes back to her city to investigate the family curse. She wants to know if her mother is speaking the truth or is crazy. The other is the cop’s investigation, and she doesn’t treat it as a supernatural thing. She doesn’t believe in curses. She thinks there’s a serial killer or somebody’s offing the men in the family one by one.”
Keshales would sit and listen to Sabag’s “hundreds” of ideas for the series and offer his thoughts, acting as a mentor through the writing process.
But writing the scripts “was like hell,” says Sabag. “It took me a lot of time to convince [people] that this series is two genres mixed up.”
In fact, she believes Soul Sucker defies definition. “This is something you haven’t seen yet,” she continues. “You can say it’s a family horror comedy, but this is a special combination that I’m very proud of. You can’t say it’s like this or it’s like that. It’s a different tone and it’s my tone. [That means] it’s so much more important that you have people you can count on, because you hear a lot of voices and these two people [Levin and Keshales] were the solid thing I really could count on in a creative way.”
Finding the right balance of genres was particularly tricky with Sabag’s taste in humour, which she describes as the kind of comedy “that comes from the filth of life, from the ugly side.” “It’s bodily fluids, it’s comedy from the trash,” she says, highlighting one particular scene where Avishag vomits – a lot. “I like it when my character suffers.”
Sabag started out as a “frustrated” actor, before she turned to writing and created Dumb, a crime drama. It centres on a 30-something actor called Shiri who believes she still looks like a teenager and leads a mundane life – but when her drug dealing ex-boyfriend is arrested, she is offered the chance to join the police as an undercover agent at the local high school.
“It was crazy and I’m very much proud of it. We did three seasons, a total of 75 episodes. It was like a sweatshop,” she says. “Now with Soul Sucker, it’s not the same at all. But it still has my tone and my language. It’s some kind of a twisted opposite [to Dumb]. If you love Shiri, now see which home she was raised in.”
“She’s a brilliant actress,” Levin says of Sabag. “Even before me taking on this, I saw Dumb and I thought she was brilliant.” Then partnering with her on Soul Sucker, “she came with the part,” the director laughs.
Before filming began, Levin spent a lot of time having conversations with Sabag, and also with her own mother and daughters about their relationships. As far as genre is concerned, she was also able to tap into her previous comedy work. “Not always did I handle tragic [material],” she notes. “I love [Avishag’s] humour; it’s kind of dark and not socially acceptable, not politically correct. This is what I like.”
On set, Levin would often adopt many of Sabag’s ideas for the visual style of the series. “She knows what she wants, and she knows what she wants from the other actors too,” she says. “I’m just there to really hold her hand and to put some of my ideas across.”
One outlandish sequence sees a character flying above a grave during a funeral. “I didn’t imagine it like this,” Levin says. “Then in the special effects meeting, Bat Hen said, ‘No, I want her to fly.’ I sat down quietly and said, ‘OK, yes.’ It was in a real cemetery and we didn’t get any permission to do that. And it ended up amazing. I didn’t believe we were going to succeed in shooting that.”
Due to debut on Hot later this year following its world premiere in London in February, Soul Sucker Is ultimately about the bonds between a mother and her daughter, and how they are incontrovertibly connected to one another. “A metaphor that my mother very much loves is that the umbilical cord is like rubber. It can stretch and your child can even go to the other side of the world and they will stay connected to you,” Sabag says. “I always imagine it as a bungee rope, because no matter how far you go and how strong you are, it’s going to pull you back to your mother.
“But I love my mother and I am all my mother put in me. I’m very much like her,” she adds. “So this is what I want to say about mothers and daughters. You cannot separate connections. This is a symbiotic bond. Even if you go far away, the bond is still living inside you.”
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tagged in: Abot Hameiri, Aharon Keshales, Bat Hen Sabag, Daphna Levin, Dori Media Group, HOT, Soul Sucker