On the historic night when hundreds of thousands went out to demonstrate on the roads and streets against the dictatorship in the making, the new horror series of Channel 11, “Destroying Angel”, was supposed to be broadcast. The timing could not have been worse for its creators – Noah Stollman, Abigail Ben-Dor Niv and Oded Davidoff – but the cancellation of the broadcast was inevitable on such an evening. However, the episode was released through the YouTube channel and on the Kaan 11 app and you can already watch it.
All the television series we know today deal with a variety of topics – families, relationships, comedies, dramas, impossible love stories, politics, crime – but almost everything is under a glass ceiling called “realism”. It is not because of some strong desire of the audience to see a realistic reflection on the screen.
The reality is much simpler than that: until recently they did not want to invest large budgets in Israeli television, but the broadcasting corporation broke through the dam with “Carthage”, an internationally produced series under the transmission of Khan 11 which received an extremely high budget and many praises and above all made us realize: we have exhausted the here and now , in the case of “Carthage”, and we also break from realism. Tired of watching dysfunctional families, a criminal father, a drug addict mother, a child planning a robbery, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In short, we are out of touch with reality. and so Here 11 allows the three creators to take one step forward and deal with a genre that is rarely dealt with on Israeli television: supernatural horror, and more with Jewish roots.
“Destroying Angel” tells about a sabotaging demon that roams Mea She’arim and causes women in Hasidim in Brody to lose their sanity and commit horrible acts. The series focuses on a professor of physics at the Hebrew University, a Hasidite, who collaborates with an ultra-Orthodox psychologist to hunt down the demon. The physicist is played by Tom Avni with great talent, but the surprising and truly successful casting is that of Lioz Levy for the role of Malki Price, the psychologist. Giving a transgender actress the role of a woman rather than the role of a woman who has undergone gender reassignment for a transsexual actress is a nice and obvious move, but even though she gets relatively little screen time compared to Avni, Levy occupies her relatively few scenes because of her acting talent and not because of any issue of representation. In any case, according to the synopsis that has been published so far, it seems that Malki Price also has secrets in the closet – I just hope it won’t be a revelation that Malki’s character has also undergone a gender change, simply because it would feel not so connected to the world of the series.
Tom Avni as a physicist? yes sure why not From “Destroying Angel” (photo: Courtesy of Kaan 11, Anani Studio, A+E Studio)
There are quite a few biblical stories that could have been adapted into a horror film, but the work that resonates here the most is “The Possession”, by S. An-Ski, written between 1913 and 1916. The play itself tells the story of Hanan, who is in love with Leah, who is destined to marry another person Hanan, who engages in forbidden Kabbalah, dies when he hears that Leah has betrothed Menashe and his soul clings to Leah’s corpse. This horror play has become a Jewish classic and to this day there are various adaptations of it, so it is not a surprise that we see its influence here as well. The demon roaming in Mea Shearim indeed Reminiscent in its features of the possession from the classic play, but it is original enough. And that is the beauty of the “Destroying Angel” series, in one episode they managed to build their own language and create something original and new and intriguing. What’s more, the main problem with “Destroying Angel” is that it is a non-scary horror series.
It’s not that there are no elements of horror in the series, there are a lot. There is an unnerving silence, blood, death, supernatural elements, and above all, lots of unsolved questions. From the first episode it is not clear what the demon is trying to achieve, but it is clear that he is looking for Dov Baer, the physicist and the hero of the series. But despite some serious achievements in the field of effects in the episode, whether it’s a body impaled on a fence or a woman standing in a mikvah and trapped in a pool of blood – a real surprise because most of the effects in Israeli series are mediocre at best – it still feels like a drama that turns into a psychological thriller, instead of committing to the end For the horror genre, which still suffers from underrepresentation in the local television and film industry.
But in any case, this is a milestone. The Broadcasting Corporation financed a series from a genre that is hardly seen in Israeli cinema and takes a more Hollywood direction than expected in the best possible segment. Israeli horror is a rare commodity, almost non-existent and seeing it gives hope that in the future we may see more and more genre television on the Israeli screen: more dub, action and fantasy and less family comedy dramas. And who knows, maybe someday we’ll even get A cinematic universe for Israeli superheroes?
“Destroying Angel”, here 11, Sundays at 22:15 (the broadcast of the first episode was postponed due to the news broadcasters yesterday) and also on the YouTube channel of the Broadcasting Corporation