Winona Ryder, Werewolves, & Jewish Horror

🎃 notes on our collective terrors

Nov 01, 2024

This newsletter is brought to you by Winona Ryder.

In my house this October, we’ve been scrolling through Criterion’s available horror films and horror-adjacent collections.

Werewolf Bar Mitzvah

First we watched An American Werewolf in London, a 1981 movie I’d never before been interested in. I find horror fascinating and repelling in equal measure, and I appreciate a good tension-relieving joke in a scary movie, but “Comedy-horror” has always flummoxed me.

“Werewolf” sets you down with two students, Jack and David, who are backpacking in England, with plans to end up in Italy. They disregard the advice of very sour-faced locals to stay off the moors and beware the full moon! —of course they do—and are attacked by a werewolf.

Cut to David in the hospital. One nurse says “I think he’s a Jew” to another. My heart made a queasy palpitation: What kind of horror film was this going to be? The nurse admits she took a naughty little peek under his blanket, and I let out a scandalized guffaw of relief.

Jack’s “undead” corpse then tries to warn David that he must take his own life before the next full moon, both to free Jack’s soul and to avoid becoming a werewolf and perpetuating the cycle of killing. Here, surprisingly, we encounter a deep ethical question! Should you sacrifice yourself—must you—to protect others?

Adding to the strange intensity of watching this forty-year-old movie was its unexpected (because unadvertised) and explicit concern with Jewish American identity and experience. In retrospect, this starts with Jack and David’s not-explicitly-or-exclusively-but-decidedly-Jewish experience of otherness when they walk into their first pub, the Slaughtered Lamb (a Passover reference to the Angel of Death?).

Writer-director John Landis creates unease, but also takes a loving and sympathetic approach to his characters and fills the world with Jewish material. Jack has a crush on a hottie named Debbie Klein. David’s doctor is named Dr. Hirsch. His nightmares are of terrifying monster-faced-Nazis storming his family’s home.

Was I imagining that this was kind of unusual, a bit of a big deal? No. Joshua Rothkopf wrote about the film for Rolling Stone in 2016, which is either a coincidence, because it was the movie’s 35th anniversary, or not a coincidence, because Jewish safety was starting to feel vulnerable for the first time in my life. Rothkopf wrote:

Hiding a secret deep within one’s body, strange urges, xenophobic glances, accusatory feelings of guilt: David’s condition already has a name, and this won’t be the first film in which Jewish otherness is made monstrous. (Not incidentally, the first werewolf hit, 1942’s The Wolf Man, was based on an original script by Curt Siodmak, a German Jew who fled Joseph Goebbels.)
For Landis, that’s part of the comedy: David is conspicuously out of place because he’s a hairy beast among stiff, proper English people. What makes An American Werewolf in London different, though, and more sympathetic, is the way David becomes emboldened by his new condition: Soon, a cute caretaker (Walkabout‘s Jenny Agutter) will bring him home for sex, stealing his NYU T-shirt like new girlfriends do — she finds him very attractive and a “little bit sad.”

For all the history Jewish Americans have had with Hollywood, it still feels unusual to see a film representing Jewish experience, with no interest in the gentile gaze.

Winona the Witch Hunter

Last night, after Trick or Treating was all wrapped up, I decided it was time to watch The Crucible, a Winona Ryder (née Winona Horowitz, just FYI), Joan Allen, Daniel Day Lewis movie I was too young to see when it came out in 1996.

Had I read the play in high school? I couldn’t have said for certain. It’s one of those books that exists in the ether, and since it’s set in the 1600s, and I paid no attention to it having been written in 1953, it might as well have been written by Shakespeare. One feels they know it, whether or not they do.

When it premiered in 1953, the Times summarized the plot this way: “Silly accusations of witchcraft by some mischievous girls in Puritan dress gradually take possession of Salem. Before the play is over good people of pious nature and responsible temper are condemning other good people to the gallows.”

Winona Ryder’s character Abby and her friends first accuse others to divert attention from their own transgressions. And the surest way to be seen as On Team Jesus is to say you’ve been the victim of Satan and his posse—and to name your enemies and friend’s names.

Widely known beef between the accuser (Abby) and accused (Joan Allen, Daniel Day Lewis’s wife) just gives credence to the idea of a motive for harm; widely known affection (between Abby and her friend Mary Warren) just makes it seem more likely your only motivation is Truth and Justice.

Moral authority was a form of power, and it was self-protective. Think the witch hunt might be going a little too far? Well, anyone who questions those on Team Jesus is obviously playing for Team Satan!

You might believe your heart is good — but can you prove it?

I wish I had seen the play staged with Saoirse Ronan in New York in 2016, when, even before Hillary Clinton had lost the election, it was being touted as “the freshest, scariest play in town” for the way it mirrored the moment’s fears of otherness and evil — “bad hombres” and the “deep state” and the satanic panic of QAnon. How do you talk the people with “Save the Children” signs down from the ledge?

Choice cuts from a NYT review titled “First They Came for the Witches” (a reference to Martin Niemoller’s famous poem) in March 2016:

When an officer of the court comes to arrest Elizabeth, they have the incredulity of people caught unawares by a tide of history that they simply can’t believe could happen in the world they know. Nazi Germany comes to mind. Certain pundits might even think of the United States today.
… One of the miracles of this “Crucible,” though, is its success in presenting all those onstage as all too human and all too hungry to see themselves as good people. It’s their self-protecting, self-deluding rationalizations that conjure the devils of distrust that rip a social fabric to shreds.

You could definitely watch this movie and think about how we struggle to discuss a shared reality since Donald Trump took center stage—how we end up mired in MAGA’s projections of their own inner demons (“Kamala is a threat to democracy! They’re going to cheat!”) and dog-whistles chasing their own tails (“They’re eating the pets! If not dogs, then ducks! Well I wouldn’t have to invent stories about ducks if you’d just been paying closer attention to what I said in the first place!”).

