New Israeli Horror: Local Cinema, Global Genre

By Olga Gershenson

Before 2010, there were no Israeli horror films. Then distinctly Israeli serial killers, zombies, vampires, and ghosts invaded local screens. The next decade saw a blossoming of the genre by young Israeli filmmakers. New Israeli Horror is the first book to tell their story. Through in-depth analysis, engaging storytelling, and interviews with the filmmakers, Olga Gershenson explores their films from inception to reception. She shows how these films challenge traditional representations of Israel and its people, while also appealing to audiences around the world.
 
Gershenson introduces an innovative conceptual framework of adaptation, which explains how filmmakers adapt global genre tropes to local reality. It illuminates the ways in which Israeli horror borrows and diverges from its international models. New Israeli Horror offers an exciting and original contribution to our understanding of both Israeli cinema and the horror genre.
 
A companion website to this book is available at  https://blogs.umass.edu/newisraelihorror/ (https://blogs.umass.edu/newisraelihorror/)

Book trailer: https://youtu.be/oVJsD0QCORw (https://youtu.be/oVJsD0QCORw)
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781978837867

Book preview

Cover: New Israeli Horror, Local Cinema, Global Genre by Olga Gershenson

New Israeli Horror

New Israeli Horror

Local Cinema, Global Genre

OLGA GERSHENSON

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey

London and Oxford

Rutgers University Press is a department of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, one of the leading public research universities in the nation. By publishing worldwide, it furthers the University’s mission of dedication to excellence in teaching, scholarship, research, and clinical care.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gershenson, Olga, 1969– author.

Title: New Israeli horror : local cinema, global genre / Olga Gershenson.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023011915 | ISBN 9781978837843 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978837850 (hardback) | ISBN 9781978837867 (epub) | ISBN 9781978837874 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Horror films—Israel—History and criticism. | Motion pictures—Israel—History.

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.H6 G39 2024 | DDC 791.43/6164—dc23/eng/20230424

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023011915

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2024 by Olga Gershenson

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

rutgersuniversitypress.org

For Aaron

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 The Precursors: From The Angel Was a Devil to Frozen Days

Part I Subversion

2 The First Hebrew Horror: Rabies

3 A Korean Revenge Thriller in the Israeli Countryside: Big Bad Wolves

Part II Conversion

4 Horror in the IDF

Zombies in the Fatigues: Poisoned and Cannon Fodder

Freak Out: The Final Boy on the Base

The Specters of Violence in The Damned

5 The Jewish Supernatural: JeruZalem

6 Slasher on the Kibbutz: Children of the Fall

Part III Aversion

7 Escaping Israel: Another World, Madam Yankelova’s Fine Literature Club, and The Golem

Coda: Is There I-Horror?

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

In some ways, I am the last person to write this book. I am not a horror native. I grew up in the Soviet Union where horror films were neither produced nor shown and then spent my formative years in Israel, another country with no horror tradition. The few horror films that I did see (and loved) I did not even know were horror.

And yet, when I watched Poisoned at the midnight screening at the 2015 Toronto Jewish Film Festival, it blew me away. It felt like a breath of fresh air, which is a strange thing to say about a zombie flick full of guts and gore. It was very funny—and an astute satire of Israeli militarism. I was hooked. The filmmaker Didi Lubetzky was at the festival to introduce his film. After the screening, he told me that his is not the only Israeli horror film and urged me to see others. I followed his advice, fell in love with other movies, and started writing. Didi remained my guide into the strange world of Israeli horror. He answered, explained, and put me in touch with his fellow filmmakers. Thanks, Didi, and thank you, all the other directors, writers, and cinematographers for your films and for speaking to me: Aharon Keshales, Navot Papushado, Yoav and Doron Paz, Eitan Gafny, Boaz Armoni, Guilhad Emilio Schenker, Danny Lerner, Yevgeny Ruman, and Dan Wolman, as well as Yael Oron, Roni Kedar, Ariel Cohen, Lior Lederman, Yoav Shutan-Goshen, Ram Shweky, Rotem Yaron, Itzik Rosen, and Michael Mayer. Thanks also to Stuart Hands who invited me to the Toronto festival and dragged me to the midnight screening.

