I love horror, obviously, and I love Jewish culture. While crossovers may not seem common, there’s quite a bit of superstition and creepiness in Jewish culture. Perhaps the most easily explained facet is the presence of sheydim, or demons. The books of the Kabbalah and the Gemara in particular discuss demons in detail. It is said that there are a thousand demons to one’s left side and ten thousand to one’s right. While belief in sheydim isn’t very prevalent in Jewish life today, there is plenty of historical basis for it. The best-known type of sheyd is a dybbuk, or the malevolent spirit of one who died before their time and can possess a living person in an effort to complete their duties. There are several adaptations of the dybbuk myth, such as the 2012 movie The Possession and the 1914 play The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds, written by S. Ansky. The Possession is an okay movie, but Ansky’s play is a masterpiece. A film version of it was released in 1937.
I never thought I’d get to see the full original film adaptation of The Dybbuk. It was kept for very limited showings by the National Center for Jewish Film for well over 30 years (there’s a 1989 article from the New York Times about a special, rare screening) until Kino Lorber got the rights and released it on Blu-ray a couple years ago. I saw a brief clip of the film on YouTube when I was in college, during a class in which we studied the play and the professor even said, “You’ll never see the whole thing,” and although there is a “full” video on the same site from 2019, it is actually missing several minutes and is in such poor quality that you can hardly make out the faces. When I discovered the Kino Lorber release, I plotzed and bought it right away. It was such a wonderful experience to finally see The Dybbuk.
The Dybbuk, as both a play and a movie, is highly regarded. Many sources cite both as the pinnacle of their Yiddish forms. Interestingly, though the plot centers on a demonic possession and exorcism, it’s not widely considered a piece of horror media. When I was writing my senior thesis on religion in horror literature, I reached out to a few professors for their takes on the play and its inherent spooky nature. However, none of them considered it a horror text. They saw it primarily as a tragedy and a piece of history. Why can’t it live in both spaces, between the two worlds of academia and horror?
Let’s talk about the film. It is clearly steeped in Yiddishkeit, or Jewish culture. It was written and performed in Yiddish and it was filmed in Polish shtetls. The subject matter itself, of a young bride being in love with the dybbuk who possesses her on the day of her wedding, is creepy, but the historical context is downright haunting. Just two years after the film’s release, Hitler’s troops invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. The locations we see in the film, the culture presented, and most of the performers were wiped out during the Holocaust. Yiddish films of the 1930s are some of the only first-hand evidence we have of a lost world.
We could linger on the horrors of the Holocaust, but let’s move on to the fictionalized horrors of The Dybbuk. There is an omniscient character, known only as the Messenger, who disappears and reappears through clever film overlays. There are plenty of superstitions, such as inviting the bride Leah’s deceased mother to the wedding to avoid disrespecting her memory. There is a scene of summoning Satan and there is talk of casting sacrilegious spells. Most terrifying of all is the Dance of the Dead scene. Although it only lasts a couple minutes, it is genuinely unnerving.
Of course, dancing must be accompanied by music, which is also a cultural touchstone of Yiddishkeit. We Jews sing our prayers and psalms, we have a long tradition of our own genre called klezmer, and our influence extends into modern music and theater. A good number of standards in the American songbook were actually written by Jews, like “White Christmas” by Irving Berlin and the musical West Side Story, composed by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. The Dybbuk uses music to its advantage not just during the Dance of the Dead but throughout the film. An arrangement of the psalm “The Song of Songs” is particularly important, as it reveals that Khonen, the poor scholar who dies after engaging with occult activities, was supposed to marry Leah because their fathers made a pact.
Respecting promises and keeping one’s word are valued traits in Judaism. The unintentionally broken promise in The Dybbuk sets off the whole chain of unfortunate events. Not only is the ill-fated couple affected by the unfulfilled agreement, but the whole community suffers. Guilt, terror, and death loom over the shtetl. It is not an insular problem, but rather permeates even the lives of those outside the community, including the tzaddik of Miropol, played by Abram Morewski, who conducts the trial and exorcism.
Although The Dybbuk isn’t often seen as a piece of horror media, I would go so far as to consider it a brilliant work of the genre. Ansky wrote a play that expertly weaves a tale of humanity, demons, and conflict between the two with an unashamedly Jewish spirit. Since Judaism is so underrepresented in horror, despite many superstitions and writings that are fertile for scary stories, I am grateful for this relic. You can read the play in various translations in print, book the movie through Kino Lorber for a non-commercial exhibition, or buy it on Blu-ray in a set with nine other classic Yiddish films from the same retailer. Don’t let this work fall deeper into obscurity.