For me, it’s easy to do so, depressing and satisfying all at once: JD Vance’s journey from Never-Trumper to V.P. candidate is the story of Mary Warren, who comes clean about her and Abby’s lies. Abby’s defense is to accuse Mary of dealing with the devil, and the rest of the girls go along. Mary realizes her survival depends on conforming with the ringleader’s narrative and she falls in line, joining them to throw another lamb (Daniel Day Lewis) to the slaughter.

From 1690 to 1996 to 2016 to 2024

What feels more gritty and urgent and raw for me is the way The Crucible kicked up feelings about the past thirteen months, which since Oct. 7 has shredded the social fabric of the Left overall and many Jewish communities and families in particular.

The accusations flung between opposing camps of “Zionist” and “anti-Zionist” seem to push these poles further and further apart, until each becomes an extreme of monstrousness to the other. The “devils of distrust” surround us, and we feel we are the victims of the ever-stronger witchcraft of our opponents.

And because the stakes are life and death for the Israelis and Palestinians, they’ve come to feel life-and-death, Good versus Evil, for our relationships to one another. Someone calls you deluded/suicidal/Antisemitic/traitorous, or hypocritical/supremacist/Islamophobic/genocidaire, and you wonder:

How can I prove to you that I am good and righteous?

One of the town’s most righteous and respected elders, Rebecca Nurse, counsels her neighbors, “Let us rather blame ourselves than the devil.” In the end, she refuses to save her own life by confessing to witchcraft and is executed while reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

Arthur Miller was born in 1915 to Jewish parents, one an immigrant and the other first-generation. A teenager during the Great Depression, a football injury left him exempt from serving in the military during World War II.

The Red Scare that took hold of America—and in particular, pressured conformity and denouncement and self-censorship in Hollywood—inspired him to study the Salem witch trials, which in turn inspired The Crucible.

Miller recalled that during the 40s and 50s, “our thought processes were becoming so magical, so paranoid, that to imagine writing a play about this environment was like trying to pick one’s teeth with a ball of wool: I lacked the tools to illuminate miasma.”

He wrote those words in a New Yorker essay in 1996 … when he was watching Winona Ryder and Daniel Day Lewis filming yet another adaptation of his work.1

“The Crucible” was an act of desperation. Much of my desperation branched out, I suppose, from a typical Depression-era trauma—the blow struck on the mind by the rise of European Fascism and the brutal anti-Semitism it had brought to power. But by 1950, when I began to think of writing about the hunt for Reds in America, I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the inquisitors’ violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly.
In any play, however trivial, there has to be a still point of moral reference against which to gauge the action. In our lives, in the late nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties, no such point existed anymore. The left could not look straight at the Soviet Union’s abrogations of human rights. The anti-Communist liberals could not acknowledge the violations of those rights by congressional committees. The far right, meanwhile, was licking up all the cream. The days of “J’accuse” were gone, for anyone needs to feel right to declare someone else wrong. Gradually, all the old political and moral reality had melted like a Dali watch. Nobody but a fanatic, it seemed, could really say all that he believed.

After The Crucible premiered in 1953, Miller became a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee … because, like his play’s heroes, he dared to suggest that the self-proclaimed Good Guys might be going too far?

Then, it was believed that the Reds had infiltrated “television, radio, and Hollywood” and were pushing their propaganda on us. Congressmen asked citizens to name names, and patriots were asked to refuse to consume their poison:

Today, the people of America can make their own lists. Did you see the one called “is your fav author a zionist?” Authors are listed a Yes/No and a color-grade, with the best people (blue) “consistently posting about palestine” and the worst (red!) for crimes such as “character in their book also a zionist lowkey” and “posted picture of Israeli flag after Oct 7” or, for Zadie Smith (Unclear / orange) “used a lot of words to say nothing.” 2

Not to worry, though, the watchful list-keeper would add updated information about any subsequent, redeeming (or incriminating) activities. So any author willing to sign their name to the confession and post it to the church door still stands a chance of earning a pardon.

I’ve spent an entire day writing this, and I fear it’s not enough. I’ll be misunderstood. I’ll be wrong. I’ll be Bad. I send you this Substack not as my closing argument or thesis, but as a bundle of notes and field observations. As a step toward figuring out how to talk about things as intangible as trauma, paranoia, polarization, and prejudice. I’ve been staring into a miasma and wondering how to find my way through it.

Today, once again, I cast my vote for the candidate I hope will be the first female president in American history.

Today, once again, it feels scary to be Jewish in America.

Today, as every day since 2016, I fear I lack the tools to illuminate the miasma.

Today, I am still striving to be on the side of goodness, freedom, openness and inclusivity … but I am also trying much harder to be mindful not only of the demons without but also within.

One last witch

Speaking of media that came out a while ago … have you listened to The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling? It’s a limited series podcast (audio documentary) about Rowling’s reputational roller coaster—from being reviled by the Right for exposing children to supernatural and malevolent ideas to being reviled by the Left as a TERF.

I was never a Potter-head and didn’t follow the drama when it was happening in real time, so I came at this as a fairly neutral listener, I think?

Hosted by Megan Phelps-Roper, who was raised in the Westboro Baptist hate-church and left it in adulthood, it’s toothsome, thoughtful, non-sensationalizing, historically fascinating (especially for ‘90s kids!), and empathetic. Or so I thought. I know there’s a lot of you podcast-lovers out there: What did you think?

Amazing fun fact: It was on this set that Daniel Day Lewis met Arthur Miller’s daughter, the writer, director, and actor Rebecca Miller. The two are still married today.

Let me not leave out that the cancellation sword has indeed cut both ways.