Jewish horror story takes ‘Possession’ of Hollywood

The well-known icons and customs of Roman Catholicism have borne rich fruit in decades of scary movies. Audiences have flocked in recent years to films like “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” “The Haunting in Connecticut” and “The Last Exorcism,” to name just a few, leaving Hollywood eager to think of new ways for malevolent spirits to inhabit the bodies of young women. Casting about for something fresh, Sam Raimi (the director of the first “Spider-Man” trilogy and the “Evil Dead” series) was wise enough to recognize the potential value in Hebraic horror.

The resulting work, “The Possession” — which opened in Israel on Thursday and in the US on Friday — keeps things kosher by introducing the Old World folktale of the dybbuk box, a traditional Jewish winebox said to contain a dybbuk, or evil spirit.

With a cast including “The Closer” star Kyra Sedgwick, the film takes a bit of inspiration from a 2004 LA Times story about a man who believed he had purchased a real dybbuk box at a yard sale. Those who came into contact with the old object indeed encountered “bad luck,” for whatever reason — although other than its yard-sale provenance, that’s where the similarities between the “true story” and “The Possession” end.

The film, set in an upstate New York suburb, revolves around members of the Brenek family, currently doing their best to stay civil during a divorce. That’s their biggest problem, until the youngest daughter (played by Natasha Calis) is possessed by a dybbuk.

After failing to solve the problem by sending her to her room and giving her medical tests (following the major plot points from the granddaddy of the genre, William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist”), they end up in a place with lots of Jewish tradition: Borough Park, Brooklyn.

Here’s where Dad (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) meets with a rebbe’s son (Matisyahu), who agrees to perform what amounts to a Jewish exorcism.

Once the tefillin start flyin’, it gets fun — though those hoping for a beat-by-beat Jewish homage to “The Exorcist” (spitting matzo balls instead of pea soup, say) may want to manage their expectations.

The film’s director, Ole Bornedal (“Nightwatch”), and Matisyahu spoke with the Times of Israel in Los Angeles. A condensed version of the interview appears below.

Ole, you are from Denmark — and, I’m going to guess, are not Jewish. As an outsider and a visual artist, tell me a bit about how you approached the film’s Jewish iconography and design.

I find it mysterious and fascinating, but not more mysterious and fascinating than all of the world’s religions. What I found so remarkable, and a little scary, about this story was learning that exorcism exists in all religions — not just Catholicism, but Jewish and Hindu. You can see on YouTube – and we include some of this in the movie – people in so many different dress codes lying there, screaming on the floor.

How do you shoot a Jewish exorcism to make it different from the ones we’ve seen before?

The rituals, mainly. These were very new for me. Meeting Matisyahu, who knows this world better than anyone else, adds a lot to the film. There are a lot of decisions on how to cast the Jewish guy in the movie, and I could see that Matisyahu was absolutely real. He’s not from the Actors Studio; he’s new to film, but [his] natural style is so great to break up expectations. And I didn’t need to tell him anything. He not only knew the rituals, but he would go around the set and correct all the things that we had wrong.

Those hoping for a beat-by-beat Jewish homage to “The Exorcist” (spitting matzo balls instead of pea soup, say) may want to manage their expectations.

Such as?

How to wear the [prayer] shawl, the length of the beards, you name it. Someone had made inscriptions on the box — it was supposed to say [in Hebrew], “Danger – Do Not Open” — and it turns out we had misspelled it.

Matisyahu, you shot this movie before you shaved your beard. Was it something of a last lap for your classic look?

Yeah, a last hurrah, I suppose. I try to stay humorous about it.

You used to live in Crown Heights [in Brooklyn], but your character here lives in Borough Park. Is there a big difference between the two, or with other nearby Jewish enclaves such as Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Lakewood, NJ?

They are different. Crown Heights is Lubavitch. You have 770 [referring to 770 Eastern Parkway, the world headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement], and the blend of the neighborhood is a West Indian community and African-American. That’s specific to Crown Heights, and it is actually rather small, in terms of the number of blocks that are Lubavitch. Borough Park is a mixture of many different Hasidic groups. Lubavitch has a small influence, but they aren’t the main group. Lakewood isn’t even Hasidic — it is Litvish, which has a whole different history.

None of which is really discussed in the movie . . .

No, no. And I am not a Lubavitcher in this movie. I play a Borough Park or Williamsburg guy, but this is something we really did discuss while making it. They came to me with, “Do they all wear white socks? Do they all need the same type of hat?” I took that into consideration – in Borough Park you could have a fedora or a shtreimel. Some of the beards looked too clean. . .

So you aren’t just acting, you are working as a consultant?

At least on the set.

Did you charge double? You should at least get a bonus.

Where were you when I needed you?

Ole, they always say when you make a movie about ghosts or demons that there’s spooky stuff on the set. Anything happen to you?

I’ve tried to suppress this, but yes. One day we were location scouting, and there was a neon fixture that simply exploded, despite not being plugged into any electrical source.

Yeah, but had you been making a romantic comedy, you wouldn’t have made anything of it, and would have forgotten by now.

You might be right. I think weird stuff happens all the time, but if you are making a movie about it, you notice it.

There’s an actual alleged dybbuk box that’s floating around, as detailed in the LA Times. You’ve seen it?

Yes. We did not base our designs on it, but we have seen it.

That story is eight years old. Who has the box today?

I think a family has it, and they invited me to stay with them.

Why do they keep it if there was all this talk of bad luck?

I heard that they had buried it around the house somewhere. That they need to protect it, or something. Truth is, I chose early on that I didn’t want to get too attached to the actual story, to do too much research into that. I felt it could never be helpful to me. I had a good screenplay, I based my movie on that and I terminated my connection to these people.

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Well, as they say, you can’t be too cautious. It might have been a smart move.

The film, called simply “The Dybbuk” in Israel, opened there Thursday, and arrives in US theaters Friday.