Last evening at sundown marked the beginning of Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights—a holiday that spans eight nights and, for many of us who grew up celebrating, came with the myth of nightly gifts. It’s a holiday virtually everyone recognizes, whether they observe it or not. And yet, despite that name recognition, Hanukkah remains one of the few major, widely known holidays with a glaring absence in the horror marketplace.
I’m Jewish, non-practicing, and largely disconnected from both religion and family. I don’t observe regularly, and this year I wasn’t planning to acknowledge Hanukkah at all—out of stress, emotional distance, and indifference. That changed this weekend, following news of a mass shooting at a Hanukkah gathering in Australia, leaving close to twenty dead—an attack authorities described as antisemitic and terror-motivated.
The violence took place during a public celebration of the holiday, turning a moment of ritual and visibility into one of sudden vulnerability. Even for those of us who live at a remove from tradition, moments like this collapse distance quickly. Jewish identity can feel a bit more unavoidable when it’s marked by violence rather than choice.
Caught up in personal concerns, a demanding career, and a deliberate effort to avoid the sadness of spending the holidays alone, an old and uncomfortable question slipped back into my focus: why has Hanukkah—a holiday so visible and widely recognized—still not had a meaningful moment in horror or genre filmmaking? And, more personally, why had I been so eager to run from it this year?
The second question is easier to answer. My family is small and deeply dysfunctional, and after years of strain, I’m now facing the holidays largely on my own. When that reality settled in—something I’d long feared—I did what I often do: I left. I booked myself a solo beach vacation for Christmas week, one I couldn’t afford responsibly but could access anyway by credit card. I’m grateful for that privilege, even as I recognize it for what it is—the ability to escape discomfort rather than confront it. Booking it worked, if briefly. Then, today, I literally woke up to the gravity of what had happened in Australia, and the escape fantasy lost its hold.
While I don’t have access to a platform to share news stories or political editorials, this felt like the right moment to at least finally confront a question I’ve been circling for years—to channel unease into examination rather than avoidance. And honestly, facing the metaphorical erasure of Hannukkah from horror is a safer route of access than facing yesterday’s terrorist attacks head-on in any journalistic sense. It’s halfway.
From an industry standpoint, the absence of Hanukkah horror is strange. Horror has never required cultural specificity to be mainstream-adjacent. Christmas alone has produced Black Christmas, Silent Night, Deadly Night, Krampus, Better Watch Out, Terrifier 3, Violent Night, and countless micro-budget riffs. Halloween is practically a genre unto itself. Valentine’s Day gave us My Bloody Valentine. Thanksgiving has Thanksgiving. Even Easter, April Fool’s Day, and St. Patrick’s Day have all been mined for a slew of low-budget horror concepts. In indie horror, name recognition alone has often been enough to secure a green light.
Which raises the more uncomfortable question: is Hanukkah horror actually too niche—or is antisemitism, often unexamined and structurally normalized, part of why it continues to be treated as commercially unviable?
Hanukkah is widely recognized. Every non-Jew knows what it is, and nearly every Jew has some relationship to it, however distant or personal. Yet within genre filmmaking, it’s consistently framed as culturally narrow, commercially risky, or insufficiently universal—an assessment that feels increasingly disconnected from how horror has historically operated.
I’ve encountered this firsthand. As I’ve developed my career as a screenwriter, I’ve pitched fully realized Hanukkah-set horror projects in the past—ideas I was genuinely energized by. Almost without exception, once those conversations reached buyers or executives, the response was the same: Hanukkah horror was considered too narrow to reliably justify funding. The concern was never quality, but audience—whether a Hanukkah-centered horror film could “guarantee” enough viewers to make it viable.
I never took that personally. You can’t, not if you want to last in this industry. Notes like that are structural, not judgmental. Still, looking back now, they linger. What does niche actually mean in this context? Are there truly not enough Jewish horror fans—or curious horror fans, period—to support a Hanukkah-centered genre film? Or is the absence driven more by assumption than evidence?
When you look at what does exist, the scarcity becomes even more apparent. Jewish horror is a small but meaningful subcategory—strong films like The Possession, Attachment, The Vigil, The Golem, and The Unborn draw explicitly from Jewish folklore, ritual, and theology. But none of them are holiday films. Hanukkah itself remains largely untouched, not even reinterpreted or subverted as other cultural touchstones have been.
The closest attempt is Hanukkah (2019), a low-budget slasher following a group of Jewish young adults preparing for the holiday who find themselves targeted during a “Festival of Frights.” With the help of a rabbi, they come to believe they’re being punished for violating Judaic law and that survival requires a return to faith. The film features genre veterans including PJ Soles, Caroline Williams, and Sid Haig—names with real horror credibility.
The film failed to make a substantive cultural impact. Reviews were largely negative, and audience response was minimal (or less). But still, it exists. And in a genre landscape where Hanukkah horror is nearly nonexistent, that fact alone is telling—not as proof that Hanukkah horror doesn’t work, but as evidence of how rarely the attempt is even made.
What makes the absence especially striking is how naturally Hanukkah aligns with horror’s core preoccupations. The holiday is rooted in ritual and repetition. It centers on light held against overwhelming darkness. It’s a story of endurance, visibility, and cultural survival under threat. These are basic ideas horror returns to again and again, often with far less symbolic richness to draw from.
And yet, Hanukkah remains largely untouched. Not because it lacks cinematic potential, but because it’s been quietly categorized as outside the genre’s assumed audience. And could there possibly be an unspoken undercurrent of disdain lingering beneath all of it?
Maybe things will change. Or maybe Hanukkah horror will continue to exist only as a theoretical space—an idea that feels obvious once named, but perpetually deferred in practice. Either way, and at least to me, the absence is no longer invisible. And in a genre built on confronting what’s been buried or ignored, that absence deserves to be examined head-on.
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