Keith Thomas’s new horror movie The Vigil centers around a night of shmirah, the act of guarding a dead body from the moment of death until burial. Serving as a shomer, a guard, is an unnerving task and one that seems ripe for the horror genre. “I couldn’t believe there had never been one” focused on a shomer, Thomas tells me over Zoom. Although perhaps it’s not so surprising considering the paucity of Jewish horror films out there. Even those with Jewish components usually use them more as gimmicks than as elements integral to the story. (Remember Matisyahu popping up as a dybbuk-fighting rabbi in The Possession.) With The Vigil, which is almost entirely in Yiddish and set in ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn, Thomas sets out to create a film “rooted in real Jewish experience and thought.”  The...

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