New Israeli Horror: Local Cinema, Global Genre
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.
Praise for New Israeli Horror
"This significant work charts the ways in which New Israeli Horror films offer a critique of the violence that lies at the heart of Israeli society, the damaging masculinity of the military machine, and the suppression of Palestinian trauma. The result is a hugely readable and subtly nuanced work that makes a substantive contribution to our understanding of both modern Israel and the horror genre’s ability to articulate national trauma. It’s essential reading for all with an interest in the genre and in national cinema more broadly."
Linnie Blake
Author of The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity
"This is a fantastic book that looks at the intellectual, industrial, funding, and reception contexts of Israeli horror but without bouncing between them like demented pinball. Instead what we get is an extraordinarily integrated interdisciplinary account that should operate as an exemplar for horror scholarship for decades to come!"
Mark Jancovich
Author of Horror and editor of Horror, The Film Reader
New Israeli Horror in the Media
"Richly entertaining and informative book." Haaretz pdf of the article
"Excellent new book." New Books Network podcast
"Gershenson's book is one of the most comprehensive and captivating studies on Israeli cinema." Walla [in Hebrew]
"Gershenson provides a thorough, eloquent, and brilliant analysis of the reasons behind the rise of this new genre in Israel." Maariv [in Hebrew]
"Professor Gershenson's book...displays her impressive knowledge of world cinema as well as her intimate familiarity with the unique culture and economics of the Israeli film industry." The Journal of Popular Culture pdf of the review
"Gershenson's adaptation framework offers a productive framework through which to read other bodies of non-Hollywood horror films where the local and global intersect." Shofar pdf of the review
"The book is truly an accessible product; the four-strategy model of adaptation, that Gershenson develops in relation to the interlocutions between the locality of Israeli cinema and the universality of modern horror, could be perceived as a springboard to explicate the ways other national or minor cinemas interact with international inflections of horror to develop their own cinematic idioms and sub-definitions of horror." Quarterly Review of Film and Video pdf of the review
"The book outlines how, in the 2010s, a group of filmmakers emerging from an underground genre film club at Tel Aviv University Film School, adapted the familiar tropes of horror for a local sensibility. Part of that conversion meant channeling the trauma of past conflicts and the masculine anxiety of a militarized society into zombie films and creature features. In this way, Israeli horror carved out a niche that might one day help the nation to process its current nightmare, though, Gershenson believes, that may be decades away." Forward
"Gershenson gives her readers enough plot and description to understand her incisive analyses, but not so much that she keeps us from slavering for more. She is a dedicated fan of horror who understands the movies’ global influences, giving us plenty of comparands to movies we know well, including zombie movies, slasher films, and serial killer flicks." Jewish Book Council
"I would suggest you have a notepad when you start reading this book because you will be adding more than a couple titles that you’re going to want to seek out." Kitley’s Krypt: Discover the Horror