Friday the 13th. The perfect time for one terrifying Jewish horror movie! Courtesy of Decal Releasing.

Happy Friday the 13th! I know, we’re not supposed to say that, especially if you’re superstitious like me. I don’t know when the last Friday the 13th was, but I love it because it’s a great reason to write about fun, spooky things and use, “but I can be silly and scary because today’s Friday the 13th!” as an excuse. (True confession: I’m actually not a big Jason Voorhees/Friday the 13th movie fan…)

Anyway! Today’s post is a very fun one. At the end of last year, I had the incredible privilege to chat with the team behind THE OFFERING, a terrifying film that is streaming on-demand on – you guessed it – this cursed day! This is a Jewish horror movie. Let that sentence roll with you for a second. How many JEWISH-themed horror movies do we really get each year? We get a lot of movies with demonic people contorting their bodies, but who saves them? Priests. The Holy Cross. The Bible. When do we get to see horror movies with rabbis and Jews? Ordinary Jews who just happen to face ghosts and demons in their lives? Has there ever been a demon horror movie where the exorcism takes place at a synagogue?

Excellently directed with an ingenious script and breathtaking imagery, THE OFFERING stands out for its ability to center a horror story in the ultra-Orthodox community while eschewing Jewish stereotypes. The community in this film is just people, a group of individual characters with their own morals and personal dilemmas. WHEN do we ever see this community in this type of genre?! And why has it taken so long for this type of film to come around? There have been similarly made Jewish horror films in the last few years, from The Vigil to Attachment, but there’s still a way to go. I hope this film is a catalyst for filmmakers out there to take these two genres, horror and Jewish, and unify them in a meaningful story.

The detail in THE OFFERING, which premiered at Fantastic Fest and is being lauded by critics, is simply remarkable. And also, it’s just really scary! (For the trailer, scroll down to the very bottom of this page.)

In this conversation, I interviewed director Oliver Park, writer Hank Hoffman, and producer Jonathan “Yoni” Yunger, the last of who also collaborated on the script with Hank. IT IS A SPOILER-FREE INTERVIEW. If you’re really superstitious about this particular day, maybe wait until tomorrow to watch THE OFFERING. If you love horror movies, as well as richly layered melodramas that just happen to feature a baby-eating demon, I cannot recommend this movie enough.


THE OFFERING. Oh my goodness. I love horror movies and Jewish movies, obviously, so getting to see one that’s a combination of two is so exciting. This seemed like such a passion project. From the very first shot to the last, there are just so many “horror” images. You have something hiding behind a door, mirrors, a creepy, demonic child, flickering lights, etc. You have a pregnant woman in a horror movie too, which means that something unfortunate may happen. Did you all grow up on horror movies?

JONATHAN “YONI” YUNGER: I think we all grew up on horror movies. Olly is the horror buff, Hank too. We all love horror films. Hank and I have known each other going on 15 years and we always would go watch all the new horror films together. And we love Jewish things because of how we grew up!

OLIVER PARK: I’ve been obsessed with horror since I knew what horror was. My parents say I wrote my first horror story when I was three when I said I didn’t want to go to bed because the “shadow people” were going to take me away. Luckily, on things like this, I got to team up with real writers. I think when you put someone who has horrifying, visual nightmares with someone like Hank who can pen things that will keep you awake for the rest of your life, audiences are in trouble forever.

Definitely. You know, I remember being on a date a few months ago and when I said, “I love horror movies so much,” she said, “I don’t and I don’t understand. Why do you want to make yourself scared?” I think it’s kind of a valid point. I mean, why is it that people love horror movies so much? Is it the thrill? The adrenaline?

OLIVER: I think there’s a couple things. Chemical things. Obviously, a jump scare gives you the same adrenaline or dopamine hit as some drugs. So obviously, that’s going to be a nice feeling for you, the same with the fact that the brain’s only job is to keep you alive. So essentially, when it’s problem solving and gets something right or you leave that theater feeling “alive,” you feel good. It’s a chemical reaction that’s going on in the brain. Then there’s obviously the emotional relation to things, like you get to see some of your own most vulnerable fears play out. Maybe it’s some things you can’t identify with because you’re just an individual, you’re too afraid, or these are societal issues that you can’t combat alone. Horror can do that for you to some extent. I hope no one ever finds the answer to that question because I think as soon as we bring logic into emotions and answer these questions, we’re all out of a job.

