The Jewish Supernatural and the Emergent Israeli Horror Genre

The emergence of horror films is one of the most recent and most interesting developments in Israeli culture. Ever since Rabies, celebrated as the first Israeli horror film, premiered in 2010, Cannon-fodder, Poisoned, Big Bad Wolfs, JeruZalem, and many others present the audiences not only with spectacles of blood and gore, but with allegories of the distinctly Israeli reality in which they are set and which they satirize. In this paper, I survey the emerging genre of Israeli horror, and focusing specifically on the original JeruZalem film (2015, dirs. Paz) and its sequel. JeruZalem features a zombie invasion, but the monsters in question have a supernatural, even spiritual pedigree, and the invasion starts in accord with an old prophecy on the eve of Yom Kippur, the most sacred day of Jewish calendar. The invaders are not any regular zombies, but rather are Nephilim, giant winged demons, endowed with great destructive power. (The Hebrew name of the beasts is particularly conspicuous within the English dialogue of the film.) Significantly, the Nephilim, according to the film, are a particularly Jewish phenomenon. In this paper, I situate JeruZalem in the context of both international cannon of horror genre, and local Israeli cinema, and theorize that its visual representation of the Judaic supernatural and mystical symbols is the Israeli parallel to the persistent use of Christianity in American horror.