A Very Jewish Horror in Attachment

Catholicism has ruined the supernatural. Too many horror films in too many cultures are basically The Exorcist in a different hat.

That's why films that truly come from a place of different cultural understanding are both rare and fascinating. Take, for example, Jewish horror films: Jewish horror was a pivotal part of early cinema, like Paul Wegener's Der Golem trilogy and Michał Waszyński's 1937 adaptation of S. Ansky's play The Dybbuk. But it hasn't been until recently that there has been a resurgence in Jewish horror, with the late Marcin Wrona's Demon, and more recently Keith Thomas' The Vigil.

Now they are joined in their gaze into the darkness by Attachment, the story of a Jewish woman, Leah (Ellie Kendrick), and her Danish girlfriend, Maja (Josephine Park), whose relationship and lives are threatened by sinister forces rooted in Jewish mysticism. However, they're also living on the judgmental eye of Leah's mother (Sofie Gråbøl) and the watchful gaze of her very devout uncle (David Dencik).

The debut feature of writer/director Gabriel Bier Gislason, Attachment premiered at Fantastic Fest 2022 ahead of its launch on streaming site Shudder. We talked with the filmmaker at the festival about the struggles and joys of making an authentically Jewish horror movie.

Austin Chronicle: I have a constant bugbear that so much supernatural horror is thinly veiled Catholicism, so having anything that feels like it's drawing from a different belief system or mythology, I'm drawn to.

Gabriel Bier Gislason: It's funny you say that, because precisely that feeling was one of the two origin stories for the film. As a Jew, I'd seen so many Catholic-themed horror films growing up and throughout my life.

AC: Even the Protestant ones ends up Catholic.

GBG: You're right! Because there's not really enough liturgy in the Protestant ones, so they borrow. I had this thing that, "Oh, here are all these Christians of various denominations, getting to pick and choose from the different religions and mythologies and liturgies that they think would work for a story, and getting to leave the rest behind, and getting to draw on this dense mythology of Christianity as well." And I hadn't really seen anyone do that with a Jewish film.

Jewish films, many which I've loved and shaped me, tend to be comedies or they're some kind of historical trauma – which is necessary and important – but what I wanted to see in the world was a Jewish film that drew on our own culture in the same kind of slightly playful, irreverent, "We'll take the bits that work and we'll take a bunch of liberties" way. It's more about telling a fun story than it is about the Jewish experience.

AC: One of the interesting things is the choice of language and location, and that you don't treat Judaism as a monolithic whole, that there's a single Jewish identity.

GBG: I'm writing for Josephine, and so it has to be at least partly set in Denmark. I can't just plop her down somewhere, and she's definitely Danish and definitely not Jewish – she's very blond and Danish. And so much of the mythology comes from Yiddish culture and Yiddish culture, even though it's now frowned upon in most Hasidic neighborhoods, that's where it's lived. It's never really lived in these post-Hasidim, standard conservative environments. A lot of them don't even know about it, and no one I knew had ever known about these myths. So I had to put it somewhere where this kind of community exists – I'm not going to invent some enclave that hangs on to these beliefs – and I wanted to make sure it was a city I knew. There were only two cities I knew where these communities exist, and that's London and New York, so it became London.

But just because I'm making a Jewish movie, it's not my job to educate anyone about Judaism. It's not my job to make certain Jews feel seen. I'm telling a story that is clearly highly, highly fictional and hopefully quite playful, and so I'm going to invent this little world within this world, where these Hasidim have their own priorities, and they are much more preoccupied with mysticism.

AC: There's all this fantastic stuff in Judaic mythology, and sorcery is everywhere. It gets dropped out when it's translated through the Old Testament, but it's definitely, "Magic's a thing, and spirits are a thing." There's a cosmology there beyond what has been filtered into Christianity.

GBG: Kabbalah, when you start to read about it, and when it really becomes a thing in the 1600s, it's really trippy. It's like an acid trip of mysticism, kind of numerological but not really, it's about understanding God through all these forbidden ways that we Jews can't name or represent or even name God. It's such a weird mindfuck that you can see it coming out of the '60s or a Jodorowsky movie, but it's not. It's this really old tradition.

AC: We're not only starting to see more Jewish horror, but more horrors from non-European American cultures, with films like Kandisha exposing audiences to Moroccan mythology.

GBG: That's true. I would be hard-pressed as a Jew to say that I don't see myself represented in the entertainment industry, because I feel like there are quite a few of us behind and in front of the camera. But I have the speculation that, because the route there was through comedy and vaudeville and the Borscht Belt in the U.S., that so much of our entertainment capital was expended on comedy. That's great, and I love comedy, and I think in some ways my film is a comedy, but even a director like Sam Raimi, it's not like any of his movies – even Drag Me to Hell – are at all about Judaism.

I think that there should be more Jewish horror films. I think that, and since Get Out this has become somewhat of a truism, the things that will make a film funny are the same things that make it scary. It is about expectation and release, or tension and awkwardness and discomfort, and a lot of the great tools you use in terms of timing and pacing that you use in comedy are a lot of the same tools you use when you make something spooky. So I hope that more of us go on to do it.

AC: Where did this specific story come from?

GBG: I wrote the whole film for Josephine. She's one of my best friends, and we've been best friends since high school, and about four years ago she and I went out and got really, really drunk. She hadn't told me these stories before, but she started telling me about this ex that she had been dating while I was in London, and how this ex-girlfriend of hers and she had both been between apartments, and they needed a place to crash, and her ex went, "Oh, we can just stay with my mom for a bit" – and that was terrible. It was a really bad time.

I'm not going to go into the stories she told me, because none of them made it into the movie, but they were so funny and over the top, and in my drunken reverie I went, "I'm going to write you this movie. You will star in it, and I'm going to make you a star." She did indeed become a star, but no thanks to me at all.

It wasn't enough that it was about this awkward situation – and, as I said, wanting to do something playful with the Jewish mythology, that idea was banging around in my head. And then I started playing with the idea of the Jewish mother as a trope, how the trope is that they're so overbearing and overprotective that everything feels like it's a matter of life and death, even if it's just doing the laundry. So I suddenly had an idea about, "Well, what if it is, though? What if it's really life or death?" Once I started thinking about that, and this structure of three women in a house together, that's when things clicked into place.

AC: Speaking of Jewish mythology, in most ghost stories the spirit is attached to a place. But the dybbuk, it's this idea of something that goes with you, on your back.

GBG: The very word dybbuk means something that gets stuck to you. That's the pun in the English title, that you've got all these attachment issues to the people that you fall in love with, but then the Yiddish word comes from "something that gets stuck to you."

AC: So why did you pick the dybbuk as the central driver in this story about a very dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship, all while she's trying to start a romantic relationship, and then you have her uncle floating around ...

GBG: I'm very wary of trying to say that anything is very concretely metaphorical, because I actually prefer, when watching horror films, even if there is clearly metaphor in it, sometimes it's a lot more interesting to try to view it literally first, and see what it actually says on its face.

So what I wanted to do with the dybbuk here was that, unlike a lot of other dybbuk stories, it wasn't important who the dybbuk was. That was kind of a red herring, in a way, because it should just stand in for a bit of the baggage we carry around, and the baggage that the people we love carry, and that we eventually take on ourselves. That was why the dybbuk was what I clicked on to as what parts of the Jewish mythology I wanted to work with, is that it has that inherent connotation of the shit you carry around with you. It's this dark thing that just sticks to you. So if someone falls in love with you, or is familiar with you, then they're going to have to help you carry that stuff, one way or another.

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Attachment is on Shudder now.