HANK HOFFMAN: I also think people like horror movies for the same reason they like movies in general, which is that they want to feel. We’re at a time where I think we’re suffering from a lot of emotional suppression, and people just want to feel something. Horror has an opportunity to be a religious experience because you’re dealing with the unknown and all the questions that religion tried to address or trying to deal with underlying fears; the scary things, like what happens when you die, who really runs your life, who’s in control, is there fate, etc. I think being able to tackle those ideas, to us, was very exciting because Judaism is full of scary ideas. I never realized that Judaism was full of scary ideas until I was trying to teach some midrashim (Jewish allegories) to my 10-year-old daughter, and she started crying. I said, “Why are you crying? I’m trying to inspire you” She said, “This stuff’s scary!” You’re dealing with extraordinary, mysterious ideas, and I think people love mystery. Horror tackles mystery at its core.

YONI: It’s also an experience that’s shared, you know? When people go watch a horror film, generally, they go together with somebody. I think today, that’s more important than ever because it’s much harder to connect on something today more than ever. And it’s so funny because all this tech [social media] is supposed to bring us together, but it’s kind of torn people apart. I think going to the movies or watching a movie at home and watching a horror movie at home where you can share that experience together and get scared together, jump together – whether you’re also doing it on a date or just with your friends – it’s a shared experience. You don’t have to really communicate between one another too much, and I think there are issues with communication today. You can just have that moment to “feel” together and have a good time, you know? At the end, you can have another conversation about that. How many times have you gotten scared or almost into a car accident with a friend or something crazy and all of a sudden, it jolts a conversation?

HANK: Yeah. It’s like virtual skydiving, in a weird way. I think people love the feeling of being brave. It’s the only genre where you’re like, “I feel brave that I went through that.” I think as we get older, it’s harder to appreciate horror like when you’re younger. When you’re younger, you never forget that horror movie that messed you up, that horror movie that changed the way you experienced reality for years. I mean, look at Jaws. It ruined the ocean for people. There’s an implicit dare when someone says they’re going to turn on a horror movie because you’re being scared to see if you can handle it. How brave you are? I don’t know if there is any other genre that is so visceral like that.

Oh, I hear you! I remember, as a kid, seeing The Sixth Sense because my dad was like, “Matt, it’s a scary movie, but it’s PG-13 and it was filmed in Philadelphia…so we have to see it.” It terrified me, but then I also remember feeling very brave. I could tell people in my class that I got to see the scary movie and made it through. It’s fascinating how horror really can do that.

HANK: I almost feel like you could sell t-shirts at the end of a movie saying, “I survived,” and then you just put in the name of the movie.

Exactly! So Hank, I read about your story, and it’s just incredible. So you were raised Modern Orthodox and studied at Aish HaTorah in Israel. The Offering is your first film feature writing debut?

HANK: It’s the first one they made.

Haha, yeah. And the inspiration all came from learning Kabbalah, right?

