‘A Series Of Unfortunate Events’ author to write horror film based on the Golem of Prague

(JTA) — The Jewish creator of best-selling kids’s ebook collection “A Sequence of Unlucky Occasions” has been tapped to put in writing a horror movie based mostly on the legend of the Golem of Prague.

Daniel Handler, identified by his pen identify “Lemony Snicket,” will write the film for impartial Jewish manufacturing firm Leviathan Productions, from veteran movie producer Ben Cosgrove and Josh Foer, a contract journalist, the co-founder of the journey journey model Atlas Obscura and co-founder of Sefaria, the open-source Jewish textual content library.

The movie will replace the sixteenth century narrative of the golem of Prague, the place Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel created an anthropomorphic golem out of clay or mud to guard the ghetto from antisemitic assaults.

Within the upcoming movie, “a younger girl on a school campus finds herself terrorized by a creature with a mysterious previous,” Deadline studies.

Within the traditional golem legend, the Hebrew phrase for “reality,” “emet” is inscribed on the golem’s physique, giving it its powers. As soon as the golem turns into harmful, the one option to kill it’s to take away the letter “aleph,” which leaves the remaining phrase for “loss of life,” or in Hebrew, “met”.

Handler grew up in a family that “hovered between Reform and Conservative Judaism,” he advised Second Journal in 2007. And, the primary characters of his beloved gothically darkish and humorous “Sequence of Unlucky Occasions,” which was tailored right into a 2004 movie and a 2017 Netflix collection, are Jewish.

“Sure. The Baudelaires are Jewish! I assume we’d not know for certain however we’d strongly suspect it, not solely from their method however from the occasional point out of a rabbi or bar mitzvah or synagogue,” he mentioned. “The cautious reader will discover fairly a number of rabbis.”

Handler can also be the creator of a kids’s ebook, “The Latke Who Couldn’t Cease Screaming,” about an offended latke telling the Hanukkah story whereas operating into varied Christmas symbols who’re uneducated about Jewish historical past.

Leviathan Productions has acquired numerous different initiatives with Jewish themes, together with “{Photograph} 51,” a play by Anna Ziegler about Rosalind Franklin, the British Jewish chemist who found the construction of DNA; “The Secret Chord,” a novel by Geraldine Brooks about King David; and “The Pledge,” a 1970 nonfiction ebook by Leonard Slater concerning the U.S.’s function in Israel’s 1948 struggle for independence.

“Jewish tales have unbelievable resonance as a result of they discover concepts which might be universally identifiable,” Cosgrove advised Deadline. “Everybody is aware of what it feels prefer to be the underdog, the outsider, or the immigrant. Jewish tales sort out these concepts with humor and drama, and folks all over the world see themselves in our tales.”