The research took a long time. Along the way, I met Uri Aviv, a powerhouse behind Utopia, the one and only genre film festival in Israel. Uri not only spent hours talking to me about the local horror scene but he also allowed me to be a part of it: in 2017 I joined the team of volunteers at the festival and learned how the sausage is made. Thanks, Uri and your amazing team. Through Utopia, I met another key player, Pablo Utin, a film scholar who quickly became a friend and a collaborator. Pablo shared with me not only his published interviews with the filmmakers but also the unpublished ones. Without his generosity and wit, there would have been no book—we spent hours talking movies, and some of the ideas that drove my research emerged in these conversations. Another colleague who was absolutely indispensable was Avner Shavit, one of the most brilliant Israeli film critics, who generously shared his knowledge and connections. In the course of years of research and writing I could rely on Avner to find an answer to the most arcane question or to put me in touch with the most inaccessible source.

I owe enormous gratitude to my friend and colleague Dale Hudson, who showed me the ropes of writing about horror. Dale was my coauthor for my very first article about what I call now New Israeli Horror films. A special shout-out to Tim Burr, who not only shared with me his enormous knowledge of the horror genre but also came to the rescue when my chapters needed shrinking. Special thanks also goes to Daniel Magilow, who voluntarily (!) read the entire manuscript and gave me notes. Other colleagues and friends who helped along the way and to whom I am thankful are Dorit Naaman, Yael Munk, Tal Ben Zvi, Judah Cohen, Rachel Harris, Dan Chyutin, Boaz Hagin, Ido Rosen, and Raz Yosef.

I had the good fortune to receive help from Farzaneh Tajabadi, Mahdi Jalili, Deniz Ozyildiz, Rayan Daud, and Maysoon Hussein, who did the research on circulation of the New Israeli Horror in Farsi, Turkish, and Arabic. Archivists at the film archives at the Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv Cinematheque, and Jerusalem Cinematheque helped provide access to rare materials. Felix Kiner did magic with the images, and Leo Kiner shared the good cheer.

My research was supported by funding from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The Warner Fund at the University Seminars at Columbia University helped with publication and production of the website which accompanies this book. I also benefited from my affiliations with the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University and with Columbia University during my sabbatical. There, I gave talks at the departmental colloquium in Tel Aviv and at the Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation Faculty Seminar at Columbia: both were phenomenal groups of colleagues whose feedback was invaluable.

As I was writing this book, real-life events made horror films seem juvenile in comparison. No amount of zombie outbreaks and on-screen apocalyptic disasters prepared me for the combined effects of COVID, the climate crisis, and the threats to democracy. Through all of it, my partner Aaron Ring was by my side. He was my inspiration, my sounding board, my system of support, and an editor extraordinaire. This book is for you: thank you.

New Israeli Horror

Introduction

A serial killer stalks the woods. Demons rampage through Jerusalem. Zombies ravage an army base. Audiences had seen nothing like this from Israeli filmmakers. Whether serious or comedic, art house or popular entertainment, with or without a political agenda, Israeli films had always featured recognizable characters in characteristically Israeli situations. In other words, they were largely realistic and inward looking. In the 2010s, the situation changed when the first psycho-killers, zombies, vampires, ghosts, and other monsters entered the frame. Although these figures were unprecedented on Israeli screens, they were not novel in and of themselves. What was novel was the way in which these iconic figures were imported into local realities to find and expose horror within Israeli society or Jewish tradition. The entire cycle of such films that I call New Israeli Horror seemed to have sprouted up overnight. Before 2010, there were virtually no Israeli horror films. By the end of the decade, there were enough of them to write this book.

To be sure, this decade was not the first time that Israeli cinema had absorbed international influences. Early Israeli films were affected by the Soviet avant-garde and by Hollywood melodramas and Westerns. Bourekas films, an Israeli cycle of ethnic comedies and melodramas, were fashioned after Egyptian and Iranian comedies and melodramas, as well as Yiddish theater and film.¹ The New Sensibility filmmakers were inspired by the French New Wave.² More recently, Israeli cinema drew on European New Extremism.³ But even in view of these diverse sources, the New Israeli Horror films broke new ground. They introduced influences hitherto unseen on Israeli screens, including those from American horror, sci-fi, and action, as well as from Spanish, British, Italian, Japanese, and Korean genre films. The result was a new cultural phenomenon, a hybrid of local cinema and global genre.

