Film Review | 1937’s ‘The Dybbuk’: Just in Time for Halloween

This year, as Halloween approached, I found myself thinking about The Dybbuk as I scrolled the seemingly endless number of horror films offered on one of my streaming services—the kind of movies I love to stuff in my eyes every October. The Dybbuk, made in Poland in 1937, is different. It’s a supernatural film, yes, but also a document of a world that was about to disappear. Watching it feels less like entering a fictional story than opening a window into a past far gone.

It begins with music, a sound that could only come from the Ashkenazi Jewish world of Eastern Europe. You hear the hymns swelling and receding in beautiful minor chord melody. The camera glides over a table of men in black coats, faces shining in candlelight. The imagery calls to mind da Vinci’s The Last Supper, as if the filmmakers knew in 1937 precisely what was coming. But the men are drinking and celebrating and making plans for the future. Already the movie feels, in hindsight, alive with contradiction: joy and dread, faith and doubt, the sacred and the absurd, all folded together in that most Jewish of ways.

The story is simple. Two children, Khonen and Leah, are betrothed before birth by their fathers, but tragedy separates them and this promise is forgotten or lost to time. Years later, in a sort of shtetl version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, they find each other again, largely unaware of their identities. They fall in love, quickly. When Khonen learns that Leah’s father plans to marry her off to someone wealthy, Khonen tries to alter his fate through a forbidden mystical practice from the Kabbalah. He fails and dies, and his restless soul returns as a dybbuk. This titular entity is a spirit that possesses the living when unfinished business is left on the table. He finds Leah on her wedding day.

All the while, a mysterious mystic comes in and out of the story to bestow wisdom (or in dramatic terms, exposition) upon the characters, and the viewer, warning about the follies of humans trying to exert control in a chaotic world. Is this figure real? A man? A ghost? I had to chuckle to myself, thinking the device could easily fit into a Mel Brooks parody, with the mystic ideally played by Mel himself. Once again, it feels natural to imagine how Jewish humor could fit so neatly into an otherwise dark tale. 

The humor expands. When the townspeople are left outside of Leah’s exuberant wedding, hosted and attended by the town’s elite, they protest. One person yells “he’s so rich, he could have given us each a whole loaf of bread!” Without missing a beat, another protester responds “What’s the difference? When we die, the worms get us all.” One bristles, chuckles and nods in quick succession. 

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You can read The Dybbuk in many ways: as folklore, as a theological parable, as a love story interrupted by the rigid hierarchies of class and faith. The dybbuk character is not exactly a villain. He’s a soul trying to speak, a counter force that refuses to stay buried. Khonen’s haunting of Leah is both a love story and a warning: When a society demands obedience at all cost, the human heart will find a way to rebel, even if it means moving across that greatest of divides. 

The film’s centerpiece, the wedding dance, is astonishing. It begins as celebration and slowly becomes something else: a kind of ecstatic reaching out to God. A possessed ritual where the dancers, dressed in haunting garments, spin faster and faster. It calls to mind a spooky version of a wedding horah. The scene feels like something out of Ari Aster’s Midsommar, another horror film about ritual colliding with the repressed. 

To fully engage with The Dybbuk is to open a window into the world in which it was made. In the late 1930s, Jewish Eastern Europe was still teeming with cultural life. Yiddish theaters in Warsaw and Vilna were packed nightly, and Jewish writers and thinkers were at the center of culture. Yet the air was getting heavy. Antisemitism was on the rise, and violence against Jews was growing more institutional and state-backed. You can feel that pressure in every frame. 

Khonen’s act of forbidden study, his attempt to use mystical knowledge to rewrite destiny, feels unique in religious lore. As an aside, I love that in Judaism we have a sort of “off-limits” spooky alternative to the Torah. As if to say “that is the ghost book, please don’t use it even though it’s sitting right there and can offer some spells and powers.” Of course such a tale of hubris is timeless and seen across cultures. Khonen wants to climb out of the station he was born into, to force the divine hand. He fails, and the film punishes him for it. Yet his rebellion lingers as an understandable response in the context of social rigidity: What does it mean to resist the life to which you were assigned? Judaism, after all, is as much about questioning the world around you as it is anything else. The Dybbuk is not moralistic about this. It understands the tragedy of a person who cannot accept the limits placed on him in his pursuit of a meaningful life. 

Knowing what happened after the film was made changes everything. Many of the actors, the director and the audience for whom it was made would be dead within a few years. The haunting is not only supernatural but historical; it plays onscreen and offstage as well. 

Still, there is something deeply life-affirming in it. “When you study, you’re not afraid,” one character says, which feels like a prayer for the living. For these characters, religious study and participation in their community and culture become the tools by which fear is held at bay. Watching the film now, I thought about how much of Jewish survival has depended on exactly that: the belief that to understand is to endure.

What makes The Dybbuk so moving is that it refuses neat conclusions. The ending is what you make of it. There is a line uttered;  “I’ve forgotten who I am. Only through your thoughts can I remember myself”—which blurs the line between romance and darkness. The living and the dead remain bound together. 

This Halloween, if you want to watch a spine-tingling movie full of culture, history and meaning, consider watching The Dybbuk. 

Note: The film was adapted from the eponymous 1914 play by S. An-sky (pen name of Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport). Other adaptations include: an 1951 opera composed by David Tampkin; a 1960 TV movie directed by Sidney Lumet; a 1974 Jerome Robbins ballet; and a 1997 Tony Kushner theater production.

The film is available on Blu-Ray from Kino Lorber and available for streaming on Kanopy. There are also lesser-quality streams uploaded for free to YouTube. The film is in Yiddish with English subtitles.