Jewish Horror Cinema

Abstract This chapter examines the complex relationship between Judaism and horror cinema, distinguishing between films that merely feature Jewish characters and those that engage substantively with Jewish folklore and cosmology. While Jews often appear marginally in Christian-centric horror films like The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976), a distinct tradition of Jewish horror cinema has emerged through adaptations of folklore figures like the Golem and the dybbuk. The chapter traces how early Golem films, from Paul Wegener’s Der Golem (1920) to contemporary works like the Paz Brothers’ The Golem (2018), interpret this protective figure from Jewish mythology. Similarly, it analyzes dybbuk narratives from Michal Waszynski’s canonical The Dybbuk (1937) to recent films like Demon (2015) and Attachment (2022), showing how possession stories reflect Jewish approaches to loss and memory. While some films strip these folkloric elements of their cultural specificity, others maintain or reinterpret Jewish theological and cultural frameworks. The chapter proposes methodological questions for analyzing horror cinema’s engagement with Jewish traditions, arguing that examining films through a Jewish cultural lens opens new interpretative possibilities and enriches our understanding of how horror cinema engages with religious and cultural identity.