HANK: There were multiple inspirations. First and foremost, Yoni had an intense love of two things: horror movies and Jewish mysticism. It’s funny because I was actually going through a divorce at the time. I was a mess. Yoni would call me and console me with my pain…and then end the conversation with, “So are you gonna get this script done?” This was a fresh space, and Yoni was passionate about and knew that the combination of our interests could yield a very interesting story. In terms of the layers of inspiration, good artists don’t steal, in my opinion. They steal a lot. Mediocre artists steal a tiny bit. What I mean by that is if you look at a movie and are like, “That’s just two ingredients that you took from other movies and put them together,” you’re like, “eh, whatever.” If you talk to the artists of great movies, they’re like, “Oh, I stole a million little pieces,” like this scene from that movie in the 1950s, that line of a dialogue is from a diner I was at in Belgium when I was five, etc. So in terms of what the source of the inspiration was, it was a lot of homage. You can call it homage, inspiration, stealing, etc. (You just can’t call it plagiarism because then you’re in trouble.) So what we tried to do from the get-go was to be as greedy as possible and take as many elements that inspired us, whether it was people that we met in our childhood – specifically, Hasidic people – and fell in love with and felt they have never been represented; people like Heimish [a character in the film]. People always imagine the Hasid as a very black-and-white, very stale type of people. And we’re like, “These are the most interesting characters we’ve ever met!” Let’s bring some life to these people. I think that was a big part of the inspiration. There were a million things that inspired us, from Jewish mysticism to the nuances of the genre. I’ll say that the design principle was our guiding light, and I think that was the most important inspiration. From the get-go, what was important to me, at least – and I’m glad the guys felt the same way – is that horror is innately a tragedy. And so we have two options here: either people sit back and enjoy watching people murdered or we have an opportunity to lean into the tragedy. To Olly’s credit, he respects the genre so much that he wanted to make a great movie. The fact that it’s horror, that’s the spice. Olly really cared about the characters. Yoni and he spent a lot of time talking about the characters just as much spent on the set pieces and horror scares. What that can yield for you is if you really care about the characters, then it’s a tragedy when bad things are happening to us. Because Yoni and I have a sensitivity around antisemitism and specifically, the misrepresentation of Hasidic people, we realized that this could be more than just a horror film. This was an opportunity to make people care for the lives of an under-misrepresented minority in America that was being portrayed in a way where you almost want them to get punished. We thought about what if you can leave the movie and say, “No! We don’t want anything bad to happen to that Hasidic guy.” And then it makes your demon more juicy too because there are higher stakes. That was really important, above all the other things that we also sweat over.

I always say that a good horror movie needs to be scary, but there needs to also be emotionally relatable characters. You have to care about the characters. There are always cheesy horror movies from the 80s where you don’t care about anyone. What’s so unique and good about The Offering is that the characters are so relatable, you know? I think a lot of people who may have left their religious community, for example, may share Art’s emotions in the film. Even if you removed all the horror elements from the movie, you would still have a very moving, tragic drama. This might sound crazy, but I even felt a little bad for Abyzou. Is it bad for me to admit that?

OLIVER: No, you should feel bad for her!

YONI: It’s actually funny that you’re touching upon that.

OLIVER: She’s a character, which means she has an arc. She may not change at the end. That may be her downfall, which tends to be that way for a villain. Ultimately, however, every character has their own story to tell. If you track Abyzou’s story, it’s also a tragedy, like Hank was saying. It’s devastating looking at it from her point of view.

Yeah. She just needs to eat! Children, unfortunately, but yeah.

YONI: You talked about Art. If you think about it, Art is just a guy who bit off more than he can chew. How many people find themselves in that position in their lives because they’re trying to make everything around them seem OK, you know, while realizing they’re boiling inside? I think that’s very relatable. People are dealing with these issues every single day.

HANK: It’s also back to that design principle I was talking about. How do you represent Hasidim in an authentic way? We didn’t want to whitewash the characters. We didn’t want to lie and say, “Oh no, everyone’s just super nice. Everyone’s just amazing.” We wanted to humanize them, and there is nothing more awkward than intermarriage, when you’re dealing with that culture. We got some interesting pushback from certain people in the Jewish world, or at least I know I did, the pushback of “the father hugs her?”

YONI: Yeah!

HANK: It’s funny because people are getting murdered and you’re concerned about a hug, but it’s still a fair question. If you’re here to represent Hasidim, then they would never hug. So my answer to that, if there’s anyone who took umbrage with that creative decision, is that I think the responsibility of an artist is to authentically showcase human nature in cultures and societies. At the same time, you also have to show not only who they are but who they ought to be.

OLIVER: During the filming of that specific beat where he hugs her, someone actually asked me on set, “Why isn’t Arthur smiling? Why isn’t he happy about this?” Because he’s shocked! This is not what he expected. It’s an insight to a different world, and I think that’s the most important thing across all of this is that it’s a very different insight to what most people going into expect. The horror certainly brings it up and makes it commercial. I think people are going to be surprised. They’re going to have such a good time, and they’re going to learn so much.

