Camille explains:
“I heard from a friend about a gang named the “midnight hunters”, which reputedly consisted of a bunch of upper class young adults. They hang out at night in deserted areas of the city, displaying ultraviolent behaviour. Trespassing, setting cars on fire or assaulting people. Their favorite pastime is what they call “the cleanse”, which consists in reaching beat down areas of the city at night in their fancy sport cars, targeting isolated, often homeless elderly people and beating them up with golf clubs and hockey sticks.
When I heard about these things, half horrified, half intrigued, I first thought it was some kind of an urban legend, but my friend, “V” told me he knew people who could testify they were for real. The most difficult part of the project was to establish contact since their identity is still unknown by the authorities and they managed to act discreetly so far, mostly targeting outcasts, migrants, people whose lives don’t seem to matter to the public opinion or the establishment. But I did all I could to arrange and meet them, it took me a few weeks and a lot of research, but I eventually came across someone who knew their leader, “J” personally and I eventually got to meet him. He struck me as a calm and considerate gentleman and I couldn’t believe the Hunters were as violent as I was told they were. So when he told me that they were gathering the same night and that if I wanted to film them I had to be at midnight on a certain parking lot in the Anderlecht area, I didn’t react as carefully as I should have.
As I arrived, they were all wearing pale sport polos, which seems to be some kind of uniform for them, and I noticed J had small tattoos - such a noticeable feature actually because none of the others had any.
As most of them belong to politically influential families (among which an important industrial company and a well known law firm), their main condition for allowing me to film them was not to display any of their faces, except for J, who seems to be way more outspoken and might even take the role of a frontman in the future. Actually, he was the only one in the group who seemed to enjoy the presence of the camera and to be willing to show off. The rest of them can be considered as “closet vandals”, some are married and all of them are professionally active, they see “The hunters” as some kind of secret bloodsport club. “For us it’s a well deserved way to blow off a little steam, we’re all hard working citizens you see, we undergo stress and responsibilities. Some prefer to do Yoga or macrame, but it’s not for us. And since there’s no Circus Maximus and no wars around here at the moment, someone’s gotta do the job” said one of them.
Only initials and nicknames are allowed during their gatherings, which always starts by a ritual which they defended for me to film or report here. With the Hunters, there is no “asking questions”, or too much talking in general. I wasn’t allowed to film the interviews or take pictures. The only thing “J” agreed with was for me to follow them and film some of their actions.
Surprisingly enough their hatred doesn’t seem specifically directed towards any gender or race. For all I witnessed and heard them say, their only concern relates to “class”. They openly hate the poor, that they consider “parasites”, often calling them “scum” or “whack”.
“Krisis” (whose real name is Christine, I learnt after) a female member is very clear about their views: “we’re not against progress or gender equality, we actually believe in those things, but we believe a healthy society has to self regulate. That includes wiping off undesirables, the kind of people who take advantage of it and never give anything back but mediocrity, ugliness and disgrace.”
“We live in a rotten time of human history, a world in decay, we don’t belong in such a wasteland. Technology and science should have brought us happiness and we think it could, but take a look at this, it creates too much waste. Toxic waste, human waste… We refuse the loss of meaning that it imposes on us. We choose to fight, we celebrate the strength of youth, willpower and survival of the fittest. A core value that our democratic world has forgotten for a long time”.
In the morning, shaken by what I had seen and praising God for making it home, I listened to some Figure Section while watching the images. Something worked straight away between the images and the track and I found the lyrics were about alienation and the violence of today’s society. In my train of thoughts I figured it would make sense to recycle those videos into a music video so I roughly edited what I had and came with this result.
Spectre is out now for free download and you can get yours at: https://figuresection.bandcamp.com/album/spectre
