#but like...dont go stealing concepts from like the coptics and then making some wildly anti-arab shit yknow

[note-a-bear]

Just saw a trailer for a horror movie seemingly based on Jewish mysticism. Me being a fan of religiously inflected horror, I go to the name of the director/writer. No one I recognize. I go to the wiki for him and....he's almost def not actually Jewish.

*Wilhelm scream*

I fucking hate hate hate how hard it is to come across movies dealing with not-xtian religious-ish horror.* And I hate that on the rare occurrence you do see something that's supposedly not-xtian, most of the time it has no one from the subject group involved in writing or directing. It's especially galling because the whole thing with most religious horror is the invocation of some kind of esoteric or obscure element but given that...yknow...lots of religions and cultures are closed, and any esoterica is either incredibly specific (meaning you can't just graft xtian interpretations of concepts onto them and say 'close enough'), or elements of an even *more* closed part of that religion.

At best what we get is something lazy and boring, but not intentionally offensive. At worst it's a complete slap in the face of the subject religion/culture.

*note: this complaint is largely about mainline releases in the US/UK/Canada. Which, yes obvs these are heavily culturally xtian places but also there are a lot of not-xtians involved and fans of genre media so it's increasingly frustrating that they're like...not 'rare' finds in that they're not out there, but rare in that they don't get as much (if any) marketing push.

#like at a certain point just be lazy within the parameters of xtian horror please #dicking around in someone else's culture especially for purposes of horror-fying it is beyond excuse at this point #and real talk: theres MORE than plenty xtian esoterica out there to get into #but like...dont go stealing concepts from like the coptics and then making some wildly anti-arab shit yknow #or like utilizing language of the Ethiopian orthodoxy to show spooky backwards xtians yknow?