Oh they will, yeah. Even watching the movie, what’s so interesting is that we’ve seen religious horror movies for so long now. I mean, there’s The Exorcist, for example, but it’s a priest. It’s not a rabbi. We’ve seen all these demonic horror movies, but it’s from the Christian side, never the Jewish one. I feel like there’s been a slow increase in Jewish horror movies. There are small movies like The Vigil and Attachment that are also similar to The Offering in that they revolve around Jewish demons and take place in ultra-Orthodox communities. Do you guys think there is definitely a chance for more of these horror movies to get made, but from the Jewish perspective? And why do you think there’s been a dearth for so long?

OLIVER: There’s been a gap, but let’s remember that the first trilogy of horror was Jewish. It was The Golem in 1915, before even Nosferatu. I would love to have a chat with Mary Shelley at some point about where she took Frankenstein from because The Golem was a story that reaches way, way, way further back.

HANK: I also want to add The Golem was created by the Maharal of Prague, who was a wild, wild rabbi. We might as well just call him a wizard at this point. He was a major mystic. What a lot of people don’t know is that most of the occult that inspired waves of comic books and horror films was actually pulled from misrepresentations of the writings of Maharal of Prague. So whether people consciously know it or not, The Golem is the seminal source of almost all occult that is out there in the world. The means all the pentagrams, magic stuff, Aleister Crowley stuff –

YONI: But because it was misrepresented.

HANK: It was totally misrepresented and perverted. What’s interesting is The Golem actually – whether people are aware of it or not – is like the heart of the entire occult universe.

OLIVER: Matthew quite rightly said there has been a dearth of Jewish horror. I think that first of all, it should be normalized because we don’t see The Conjuring as a “Christian” horror. We just see it as a horror. So I think all of this should be normalized.

YONI: I agree.

OLIVER: I think it’s pretty obvious why Jewish horror disappeared for a while, but I’ll leave that to Hank and Yoni.

HANK: I have two theories why there’s been a dearth. I think number one is for the most part, the fathers of Hollywood are a bunch of –

YONI: Yeah, that’s what I was going to get into –

HANK: A bunch of Jews who survived World War II. And what was their agenda? They wanted to be embraced by Americana. They wanted to feel part of the country club.

YONI: That’s why they gave birth to things like the western.

HANK: Exactly. So to get into their Judaism was against their agenda. Their agenda was, “No, we’re like you!”, not, “we’re distinctly Jewish with our unique tales.” But that doesn’t answer why there’s been a dearth in the past 25, 30 years. It answers why there was a long wave of it not being done. I could be wrong, but my theory is that the reason there’s been a dearth is because I think that we’re in a unique generation now where there are people who identify as Jews very strongly, but now they also equally identify with the West. They used to be much more separated. So if you were really into Judaism, you didn’t really want to be involved with western stuff. That was a little stigmatized and taboo. Now there’s a unique version of the modern Jew, who is watching everything on HBO. They’re very plugged into all the western culture, but at the same time, they’re also very plugged into their Jewish side. It’s only natural when those things combine that you would start seeing Jewish storytelling returning to the medium. Before, I think they were like oil and water. I don’t think those two passions were mixing as much. The modernity allowed for that blending. I could be wrong, but that’s my theory.

I can definitely see it too. I do hope they get made more. You, Olly, brought up old age Hollywood, and I can’t even imagine people making a horror movie with a Jewish theme to it, especially for back in the day. Even here at PJFM, sometimes we ourselves have trouble finding older, classic, Jewish American movies from the 30s on.

OLIVER: Because you’re looking at America. Go to Germany pre-1920 and you’re going to find a plethora. Most of the Jewish people in Germany, at the time, were the ones who were creating. That’s where Expressionism came from, and that’s where horror was born. Americans didn’t really cash into horror until the 20s. And even then, they avoided things that were difficult to tell because of what was going on in Europe. Europe was the birthplace of horror, and it crashed in the 20s. (We all know why.) It’s thanks to America that it was picked back up.

