theory – Jewish Horror Review

With Christianity having a stranglehold over most of Europe for several centuries and large amounts of early modern visual art being devoted to religious scenes or figures, even the most agnostic and atheist among us are familiar with certain images: the crucifixion, the resurrection, the Virgin Mary, and the Eucharist to name a few. However, the ubiquity of these images has somewhat defanged them. When writing horror, cliched depictions of the devil and the like just don’t cut it anymore. What’s a lazy screenwriter to do?

In a fantastic lecture given for the Miskatonic Institute in March 2020, Dr Mikel Koven suggested the idea of horror movies adopting a kind of ‘Jewish drag’. The lecture (initially an article on Dr Koven’s blog) offers several examples of narratives that use Jewish theology, folklore, and culture to tell distinctly Gentile, if not overtly Christian narratives. These texts get the best of both worlds: using Jewish theology or folklore is refreshing, something audiences are probably less familiar with, but the narrative is still able to conform to Christian (aka Western-box-office-friendly) norms. Koven’s examples, including The Exorcist (1973), William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist III: Legion (1990), and Carl Schultz’s The Seventh Sign (1988), all utilise Jewishness, whether through overtly Jewish characters, agnosticism framed through a Jewish perspective, the existence of dybbukim, or Jewish eschatology (the area of Jewish theology that discusses the role of Jews in the end of days, etc.). While Koven concedes that films such as Ole Bornedal’s The Possession subvert this somewhat by grounding themselves firmly in Jewish cosmology and granting no power to Christianity, this is quite clearly the exception to the rule. Judaism is rarely invoked in service of Jewish horror, instead bolstering Christian horror. The use of a non-conventional iconography in horror strengthens the norm instead of subverting or questioning it, and audiences are left with an amalgamated vision of Judeo-Christianity, and thus ‘Jewish drag’ comes to be, as a narrative mode in which the other Abrahamic religions are only valid if they become supporting players in Christian narratives.

With all this in mind, Dr Koven’s choice to invoke drag made me consider the reverse. If Gentile writers can have ‘Jewish drag’, can Jewish writers don ‘Catholic drag’? In Judith Butler’s seminal monograph Gender Trouble, the author outlines three key elements of constructing gender anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance, in no particular order. None is more ‘real’ or instrumental in constructing gender than any of the others, and the three endlessly contradict and destabilise one another. The effect of drag and other means of impersonation is that attention is drawn to the inherent contradictions at play, highlighting how identities have no ontological status outside of the acts that constitute its reality. Drag can reveal artifice and revels in it, be this in terms of gender or, in my case, religion, mocking both the imitator (through parody) and the very idea of an ‘original’ (through pastiche). On top of this, drag has never been limited only to gender. The 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning emphasises the subversive elements of drag within multiple cross-sections of society, particularly within race and class. Ideas of opulence and adopting the aesthetics of the upper class from the New York City drag subculture have provided venues to interrogate power relations between the imitator and the imitated. Drag can be seen as a subversive act with the potential to envision radical new ideas about gender, and if we apply theories of drag to religion, I believe they can facilitate discussion of the dialectical tensions between Christianity and Judaism.

I’ll be the first to admit that this is a niche within a niche, and there are certainly discussions to be had about whether this is an empowering, satirical mode, or merely another example of Jewishness and Judaism being side-lined in the horror genre, even by Jewish writers and directors. However, three of the most famous occult horror movies of all time, The Exorcist, The Omen, and Rosemary’s Baby, were directed by Jewish creators. Alongside modern contributions such as Hereditary and the filmography of Michael Haneke, there is some evidence of a pattern here. But what purpose can we ascribe to this pattern? I believe that Catholic drag has three key functions:

Satire

Catholic drag allows for covert satire even in films that would normally flinch away from criticising Christiannity, and with an abundance of self-serious, melodramatic rituals and fire-and-brimstone preaching rhetoric, the Catholic church is ripe for parody and mocking. Plus, the far darker elements of the Catholic church, such as historic sex abuse scandals, and the individual bigotry found in many sects of Christianity, such as the Westboro Baptist Church, provide ample targets for satirists (non-Jewish horror films such as Kevin Smith’s Red State (2011) provide incisive critique of the latter).

De-centring Christianity

In much the same way as I am trying to do with this research, here Catholic drag is used as a Trojan horse of sorts, facilitating explorations of other religious and cultural groups in the horror genre. For example, one of the films Dr Koven cites, The Exorcist III: Legion, uses Catholic iconography and submits to a Catholic cosmology, but explores the roles of Judaism and agnosticism within such narratives. This subversion or expansion of Christian narratives to include other perspectives aids in both deconstructing Christianity and in providing space for alternative religious narratives.

