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In ‘The Offering,’ the latest Yiddish-inflected horror movie, a Jewish spirit haunts Hasidic Brooklyn
(JTA) — British filmmaker Oliver Park isn’t Jewish, but he does have a deep appreciation for the Jewish roots of the horror genre that informed his work on “The Offering,” his feature debut as director about an ancient demon set in a Hasidic enclave in Brooklyn.
“Jewish horror stories have been around for thousands of years,” Park told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “All of these fantastic and rich stories come from this Jewish space.”
The first horror movie franchise, he points out, centered on the Jewish Golem monster and was produced in the 1910s, years before “Nosferatu,” the well-known silent vampire film from 1922.
The legend of the Golem, said to have originated in 16th-century Prague, has been credited with inspiring “Frankenstein.”
“Having been a lifelong fan, obsessed horror nut that I am, I’ve always wanted to get into the Jewish space,” Park said.
The demon in “The Offering” is known as Abyzou. “She is this very, very old ancient demon. For all we know, she could be Lilith herself,” Park said, referring to a spirit of darkness and sexuality found in biblical and Talmudic texts.
In the film, which hits theaters and on-demand platforms on Friday (the 13th), a young man (Nick Blood) brings his pregnant, non-Jewish fiancé (Emily Weisman) to meet his long-estranged father (Allan Corduner), a Hasidic man who works at a funeral home and morgue in Brooklyn. Long-buried tensions are revealed and revisited, and there are several lines of Yiddish dialogue.
The screenwriter and producer, Hank Hoffman, is the son of a rabbi and has a background in Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. The main producer, Jonathan “Yoni” Yunger, comes from a Jewish background as well. Hoffman worked in a morgue for a time in his youth.
“Both of them immediately, their brains just exploded with ideas,” Park said. The film was in the making for about six years. He called it “a passion project, and very much their baby.”
“The Offering” was shot in early 2021, with Bulgaria standing in for Brooklyn, and the production was able to continue during a particularly nasty stage of the pandemic. Park called the script “so rich with characters, and so rich with horror, and mythology and rituals, and the occult and esotericism, and all within this beautiful Jewish community.”
Theres has been a boom in the Jewish-themed horror realm in recent years. “The Vigil,” from 2020, took as its subject matter shemira, or the Jewish ritual of watching over a dead body. “The Unborn” was a dybbuk-themed horror movie that came out in 2009 — featuring Gary Oldman as a rabbi — and in 2021, a movie called “Dybbuk” was made in India, in Hindi. That was itself a remake of a 2017 film called “Ezra,” which was made in Malayalam, an Indian language, and involved an Indian Jewish protagonist.
“I’m so excited that in the last 30 or so years, they’ve slowly trickled back through and we’re seeing more and more of them now,” Park said of Jewish-themed horror movies. “So I’m really hoping that there are many more terrifying and disturbing tales that are inspired richly in Jewish folklore.”
Lead actor Nick Blood may have a perfect name for horror — “I think I’m destined to play Dracula one day,” he said — but he described himself as not particularly an enthusiast of the genre. However, he told JTA that the director and writers’ “passion for it convinced me straight away” to star in the film.
Blood said he had some Zoom sessions with a Yiddish teacher in New York, who helped him get words and pronunciations right. Some of the spells and incantations used in the film were in Aramaic, a language with which Hoffman, the screenwriter, is familiar.
“The Offering,” which premiered at festivals last year, comes from Millennium Films, founded by the Israeli-American producer Avi Lerner. Corduner, who plays the father, was raised Jewish, as was actor Paul Kaye (who played Thoros of Myr on “Game of Thrones”), actor Daniel Ben-Zenou and several background actors in the film.
Park and Blood both said that the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man” was frequently cited in the production of “The Offering,” and not only because of a scene in which a Kabbalah passage appears inside a dead body — much like the Hebrew passage engraved on a dental patient’s teeth in the Coens’ very Jewish movie. In the opening scene of “A Serious Man,” a possible dybbuk appears in a 19th-century shtetl.
“There was an enormous amount of inspiration taken from that film,” Park said.
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The post In ‘The Offering,’ the latest Yiddish-inflected horror movie, a Jewish spirit haunts Hasidic Brooklyn appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Mistrial Declared in Case of Students Charged After Stanford Anti-Israel Protests
FILE PHOTO: A student attends an event at a protest encampment in support of Palestinians at Stanford University during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Stanford, California U.S., April 26, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
A judge declared a mistrial on Friday in a case of five current and former Stanford University students related to the 2024 pro-Palestinian protests when demonstrators barricaded themselves inside the school president’s office.
Twelve protesters were initially charged last year with felony vandalism, according to prosecutors who said at least one suspect entered the building by breaking a window. Police arrested 13 people on June 5, 2024, in relation to the incident and the university said the building underwent “extensive” damage.