This book is about these new films, their filmmakers, the emergence of a horror film scene, and what it says about Israeli culture in the first decades of the new millennium. Film analysis might be at the heart of the book, but no less important are the voices of the filmmakers and the stories of their films’ production, circulation, and reception. I look closely at the most significant films across horror subgenres: Rabies (2010) and Big Bad Wolves (2013) by Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, Poisoned (2011) by Didi Lubetzky, Cannon Fodder (2013) and Children of the Fall (2016) by Eitan Gafny, JeruZalem (2015) and The Golem (2018) by Yoav and Doron Paz, Freak Out (2015) by Boaz Armoni, Madame Yankelova’s Fine Literature Club (2017) by Guilhad Emilio Schenker, and The Damned (2018) by Evgeny Ruman. In addition to productions during the 2010s, I include several films from 1970s to the 2000s that I call precursors; most significantly, Night Soldier (1984) by Dan Wolman and Frozen Days (2005) by Danny Lerner.⁴ I also briefly discuss several less significant feature films, some short films, and films that circle the orbit of horror without quite landing there. My focus in this book is on film. Although there were some early Israeli horror television series, they did not engage with Israeli culture like New Israeli Horror films do, and they had little impact on the current wave. The horror TV series that appeared later, in 2010s–2020s followed in the footsteps of New Israeli Horror, testifying to the vitality of the movement.⁵

Horror is notoriously hard to define, and New Israeli Horror is no exception. In this book, I locate horror at the intersection of three fields: affect (such as fear, repulsion, and eeriness), tropes and formal characteristics (e.g., zombies, vampires, serial killers, or found footage technique), and social consensus (i.e., recognition of a given film as horror by critics and audiences). In some films included here, the three fields overlap, making their generic designation clear. In others, these elements are less obvious, in which case I make an argument for their inclusion based on the film’s production values, circulation—and my own taste. All the films discussed in this book participated in horror film festivals and thus were recognized as part of the genre by programmers, critics, and audiences alike.

The Films and the Filmmakers: The Social Scene

Israeli cinema has long had an uneasy relationship with genre film and, indeed, the idea of film as popular entertainment. Until the 2010s, there were virtually no Israeli horror films. In this regard, Israel was not unique. Other national film industries—such as French, Turkish, Egyptian, and Eastern European cinemas—had not developed a sustained horror tradition by then.⁶ The question is, what triggered the sudden growth spurt of local productions? The answer lies in a combination of factors: specific to Israel, the social scene, expansion of the film industry, and the mode of film funding were the factors. The global factors were changes in technology and media environment.

The Hamorotheque Club

The filmmakers behind the horror productions belong to the same generation, born in the years between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s. Most are men of Ashkenazi or European descent. In an exaggeration of a pattern of the Israeli film industry in general, this cohort includes few women and no Mizrahim (Israeli Jews with roots in Muslim-majority countries) or Palestinian citizens of Israel. Theirs is the first Israeli generation to grow up in an era of home video and cable (introduced in Israel only in 1993).⁷ These filmmakers came of age with easy access to international genre films and television, especially American action, sci-fi, and horror.⁸ They are the first Israeli generation to be both Americanized and globalized due to the availability of Western media and easy international travel. They live and breathe pop culture. As they were growing up, technological advancements made it possible for them to shoot on video on their family camcorders. When they studied film and entered the profession, they were the first ones to use digital cameras. This technology made production cheaper and simpler, freeing them to experiment with the genres that appealed to them.

The core group of these filmmakers came out of Tel Aviv University (TAU) Film School, where they studied in the early to mid-2000s. What influenced them more than the formal curriculum was the Hamorotheque Film Club, which exposed them to a range of international genre films. Hamorotheque (a portmanteau of the Hebrew word hamor [donkey or mule] and the word cinematheque) was envisioned as an alternative to the high-brow offerings of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque and the conservative tastes of their professors. Among the founders of Hamorotheque was Aharon Keshales (who would later direct Rabies and Big Bad Wolves), then a popular teaching assistant at the Film School.⁹ Throughout 2004–2006, students gathered every Monday to watch genre films, many of which were horror—from Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979) and Re-Animator (1985) to Dog Soldiers (2002) and Oldboy (2003).¹⁰

These screenings regularly attracted seventy to eighty students hungry for genre films: not just horror but also sci-fi, action, fantasy, and even romantic comedy. What made Hamorotheque particularly attractive to its fans was that the club was unofficial and unsanctioned, with films pirated online and screenings advertised by DIY flyers and by word of mouth (figure I.1).¹¹ Just to watch them was subversive: such films were not in the syllabi, and professors treated them as beneath any serious attention. Horror, in particular, did not fit into the film canon. And yet, horror’s explicit gore, its dark or absurd humor, freedom from realistic tenets, and its sheer exuberance spoke to students. As they watched, they increasingly wanted to make such films in their own language, set in their own culture.

