J-horror is often used as shorthand for Japanese horror, but that “J” is a bit limiting. It’s also required for Jewish horror, a subgenre that’s coming into its own. In 2012 the Jewish possession movie titled, well, The Possession presented the world with a Hasidic exorcist. Directed by Ole Bornedal, the film had a substantial budget and wide theatrical release. Played by the famed Hasidic rapper Matisyahu, the sympathetic exorcist has to assist a goy family who bought their way into trouble at a yard sale. Em (Natasha Calis), a young girl from a broken family, asks her father to buy her an ornate box which, unbeknownst to them, contains a dybbuk. A dybbuk is essentially the ghost of a wicked person—a very powerful entity that, according to the movie, is capable of possession. It turns out that this is actually the demon Abyzou.
Six years later, the famous Jewish monster, the golem, made an appearance in the Israeli horror film, Doron and Yoav Paz’s The Golem. Set during a pogrom in seventeenth-century Lituania, it follows previous films that share both the monster and title. It does this in unique fashion, however, by making the golem a little boy in the shape of a grieving mother’s dead son. Hannah (Hani Furstenberg), the mother, creates the golem to protect the shtetl against hostile Christians. Golems do what golems do, and it saves the community but then turns violent on the Jews.
The next year (this puts us at 2019), Keith Thomas’s The Vigil introduced non-Jewish viewers to the shomer, the role of one who performs the Jewish ritual of watching over a corpse all through the night. Yakov Ronen (Dave Davis), an Orthodox Jew down on his luck, needs the fee money and agrees to sit with the dead man. Set in Brooklyn and shot partially in Yiddish, there’s a feel of authenticity to the movie that bigger budget productions like The Possession somehow fail to capture. As a Holocaust survivor story, The Vigil has its own poignance.
This month we now have The Offering. Directed by Oliver Park, who isn’t Jewish (finding the religious affiliation of living people is often quite difficult if you don’t know them to ask, and, even if you do know them, asking if someone is Jewish is still potentially problematic), the film brings back Abyzou, the Jewish demon we met in The Possession. Once again, it’s in an Orthodox setting, specifically Hasidic.
This 
new J-horror is marked by a distinct intellectualism, but the specter of appropriation must always lurk when such films involve goyim as producers, directors, and writers (The Offering was written by Hank Hoffman, who is Jewish and actually has experience as a shomer.) Nevertheless, those of us who aren’t Jewish can still feel compelled to watch. That compulsion, even if problematic, is repaid in The Offering. In fact, the film centers on a character Art (Nick Blood) who’s forsaken Hasidic ways to pursue a career in real estate. He married a non-Jewish girl, Claire, played by Emily Wiseman, who is pregnant with their first child. Having fallen on financial hard times, Art decides to go to Brooklyn to reconcile with his father, who runs a successful funeral home there.
It turns out, however, that another member of the community, Yosille (Anton Trendafilov) accidentally summoned Abyzou in an esoteric ritual meant to bring his dead wife back to him. Abyzou, as The Possession taught us, is the “taker of children,” a Jewish demon that feeds off the souls of the young. Since Art’s father Saul (Allan Corduner) handles the funerary needs of the community, Yosille’s body is brought in. He’d trapped Abyzou by his suicide, following an arcane kabbalistic rite. But Abyzou is now in the same house as a pregnant woman. Art, who is helping to prepare the corpse, fails to tell his father that an amulet fell from the body and broke. He hides it instead, not knowing he’s just released the demon.
Meanwhile, Heimish (Paul Kaye), Saul’s devoted assistant, discovers that Art has to get his father to sign over his house—his business and livelihood—as collateral in order to prevent losing his own home. Heimish was suspicious of why Art had returned in the first place, since he’d made no attempts to reconcile with his father earlier. Abyzou, taking on different forms, and making Claire and Art see things that aren’t there, begins circling in on the unborn child. Without giving too much away, it’s nevertheless obvious that the set up is consistent with a realistic Hasidic family scenario, but involving a Jewish demon.
Demons are ill-defined monsters. The demon as it’s understood today largely derives from the Catholic world of The Exorcist (1973). This Christian-originated entity has roots that go back at least to ancient Mesopotamia (the movie begins in Iraq, after all), but developed in different ways in Judaism than it did in Christianity. Movie makers often face the dilemma of having to show demons, and the corporeal kind are never as scary as the unseen variety, as in The Exorcist. Jewish horror is, whether appropriation or not, reclaiming the Jewish monsters. The golem goes without saying, but The Vigil brings in a mazzik, another type of Jewish demon, while The Possession uses a dybbuk and shares Abyzou with The Offering.
There’s a common sadness to these films. The sadness has two essential foci: persecution and death. Persecution has a long and tragic association with Judaism as a religion that separates itself and finds a world hostile to those who do things differently. Death, however, is central to these Jewish horror films. In The Possession, the dybbuk is an unsettled spirit of a dead person. The eponymous golem from 2018 is made in the image of a dead child. The Vigil unfolds through one night’s watch over the corpse of a Holocaust survivor. The Offering takes place in a funeral home. Foregrounding death in this way says much about religion and horror, but in these cases also makes it central to portrayals of Judaism. Judaism in general doesn’t emphasize spiritual entities like Christianity tends to, which again raises questions regarding cultural appropriation of Jewish monsters.
It’s a bit early to tell about the reception of The Offering, but like The Golem and The Vigil it’s authentic to the Judaism it represents. The Offering makes use of many standard horror tropes, but it nevertheless ties in a complex story of reconciliation between a religious parent and a secular child. Loyalty to community and tradition are portrayed in positive ways, not that they will prevent a demon from having its way with you. All of this points to a future in which we might expect further thoughtful J-horror of the new kind, grappling with religion and Jewish monsters.
Steve A. Wiggins is an independent scholar who has taught at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Carroll College, and Rutgers and Montclair State Universities. He is the author of Holy Horror: The Bible and Fear in Movies (McFarland, 2018). Check out his website. Steve has also written for Horror Homeroom on “What To Do When the Exorcist is Absent,” “The Golem as the Perfect Monster” and sex and death in The Lighthouse and The Witch.
