Carl Rosenberg, a reader of this blog, made me aware of an interesting facet of the 22nd Toronto Jewish Film Festival. It features a section on horror titled “The Search for a Jewish Horror Film: Golems, Dybbuks and Other Movie Monsters.” This is described as follows and features the following films:

With a series of screenings and talks, this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival attempts to define the Jewish horror film. Horror movies traditionally suggest a Christian worldview; however, recent scholarship is starting to look at the work of Jewish filmmakers, and how they represent the metaphysical and spiritual worlds of horror movies. Add to this, the recent growth of horror movies coming out of Israel such as Rabies, Big Bad Wolves and this year’s very creepy Goldberg & Eisenberg and Jewish horror seems to add an exciting new variation to the genre. This series is based on the recent scholarship of professor and author Dr. Mikel Koven who will introduce most of the screenings.

Films:

The Dybbuk

The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck

God Told Me To

Goldberg and Eisenberg

The X-Files: Kaddish

Zeitgeist

There will also be a discussion by Mikel Koven:

Jewish film scholar and horror movie buff, Dr. Mikel Koven, has been searching for evidence of Jewishness in horror movies for as long as he can remember. This FREE TALK is a personal journey through Jewish representation in horror movies (in films like The Exorcist and An American Werewolf in London), where Jewish characters exist on the margins of a Christian cosmos. Koven will also discuss some recent films rooted (not unproblematically) within a more Jewish universe, like The Unborn and The Possession (which are based on Dybbuk stories). He will also touch on the various incarnations of The Golem.

Mikel Koven is Senior Lecturer & Course Leader in Film Studies at the University of Worcester (in the UK). He has published extensively on topics such as Jewish Cinema, horror movies and folklore. His books include La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film (2006), Film, Folklore & Urban Legends (2007) and Blaxploitation Films (2010). Eighteen years ago, as part of his doctoral study on Jewish cinema, he participated in the 5th Toronto Jewish Film Festival, interviewing a number of audience members.

Read more on this in a piece at TheStar.com.