YONI: It’s not horror, but if you look at a movie like Gentleman’s Agreement, which came out just after the war, the studio heads wanted to make something that showed what it was like to feel antisemitism. But the way that they structured the movie is that Gregory Peck is this journalist who is pretending to be Jewish in order to feel what it’s like to feel antisemitism. In other words, they weren’t ready for a Jew to play a Jew. There was actually a competing script that was being written at MGM, and I think Gentleman’s Agreement was from Fox. The other script would have had a Jew playing a Jew, and at the end, they squashed that script because they were like, “We’re not ready for a Jew to play a Jew. We’re going to have a gentile pretend to be one,” because they were scared. Today, because we have access, you see words like Kabbalah, mysticism, and spirituality being thrown around. It’s just natural, like Hank was saying, that this stuff is going to make its way more into the movies. As it made its way into The Possession, with a dybbuk box, that was one tiny, little piece. It’s funny because I actually just spoke to Matisyahu about this three days ago. I told him about The Offering, and he said, “Well, I did a Jewish horror film!” I’m like, “No, Matisyahu. You did a horror film that had a piece of Judaism in it.” And now this is full-on, and we’re in. There’s a difference between the Catholic way of doing things and the Jewish way in that in the Catholic way, the demon comes in, possesses you, and you have to do the exorcism. On the Jewish side, it’s more like if you let it in. If you let it in, you make the action. We control how much or how little evil is allowed into this world. That’s a very deep idea. I think now that we’re exposing that idea to the world, I’m actually excited to see what other filmmakers or artists come up with to keep this genre going. I’m most excited to see who is going to try to top this because that’s what keeps us going.

HANK: This just occurred to me, only because I’ve been trying to wrestle with this dearth of Jewish representation in a genre that really was born from Jews and Jewish ideas. You know how scary it is to make a Jewish horror movie, in terms of the politics? The sensitivity that you usually wouldn’t have to tip-toe around if it were any other religion and you’re doing a horror film? I think the fear of antisemitism, being hated, the danger of antisemitism has been so fresh for so long for so many Jews that you don’t even want to go to the idea of combining two elements: Jew and being scared. You don’t want to be scared of anything Jewish. “No, we’re safe! Please. It’s not true about the lies that have been told about us!” People don’t even want to go there. I think we’re a generation that feels more secure that the world, for the most part, is not down with racism. This is a fairly new thing where we’re finally at a point, thank God, in the western culture where racism is unacceptable. A guy like Kanye, who’s a billionaire –

YONI: “Was.”

HANK: Was, but when in the history of the world has a billionaire lost nearly their entire fortune, in about a week, for being an antisemite or racist? That is unprecedented. So on one hand, it’s very scary that someone like Kanye, with such a big platform, is saying these things. On the other hand, it’s also reassuring to see the response from the world saying, “We don’t like this. We don’t accept this. And we condemn this.” So that creates a safer space for people to do more Jewish horror because they know people aren’t going to take it as seriously. They’re not going to say, “See! This movie’s proof that Jews are playing with demons or do stuff in the protocol of Zion!” I think with that safety, you can lean in and join the collective campfire and tell your culture’s tales. I think that before, it was probably really scary to do that and not worth it for most artists.

I think that’s what’s so exciting about this movie and more Jewish horror movies we’re getting in. Filmmakers, actors, and everyone do feel a little bit safer to explore these topics and ideas. I really want to ask all of you about the art direction of this movie and the mise-en-scène. (Mise-en-scène is basically a film term for what’s in the shot.) Every scene in that apartment is just so detailed, the opening shot with the puddles, the stacks and stacks of books, the flickering lights and everything. I read, Olly, that you filmed this “at the peak of COVID-19.”

OLIVER: Oh yeah.

YONI: We were basically from set to hotel, set to hotel. No one was allowed to go out. There was COVID testing every day and protocols that we had to follow. We had to work on a minimal crew. We would have had a bigger crew had it been a different time, but that also gets you super focused. There’s nothing to think about but the movie.

HANK: That and COVID, yeah.

YONI: That and COVID, yeah! Everyone was a little bit paranoid.

HANK: You’re one sneeze away from getting shut down.

