Like many a ’90s kid, my first true foray into horror was R.L. Stine, with his Goosebumps and Fear Street series. The first book I picked up was Who’s Been Sleeping in My Grave?, about a boy named Zack who takes on his ghostly teacher. To say I was entranced was an understatement: Zack was an outsider, someone I could connect to and see myself in. There was a link I just couldn’t explain then. It wasn’t until a few years into reading Stine that I learned he was Jewish. Just like me. It was the start of a journey that would lead me into writing and understanding Jewish horror.

I grew up proud to be Jewish, but always cognizant of the difficulties it brought in a predominantly Gentile society. From a young age, I learned of a history of persecution but gained a deep love for life, healing, and endurance. Stine was a gateway that led to me reading a lot of other horror writers around that time and I learned those values were dearly prized in horror. But something about Stine’s work felt different to me as a kid; it felt like being understood. That a writer was creating horror stories that felt Jewish. It taught me that I was welcome in horror as a Jewish fan.

It didn’t take long for me to start devouring classic horror cinema. Two movies I saw early on were old black-and-white films The Golem and The Dybbuk, both based on Jewish folklore. I was captivated by seeing them and learning that my culture had its own horror. Its own monsters right out of folklore. There seemed to be so many stories one could tell with them. I wanted so much more.

But there didn’t seem to be very much Jewish horror written by Jewish writers. There weren’t any golems or dybbuks in the classics. When Jews were to be found in books like Dracula, they were greedy stereotypes if not outright villains. Common images of witches or vampires resembled antisemitic propaganda caricatures. It made me feel like an outsider in my favorite genre. The welcome I had received from Stine felt like a fleeting thing.

Then, as a young teenager, I found The Twilight Zone. I was captivated by the angry humanism of the Jewish Rod Serling. Two of my first episodes were “Death’s Head Revisited” and “He’s Alive.” These were sterling pieces of Jewish horror: frank confrontation of Nazism from a Jewish perspective. In the former episode, the ghosts of the Holocaust deliver justice against a former death-camp commandant. In the latter, a Holocaust survivor is left horrified by the rise of a new fascist movement. It was the first time I had seen Nazism confronted by a Jewish writer and it helped me see the rest of the show through that Jewish lens: endurance, strength, pushing to make an unjust world more just. I felt seen and welcomed again, like Serling understood me and what it was like to be Jewish.

A new disappointment greeted me that I hadn’t noticed before. Jewish characters in horror often had the Holocaust as the entire sum of their existence. So many books I read had Jewish victims as props for Gentile saviors. Victims without agency, whose suffering existed so others could be the heroes. A rare exception was F. Paul Wilson’s The Keep, where the heroine Magda is a proud Jewish woman who helps save the day. I loved reading about Magda. I wanted to know where I could find more Magdas.

But where were more proudly Jewish heroes and why weren’t Jewish writers writing them? I wondered if the Holocaust was all the fictional world horror saw in a rich, millennia-old culture. Dybbuks and golems were gone, replaced by human monsters. But we weren’t the heroes of our own stories. Nobody seemed to have interest in telling them.

I was excited when I learned of films like The Possession and The Unborn coming out in theaters, sold as Jewish horror films. I was inevitably disappointed when they turned out to be like cliché Catholic films in disguise. The Unborn clumsily used the Holocaust as a backstory and the terrifying ghost of the dybbuk was just a hackneyed creepy child. Even worse, The Possession resulted in everyone “knowing” about a dybbuk box; an admitted hoax with no place in Jewish folklore. These didn’t feel Jewish: they felt like Gentiles trying to use Judaism to make the stories more exotic. Was bad Jewish horror better than none? The question was a painful one. For a long time I resigned myself to believing “Jewish” horror was nothing but the sum of a few lucky aberrations.

But years after The Possession, everything changed. I saw The Vigil in 2019. The film roared out of nowhere to critical and commercial acclaim, the film drew on Jewish lore, anxieties, fears, history, and focused on the common themes of diaspora, inter-community conflict, persecution, and endurance. I saw myself on the screen again. This was a film based on Jewish folklore featuring a monster called a mazzik. This was familiar, yet brand new. It was by Jews, with a Jewish director and lead actor. It taught me there was so much more than just dybbuks and golems in our folklore. The Vigil’s success told me I belonged to horror as a Jewish fan. It sparked a new fire in me, and I began to research more than ever.

I found folklore and fiction in abundance: There were writers like John Baltisberger, who wrote Jewish horror based on Jewish folklore, culture, history. Of The Book, edited by Baltisberger, was the first of its kind: an anthology of nothing but Jewish horror stories. I couldn’t have been more excited to read them and the authors I found next: Richard Dansky, Elana Gomel, John Palisano, Maxwell Ian Gold, Emily Ruth Verona, Brenda S. Tolian, Veronica Schanoes, Aden Polydoros. Jewish writers penning down Jewish stories. Whether from old folklore and legends or from brand new ideas, I was captivated by all I found.

But we needed more. It was still few and far between. I decided I needed to be the change I wanted to see and write unapologetically Jewish works, inspired by all those who’d come before me and my contemporaries. So I started writing them myself. Years of research and passion allowed me to make my own stories of dybbuks and golems, but also so much more.

As I wrote, something amazing happened: People were listening. I met other Jewish horror writers and became friends with many of them. And new works began to emerge. The joy I felt with three successful and acclaimed Jewish horror releases in this past year alone was indescribable. The Offering is a demonic tale of pure terror. Attachment is a heartbreaking queer-romance retelling of The Dybbuk. Blood Relative is a cheerfully humorous horror-comedy about a Jewish vampire learning of the teen daughter he never knew. More Jewish creatives are telling their own stories with limitless variety. Most importantly, we’re able to make our own Magdas and not rely on Gentile writers to reduce us to props in our own history and legends. We’re able to tell our own stories of golems and dybbuks, and countless other monsters from our own stories. But most importantly, like R.L. Stine and Rod Serling, we’re putting our own Jewish spin on the stories we choose to tell. For us, and all the up-and-coming Jewish horror fans who want to see themselves on the page. It’s hard tearing down systemic barriers, but it’s wonderful to know we’re in this together.

I don’t think there have ever been so many Jewish writers in horror working on such unapologetically Jewish stories and sharing their culture and experiences with the world. There isn’t enough and there needs to be more across the entire publishing industry. But now we’re doing it more than ever before. There are so many stories yet to tell, and I am proud to be taking the journey with the rest of my fellow B’nei Yisrael.