The Hamorotheque Club profoundly influenced the culture of the Film School. Beforehand, students were expected to make films only in the realistic mode, and those who wanted to explore sci-fi, fantasy, and especially, horror were discouraged from doing so. Consequently, they felt alone, pitted against the system. Hamorotheque changed that: the screenings and discussions validated students’ interests and tastes, making it legitimate for them to try their hand at horror and other low genres. Suddenly, these outliers were no longer isolated: they gained a cohort of peers and they understood each other. They were able to work together and to show their works in progress at Hamorotheque for feedback.¹² The club’s alumni include filmmakers Aharon Keshales, Navot Papushado, Eitan Gafny, Didi Lubetzky, Danny Lerner, Oren Karmi, Shai Scherf, Yaniv Berman, Itzik Rosen, scriptwriter Yael Oron, and cinematographers David Michael-Shahar and Guy Raz. These young filmmakers went on to work not only with each other but with fellow travelers from other schools—Boaz Armoni (Beit Berl College), Veronica Roni Kedar (Beit Berl College), and Ram Schweky (Camera Obscura)—sharing their ideas and further spreading the gospel. Along with the new generation of filmmakers, a new generation of critics came up as well; they included Avner Shavit, Amir Bogen, Ofer Liebergall, Doron Fishler, and Oron Shamir, some of them were Hamorotheque attendees. These critics were often friends with the filmmakers and were on the same page with them about genre films. They embraced New Israeli Horror and championed the films and the filmmakers in the media.

FIGURE I.1 A flyer for the inaugural Hamorotheque screening by Pablo Utin, Aharon Keshales, Yaniv Berman, and Uri Schori, May 10, 2004. (Courtesy of Pablo Utin.)

Utopia

Alongside Hamorotheque, another influential institution for New Israeli Horror was Utopia, a sci-fi, fantasy, and horror film festival in Tel Aviv. It evolved from the Israeli sci-fi, fantasy, and role-playing fan-based convention called Icon, which was founded in 1998 and added films to its program over the years. At first, Icon screened only classic sci-fi films. In 2001, for the first time, it featured a modest program of short Israeli genre films—modest because there were so few. In fact, combing over Israeli films made between 1979 and 2001, the programmers succeeded in finding only five. In 2004–2005 an entire film festival took shape, and in 2006 it spotlighted for the first time Israeli feature-length films (among them Danny Lerner’s Frozen Days), as well as two programs of local shorts. Since then, the festival has boasted a program of feature-length and short Israeli sci-fi, fantasy, and horror films, thus helping cultivate local talent.

Uri Aviv, Utopia’s director, recalls that the initial decision to curate more Israeli productions was influenced not only by the desire to support local filmmakers but also by the availability of government funding. For the festival to qualify for public funding, at least 20 percent of the films in its program had to be Israeli.¹³ This requirement shaped the future of the festival and, by extension, the genre scene in Israel. By pursuing funding, the festival created an avenue for screening local productions. Moreover, in the early 2000s, given the dearth of local genre movies, the festival could not afford to be choosy—it needed to fill one-fifth of its program slots. That meant that any Israeli film that was not a realistic drama had a good chance of being included. As time went on, there were more and more local genre submissions. In 2008, the festival started hosting an Israeli genre film competition, first only for shorts and then later for feature films. By 2009, interest in genre films among young filmmakers was so strong that the Israeli Film Fund announced a competition for screenplay development grants in the genres of sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and mystery—an unprecedented event for a national institution that typically only supported serious realistic dramas.¹⁴ The festival initiated the competition and hosted a workshop for interested filmmakers. By 2011, these efforts paid off, and local horror films began pouring in.

In 2013, the Icon festival rebranded itself as Utopia, the Tel-Aviv International Festival for Science Fiction and Fantastic Genre Films. Throughout the decade, each annual festival offered three to four Israeli feature-length films and dozens of shorts, a significant number of them horror. All the films discussed in this book were shown at Utopia. Their screenings were accompanied by discussions with filmmakers, writers, and producers; special events; and awards. Some Utopia festivals featured workshops with established filmmakers. There were programs for young audiences, raising new generations of genre lovers. Utopia became a social scene where like-minded filmmakers and fans could meet as a community. For filmmakers, the conversations continued through a closed Facebook group that also held in-person meetings.