The case was tried in Santa Clara County Superior Court against five defendants charged with felony vandalism and felony conspiracy to trespass. The rest previously accepted plea deals or diversion programs.
The jury was deadlocked. It voted nine to three to convict on the felony charge of vandalism and eight to four to convict on the felony charge to trespass. Jurors failed to reach a verdict after deliberations.
The charges were among the most serious against participants in the 2024 pro-Palestinian protest movement on US colleges in which demonstrators demanded an end to Israel’s war in Gaza and Washington’s support for its ally along with a divestment of funds by their universities from companies supporting Israel.
Prosecutors in the case said the defendants engaged in unlawful property destruction.
“This case is about a group of people who destroyed someone else’s property and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. That is against the law,” Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement, adding he sought a new trial.
Anthony Brass, a lawyer for one of the protesters, told the New York Times his side was not defending lawlessness but “the concept of transparency and ethical investment.”
“This is a win for these young people of conscience and a win for free speech,” Brass said, adding “humanitarian activism has no place in a criminal courtroom.”
Protesters had renamed the building “Dr. Adnan’s Office” after Adnan Al-Bursh, a Palestinian doctor who died in an Israeli prison after months of detention.
Over 3,000 were arrested during the 2024 US pro-Palestinian protest movement, according to media tallies. Some students faced suspension, expulsion and degree revocation.
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Exclusive: FM Gideon Sa’ar to Represent Israel at 1st Board of Peace Meeting in Washington on Thursday
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar speaks next to High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission Kaja Kallas, and EU commissioner for the Mediterranean Dubravka Suica as they hold a press conference on the day of an EU-Israel Association Council with European Union foreign ministers in Brussels, Belgium, Feb. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Yves Herman
i24 News – Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar will represent the country at the inaugural meeting of the Gaza Board of Peace in Washington on Thursday, i24NEWS learned on Saturday.
The arrangement was agreed upon following a request from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will not be able to attend.
Netanyahu pushed his Washington visit forward by a week, meeting with US President Donald Trump this week to discuss the Iran situation.
A U.N. Security Council resolution, adopted in mid-November, authorized the Board of Peace and countries working with it to establish an international stabilization force in Gaza and build on the ceasefire agreed in October under a Trump plan.
Under Trump’s Gaza plan, the board was meant to supervise Gaza’s temporary governance. Trump thereafter said the board, with him as chair, would be expanded to tackle global conflicts.
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Two Men Jailed in UK for Islamic State-Inspired Plot to Kill Hundreds of Jews
Weapons seized from the home of Walid Saadaoui, 38, who along with Amar Hussein, 52, has been found guilty at Preston Crown Court of plotting to kill hundreds in an Islamic State-inspired gun rampage against the Jewish community, in Britain, in this handout picture obtained by Reuters on December 23, 2025. They are due to be sentenced on Friday. Photo: Greater Manchester Police/Handout via REUTERS
Two men were jailed on Friday for plotting to kill hundreds in an Islamic State-inspired attack on the Jewish community in England, a plan prosecutors said could have been deadlier than December’s mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach.
Walid Saadaoui, 38, and Amar Hussein, 52, were both convicted after a trial at Preston Crown Court, which began a week after an unrelated deadly attack on a synagogue in the city of Manchester, in northwest England.
Prosecutors said the pair were Islamist extremists who wanted to use automatic firearms to kill as many Jews as they could in an attack in Manchester.
They were found guilty little more than a week after a mass shooting at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in which 15 people were killed.
Prosecutor Harpreet Sandhu said on Friday that, had Saadaoui and Hussein carried out their plan, it “could have been very much more serious” than the attacks in Australia and Manchester.
Judge Mark Wall sentenced Saadaoui to a minimum term of 37 years and Hussein to a minimum term of 26 years, saying: “You were very close to being ready to carry out this plan.”
Hussein refused to attend his sentencing, having refused to attend most of his trial, which Wall said reflected Hussein’s cowardice, describing him as “brave enough to plan to threaten an unarmed group with an AK-47 but not sufficiently courageous to face up to what he did.”
POTENTIALLY ONE OF DEADLIEST ATTACKS ON UK SOIL
Saadaoui had arranged for two assault rifles, an automatic pistol and almost 200 rounds of ammunition to be smuggled into Britain through the port of Dover when he was arrested in May 2024, Sandhu told jurors at the trial.
He added that Saadaoui planned to obtain two more rifles and another pistol, and to collect at least 900 rounds of ammunition.
“This would likely have been one of the deadliest terrorist attacks ever carried out on British soil,” Wall said.
Unbeknown to Saadaoui, however, a man known as “Farouk,” from whom he was trying to get the weapons, was an undercover operative who helped foil the plot.
Walid Saadaoui’s brother Bilel Saadaoui, 37, was found guilty of failing to disclose information about acts of terrorism. He was sentenced to six years in jail.