The film still has its share of gender issues, however, such as a scene in which Sarah has sex while her father messages her things like “I know you are being a good girl.” I guess the irony here is that she is being a terrible person because she’s sleeping with a guy? You see how this is a problem.Īs opposed to the usual camcorder/iPhone approach to first person horror, the Google Glass hook offers the opportunity for Sarah to pull up other screens and songs laid over what we’re actually seeing. By establishing the “narrator” of JeruZalem as female, the Paz brothers upend that outdated tradition without patting themselves on the back for doing so.
For as much talk as there is about the “male gaze” in horror, no subgenre is more guilty of the device than found footage, which makes the gaze completely literal. That may not seem like a big deal, but it is actually quietly revolutionary. For starters, it’s one of the few found footage/first person horror films I can recall told from the perspective of a female protagonist. There are a handful of things that JeruZalem is smart about. We might as well be playing a first person video game. Without a ballast worth caring about when things start to go bad, there’s no emotional investment in what happens to the main characters. The rest of her character has to be developed via awkward offscreen voiceover, making it very difficult to empathize with her. All we know about Sarah is that she has recently suffered a loss and misses her caring father, seen briefly at the beginning. While it’s meant to give the movie some immediacy-we see what she sees-it has the effect of putting us at a remove. The term has become shorthand for describing the “first person” aesthetic used here, established by the fact that the main character goes through the entire film wearing Google Glass (which manages to date the movie already, as Google Glass isn’t really a thing anymore) because her regular prescription specs get nicked. While movies like JeruZalem are often lumped into the “found footage” genre, that designation is not entirely accurate here, as there’s no suggestion that this is a film that has been recovered, as it were. After a few days of hanging out, sightseeing and partying, the characters find themselves trapped within the city walls as the gates of Hell open and the end of the world begins.
Two American girls, Sarah (Danielle Jadelyn) and Rachel (Yael Grobglas) are en route to a vacation in Tel Aviv when they meet Kevin (Yon Tumarkin), who convinces them to accompany him to Jerusalem for good times in the Old City. It’s a choice that adds both novelty and a sense of history to what is an otherwise overly familiar first-person horror film that’s part zombie movie, part Cloverfield, all disappointing. As the reach of the new global cinema trickles down from the blockbusters to even indie horror, we’re getting films shot in countries and locations that are relatively new to genre films, from the United Arab Emirates (in Tobe Hooper’s long-shelved Djinn) to now JeruZalem, not just made by Israeli filmmakers the Paz Brothers, but actually shot in the titular city itself.
We’re living in an interesting time for horror movies.