Now it is time to watch one of the first exorcism movies, and one of the few Polish/Yiddish movies: Der Dibuk (1937). This is one of the few Yiddish language movies to come out of Poland, and it is based on a famous Polish play. Opening prolouge talking about the dybbuk, about how all spirits,…
Tag: Judaism
Updating Exorcism Cinema List
A year ago, Christopher Olson and I published a book on the representation of exorcisms in cinema. Possessed Women, Haunted States: Cultural Tensions in Exorcism Cinema (November 2016) was a comprehensive analysis of films across time and culture for the common themes surrounding who was the possessed and who was the exorcist. This analysis concluded…
The Possession and the Traditional Exorcism Narrative
This analysis presents an example of how we are analyzing the films of the exorcism cinema subgenre for how they reflect the traditional exorcism narrative, which you can read more about here and here. This analysis is based on the notes we took while watching the film, which are given here. The 2012 film The…
Pop Culture Lens Episode 8: The Last Temptation of Christ
In the eighth episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I celebrate the Easter Sunday holiday by discussing the Martin Scorsese film The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Not being religious scholars, we focus our discuss on the usefulness and even necessity for artists and audiences to engage in artistic and critical…
5 Things People Believe About Demons, Exorcisms and The Spirit World
As All Hallow’s Eve approaches, and the dark veil between the land of the living and the land of the dead lists, we in the Western world turn to concerns of all things supernatural. But it is not just Halloween that propels people to be worried about how the spiritual plan can impede in this…
A Judaic Take on Exorcism in The Possession
One of the first movies we could qualify as being exorcism cinema was not concerned with the Catholic approach to possession and exorcism. Instead, it showed us this conflict from an older religious perspective, Judaism. In 1937, a Polish movie called Der Dibuk or The Dybbuk was released as one of the first movies filmed…