OLIVER: The fact that we were able to actually shoot on sets without having to travel meant that we were able to stay as a tight-knit group, work within soundstages, and design these sets beautifully. Shoutout to Philip Murphy, the most incredible production designer in the world. Also, it gave us the opportunity to work collaboratively with the story creators and writer, as well, because ultimately, sets are a representative of how the characters are feeling. As the house is breaking down, our characters are breaking down. It’s a mirror to what they’re going through. It shows that they’re trapped in this unending hell, 100% set to lose this battle against this demon. I think any set is another character. You’re just in a different character’s space, so to speak. And speaking of a golem, it was actually Rabbi Loew from the original Golem who was inspiring lots of the way that Yosille, in the opening scene, looked. There was a lot of what Hank mentioned, stealing from the greats. There were so many things hidden, in a way, in the set design. We call them Easter eggs, nowadays, but I want to change that term because it’s not very Jewish.

YONI: Actually, it kind of is!

OLIVER: But I think that if anyone were to go back and watch carefully, there’s an enormous amount you’ll see within the sets.

YONI: Almost every scene has an Easter egg in it.

HANK: Like Kubrick. What Kubrick did in The Shining is you can pause almost anything and be like, “Why is there a can of beans?” and you can start theorizing. We geeked out on that too. I’ll tell you something hilarious. We created about 40 fake books with fake titles, all in Kabbalah, that were strewn throughout the room. You have limitations when you’re shooting. You’re on schedule, so we weren’t able to showcase as many, but the unbelievable efforts were put into everything, from wallpaper to what’s on the carpet and what the magnets are on the fridge. To Olly’s credit, he was hugely collaborative. The more collaborative you are, the more you can condense the collective intelligence of your creative team into every shot. I’m glad that came through. There’s no shortage. We’re going to wait now, and the movie should speak for itself, but I wouldn’t be surprised if later on, we’ll put something out loosely explaining what’s being buried. Olly had a term when we were in development that I appreciated. He said the confidence to bury things. The amount of burying that you can do with the visual elements of a room is extraordinary. Sometimes, the plot is even given away if you’re paying attention to the wallpaper.

YONI: That’s very, very true.

Now I need to rewatch this! I gotta find all these Easter eggs.

YONI: Yeah, you should! Behind every Easter egg, there are deep ideas there. This was almost kind of an experiment, and we wanted to see what would happen with inserting these ideas and see how the audience would absorb them. Generally, for the horror audience, the questions they would get after during a Q&A is how’d you pull off this scare? What happened with the camera scare? All of that stuff. But in the Beyond Fest screening, for example, they were asking really deep questions of ideas that we subliminally put into the movie. I was thinking about this this morning while I was preparing for this. I was like, “Holy shit. We figured out a way to put deep ideas into something and conceal them in order for them to be revealed, and they were able to be absorbed by the consciousness of today.” It’s a really crazy, deep idea. It’s a very Kabbalistic idea, and we pulled it off. We have a screening tomorrow night to a mainly Jewish audience, and it’s going to be very interesting to see the responses. I’m pretty excited for it, but that came with all the set design and working together to bring that stuff to the surface.

HANK: One thing is we initially were like, “Alright. We gotta find a Jewish director.” Olly, to his credit, is not Jewish. Yet, in hindsight, I’m really glad that we didn’t have a Jewish director because this movie is about bridging two worlds. Olly represented one part of the mentality and we were another. We were trying to lean on another, old-school mentality. The fusion of the two came together in a really amazing way. Olly was so open-minded about everything. We were able to distill things. We could say an idea and take it for granted, and Olly would be like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re going to have to explain that.” And then as you distill and distill it, wonderful imagery and buried ideas come out of it. One thing that I really want to add is that we put in authentic spells. We put in spells that were long buried that your average yeshiva bocher doesn’t even know exists. The thing is that Yiddish in these books is going extinct, and so what this film also is is a museum of lost images and a lost language. I actually wanted to push for more Yiddish and we were very close to having almost the entire first scene all in Yiddish with the little girl, but there’s only so much you can put on a Bulgarian girl to learn fluent Yiddish. I’m not even fluent in Yiddish! So the effort to bury is haunting because these are with a dying language, a super minority of America. You know, a lot of people think that Jews are a huge percentage of the American population. I once saw a documentary where they were interviewing average people on the street. They said, “What percentage of Americans are Jewish?” “Oh, I don’t know. 20%. 30%.” When you tell them it’s not even 2% and 1 ½ %, they’re like, “Nah! Come on. That’s not possible…because Jews ‘run the world’ or are ‘so big.’” You’re dealing with a super, super, super small minority. Horror relies on this sense of feeling fragility. There’s nothing more fragile than a super small minority that has no representation and is also dealing with books that are written in Aramaic. Who speaks Aramaic nowadays? You’re dealing with a dying language, and then Yiddish is a dying language. That’s a very haunting thing. Whether people pick up on it or not, that’s all laced in there. You’re dealing with an archive of lost literature throughout the frame. So we thought that was pretty nifty.