In conjunction with Utopia, two other initiatives contributed to the early development of horror scene in Israel. The first was a private film fund named after Tomer Moria, an aspiring filmmaker killed in a terrorist act. From 2005 to 2012, the years when the Tomer Moria Fund was active, it supported the production of dozens of Israeli short horror, fantasy, and sci-fi films by assistance with production: providing equipment, crew members, and editing studios. But the fund also sponsored competitions with cash prizes ranging from 3,000 NIS to 10,000 NIS, including the 2008 competition for best Israeli film at the Icon/Utopia festival.¹⁵ In a crucial period for the emerging horror genre in Israel, the Tomer Moria Fund created an alternative system of support for student films in genres frowned on by local film schools, which partially compensated for the dearth of public funds.

While the Tomer Moria Fund incentivized production, a second initiative, the Dying to See (Met Lir’ot) competition, gave aspiring filmmakers an opportunity to showcase their work to a larger audience. The competition was the brainchild of filmmaker Danny Lerner. Lerner, a TAU Film School graduate and Hamorotheque regular, worked as a content editor for the local cable channel HOT-Prime. In 2007, he initiated a competition of fictitious trailers for nonexistent genre films; several of these trailers belonged to the horror genre. Two of the films discussed in this book, Rabies and Poisoned, originated from Dying to See trailers.

Film Funding in Israel

Israeli cinema is best known for films dealing with social problems, wars, and occupation. To wit, the majority of Israel’s Oscar-nominated films in the 2000s are about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israel’s wars.¹⁶ They are realistic dramas, conveying the local societal consensus as expressed in key tropes, the central of which is shooting and crying (yorim ve-bokhim). Shooting and crying refers to the moral anguish felt by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers for their roles as perpetrators, even as they continue with military actions purportedly justified by the greater good.¹⁷ This trope engenders an apologetic, self-serving portrayal of Israel’s part in its wars, turning the soldier protagonist into a victim or, at least, an ethical soldier. Political implications aside, shooting and crying results in a circumspect representation of violence as befits a serious drama.

The new generation had had enough. As one filmmaker said to me, Enough with the ‘shooting and crying’; onto the ‘slashing and laughing’!¹⁸ Thus, the films of the young horror filmmakers can be read as a collective rebellion against the local cinematic tradition. For them, rebelling against shooting and crying meant opting out of a realistic mode and national concerns and embracing genre conventions and popular entertainment. This rebellion was also an expression of their cynicism toward both Zionist ideology and the left-wing agenda—their political hopelessness about the Israeli regime.

However, the slashing and laughing is not as simple in the local cultural milieu, even if we disregard the political implications. From its inception, the Israeli film industry had a contentious relationship with popular cinema, especially with genre films. In some ways, this relationship was one of internecine competition, each cycle of films jockeying for a lead position and rejecting what came before. The changing patterns of funding reflect this competitive relationship too. Before 1948, film was used for fund-raising and promoting Jewish immigration from Europe for the Zionist cause in Palestine. In the early years of the state, film became an important tool of education and socialization—a means of consolidating national identity and strengthening state institutions. Yet, despite the state agenda, the funding model then practiced—in which the government provided a partial tax rebate on box office revenues—encouraged the production of popular films.¹⁹ Consequently, the most popular films of the 1960s and 1970s were not ideologically driven heroic-nationalist films but bourekas comedies and melodramas, many of them produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. The future heads of Cannon Films were responsible for fourteen of twenty box office hits between 1963 and 1980. The biggest hit was the teen sex comedy Lemon Popsicle (Eskimo Limon, 1978, Boaz Davidzon), which sold more than 1.3 million tickets in a country of 3.7 million people and then succeeded internationally, yielding sequels and remakes.²⁰

The funding model changed in the late 1970s, when a group of young local filmmakers started campaigning for support for art films free of commercial interests. In 1979, answering their call, the Knesset passed legislation establishing the Fund for the Encouragement of Original Quality Films (it was later renamed the Israel Film Fund), which was modeled on European public film funds. The Fund signified a turn from the popular films of 1960s–70s to the quality films of 1980s–90s; from a Hollywood-inflected mode of film as entertainment to a French mode of film as art. In Israel, the term quality films was shorthand for political and socially conscious films, which meant—in real terms—movies about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or tensions within Israeli society. The Fund’s establishment was a game changer: as the only avenue of public support, it grew to have enormous power over the Israeli film industry. Whereas before local films had been subsidized automatically based on box office proceeds, now the Fund chose which projects to support through a competitive selection process. That meant that the Fund’s agenda shaped local film production. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, independent production radically diminished, and so did ticket sales.²¹ Local audiences preferred more entertaining foreign films, especially American blockbusters. Pretty Woman (1990), The Lion King (1994), and Titanic (1997) each sold more than a million tickets.