Interrogating Christian fears

Ultimately, Catholic drag serves to denaturalise the hegemonic Christianity that we see in horror by way of poking fun at it, using it as a device to discuss the roles of other religious and cultural groups in the horror genre (for example, one might find a valuable space to explore queer themes through Catholic drag), or interrogating what objects or sources of fear are dominant in a Christian worldview, who Christians are afraid of, and why they are so afraid in the first place. Catholic drag is a narrative device that enables Christianity and Judaism to be in conversation with each other in the horror genre, in ways that destabilise the hegemony of the former and explore the potential of the latter.

In a note to his publisher when releasing ‘The Metamorphosis’, Franz Kafka was careful to specify that the cover-art for the story should not depict any specific insect. In the text, Kafka remains vague with regards to describing the insect Gregor becomes, his descriptions limited mostly to ‘his hard, as it were armor-plated, back’, a ‘domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments’, and ‘numerous legs’. While readers may assume Gregor’s appearance, the author refuses to grant the spectacle of confirming these assumptions, rejecting the iconography and symbols that we see so often in gentile and Christian horror. Kafka’s narrative voice therefore rejects the Christian mode of visualising narrative in favour of a Jewish mode, focusing more on description than direct representation.

The an-iconic (as in, rejection of icons) is a specifically Jewish tradition, as it corresponds both with Talmudic opposition to false idols and the social need to obscure Jewish themes and narratives within more mainstream works due to anti-Semitism. Henry Bial argues that Jewish-American artists do not have the privilege of transparency in their works due to their status as a marginalised community, and we can easily apply this to Jewish horror. Bial and Omar Bartov both point to a growing trend in the late 20^th century of Jewish identity being normalised on screen through characters and scenarios that feature few overt references to Judaism, but give viewers a vague sense of ‘Jewishness’ (e.g. Seinfeld). Before such depictions were commonplace and in a far more aggressively anti-Semitic environment, the more subtle indicators of Jewishness, such as the an-iconic voice aid in smuggling Jewish undertones into the text and interrogating anti-Semitism in early 1900s Europe. By maintaining this an-iconic voice, Kafka again encourages the reader to sympathise with his unwilling monster: we are unable to discriminate against him in the same way as those who can ‘see’ him within the narrative, and therefore a counter-narrative is offered to his dehumanisation. In addition to this, Kafka is able to circumvent the need for specifically Jewish iconography, and instead establishes Jewish subtext via his use of an an-iconic narrative voice.

What is perhaps less clear, however, is why Kafka does this and what we can infer about Jewish horror from the use of the an-iconic voice. Consider the Catholic iconography of martyrdom: Catholic art of figures such as St Sebastian, the patron saint of holy deaths, focuses on the beauty in suffering, the sacred experience of martyrs whose pain brings them closer to God. Little to no thought is afforded to the realities of such suffering – repulsive bodily fluids, tremendous amounts of pain, and the varied guts and gore one might typically associate with the horror genre. While there are films such as Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2009) which explore the physical, political, and emotional complexities of suffering, these are few and far between, and are widely considered too distressing to be within mainstream horror fare. Death and its associated spectacle in mainstream art is rarely explored in terms of the visceral realities: what Julia Kristeva would consider the abject elements of death (the aforementioned bodily fluids, guts, and gore), are rather oddly disregarded in much mainstream modern horror, with deaths made so rote that they are often robbed of their true terror. These operatic, aestheticized, and often even eroticised depictions certainly bear more resemblance to Catholic art, with suffering being elevated to the level of the sacred, and the realities of such suffering being side-lined. Therefore, one might infer the reverse from Kafka’s an-iconic voice. He refuses to provide readers with an explanation for Gregor’s transformation, keeping the magical, mystical, and possibly religious elements of it completely irrelevant to the narrative. Instead, the reader is made to pay attention to the squalor in which Gregor lives (‘he left traces behind him of the sticky stuff on his soles’, ‘his warm room…turned into a naked den’) and to face the abject elements of his slow decay and death. In ‘The Metamorphosis’, Gregor’s suffering is not noble, nor poetic, nor aestheticized; it is simply suffering, and is thus attended with everything that suffering entails.

For more on ‘The Metamorphosis’, check out A Swarm of Flies: Kafka vs Cronenberg, our piece on the king of horror’s iconic film adaptation of the story,.

Or if you want to learn more about Franz Kafka’s unique contributions to the horror genre, read our article on two of his other short stories, ‘A Country Doctor’ and ‘In The Penal Colony’