You mentioned the film is like a museum in a way. I couldn’t agree more. This has been so amazing, you guys. I’m going to end with a very silly question that I have to ask. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with “cursed” horror movies. There are a lot of famous horror movies where unexplainable stuff happened, like The Exorcist¸ The Omen, and Poltergeist. Was there anything unexplainable that happened during filming?

HANK: Yes!

YONI: Absolutely!

HANK: Multiple.

YONI: So we were in Bulgaria, where our studios were. We were getting ready to shoot the movie. My wife was there, and she kept having these insane dreams, like really crazy, demonic dreams. And she wasn’t on set every day. She wasn’t coming in and getting consumed with the movie the way that we were. If any of these guys were coming in saying they were having bad dreams, I’d be like, “OK. Great. Good for you.” My wife would come and tell me to change things that she didn’t even know that we were working on, things that I was wrestling with, like do we do it or not? Is it important to have this in the film? She would come to me and say, “I think you should do it this way.” I was like, “How did you even know that we’re dealing with that?” She went, “Oh, I had this crazy dream when I was talking to the demon or whatever…” I was like, “what?!”

Oh my God! I just got goosebumps.

YONI: That happened multiple times while we were doing the film.

HANK: Changes were made in the script to respect whatever was going through his wife.

YONI: Yeah, we literally made changes to honor what she was coming to us with because we had a feeling it just wasn’t coming from her exactly.

HANK: We changed one word from the spell so that it was 100% authentic but technically, we’re not going to set off launch. There’s no lift-off. There’s another thing also. Classically, the return to faith storyline is if you return to faith, you’re good to go. Our story, to make it Jewish, is that to turn to faith is not a Jewish idea. The Jewish idea is to return to the rules. The fact that faith is not enough has always been the Jewish idea. It’s that there really is an engineered, mystical universe with very complex algorithms that if you don’t respect, they backfire heavily, regardless of simply returning to faith. To that end, it was very important to Yoni, Olly, and me about the amulet [featured in the movie]. Without going into any details that I’m not allowed to go into, let’s just say this was not a unanimous idea when dealing with all the notes people give you when you’re doing a movie. Yoni went to a psychic – a non-Jewish psychic too – and I don’t know how they picked up on this, but they said the amulet has to stay.

YONI: I wasn’t even talking about the movie yet. It was literally the first thing he told me. I was like, “How did you know I was coming to talk to you about this?” The first thing he said to me on the phone was, “The amulet must stay.”

HANK: So believe it or not, that was enough for Yoni and I to be like, “Well, then it stays.”

YONI: Exactly!

The good news is this all seems like very harmless paranormal activity and not evil.

YONI: Olly, did you have something?

HANK: No. Sorry to say no to that question because I would love to say something great happened, but nothing creepy happened on my end.

Haha, well that’s good. I just had to ask that because I always geek out on those things.

YONI: I mean, our set didn’t light on fire or anything like that.

HANK: Wait! We also had one freakish power outage. Remember?

YONI: Oh, yeah. What scene were we shooting when that happened?

HANK: We were shooting at the house, I believe. The main floor of the house. The power died everywhere. We had a fairly large crew, even though it was COVID, and I don’t think there was a single person that wasn’t saying, “That’s weird!”

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By Matthew Bussy, Program Director of PJFM