An important change took place in 2000, when the state passed the New Cinema Law to provide more funding for Israeli cinema. This legislation was a culmination of the tremendous changes taking place in Israeli cultural production since the arrival of multichannel television in 1993. Cable channels created a demand for original content, which resulted in more job opportunities for young filmmakers and a diversification of genres and styles of local productions. In response to this new market, several film schools opened, ushering in a new era of professionalization for filmmakers. The New Cinema Law tapped into these new resources by requiring commercial television and cable channels to support domestic film production. Israel also entered coproduction agreements with France, Germany, and other countries.

The New Cinema Law marked a time of immense growth for Israeli film, with about thirty feature films released each year. The number of publicly funded films doubled,²² and film budgets increased to about $800,000 to $1,200,000 for feature films—still low by American standards but sizable locally.²³ Israeli cinema turned to other local subjects besides war or occupation, such as ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. The best Israeli films began to compete in prestigious international film festivals, win awards, and gradually penetrate international markets, primarily in North America and Europe. This growth, though, was not necessarily good news for young genre filmmakers. Despite the changes brought about by the New Cinema Law, the mode of film as art remained dominant, with public funding continuing to delegitimize genre film.²⁴

Production of feature films in Israel is supported by two major public funds—the Israel Film Fund and the Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts.²⁵ With no tradition of private funding and few other funding sources, securing support from these two funds can be a matter of life and death for a film project. Yet even if the funding institutions are trying to support new talent, the odds are stacked against young horror filmmakers: first, the eligibility criteria privilege experienced film production companies and filmmakers with a proven track record. Second, the public funds are often interested in supporting so-called festival films—prestige projects that can compete at renowned film festivals in Cannes or Venice. As a result, these public foundations often end up giving large grants to a small number of films. Finally, the funds recruit proposal reviewers from among senior filmmakers, who are often committed to the old-school quality films approach and are not necessarily open to what they perceive as low genres. Even though the government mandates encouraging creation in genres that are not sufficiently expressed in Israeli cinema, such as horror, this is not enforced in practice.²⁶

Given these factors, it is all but impossible for young horror filmmakers to obtain public funding. As a result, the filmmakers spend years in limbo, submitting and resubmitting proposals (each proposal can only be submitted three times). Others do not even apply, relying instead on their own funds or experimenting with private investors. Only a very few are lucky to work with a major production company that has the power to push a project through and secure substantial public financial support. Most end up producing films on shoestring budgets. To the extent their films get any public funding, it is through small grants for script development or distribution.

Out of necessity, horror filmmakers are forced into making independent, no-budget productions. They cover expenses with modest development or post-production grants, making each shekel go a long way. They work with teams of committed friends prepared to donate their time and talents because they believe in the project. Family members are often recruited for logistical (and emotional) support, including feeding the crew members. Digital cameras and editing software do make productions possible even under these difficult conditions; yet, even with these new technologies, working with a limited or nonexistent budget means that the production can stretch over months and even years. This mode of production and funding (or rather lack thereof) became so widespread that it has been institutionalized. The Israel Film Fund now offers the so-called guerrilla track, which supports low-budget independent films with about $50,000 (in contrast, the Fund may invest as much as $550,000 in a main track film). Each film made in this way is a product of love and, in some ways, a miracle; each filmmaker is a hero.

The Horror and Film Market in Israel

Israelis love to go to the movies. Israel is a collectivistic society, and people enjoy going to theaters in large groups. In contrast to the global trend, there was a continuous increase in ticket sales in Israel from 2009 to 2017. In a country of about nine million people, between twelve and eighteen million tickets were sold annually throughout the 2010s.²⁷ The most popular films were comedies. Recent box office hits also included animated films for the whole family and action flicks to see with a group of friends.²⁸

Horror films, even Hollywood productions, have never been among the blockbusters. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, only American horror classics, such as Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock), Rosemary’s Baby (1968, Roman Polanski), The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin), Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg), and Halloween (1978, John Carpenter) played theatrically in Israel and only on a few screens.²⁹ It did not help that the Israeli censorship body, the Board for Film Review, occasionally banned horror films.³⁰ Moreover, horror films were not marketed as thrillers (seret metakh), illustrating a general discomfort with horror as a genre. It was not until the 1980s