B. Honig
These days, I, like many others, write letters to protest the U.S.-supported genocide in Gaza and to reject new American ‘protections’ of Jews against antisemitism. I start my letters by noting my parents survived the attempted genocide of European Jews by the Nazis. It is how many of us authorize an alternative Jewish voice, different from the mainstream perspective which is called “Jewish” in the U.S. Still, even as I invoke my parents’ experiences, I honestly have no idea what they would themselves say about the devastation we are witnessing now. I wish I could know. And I am not sure I want to know.
As particular as this ambivalence is, specific to my own circumstances and upbringing, it is also universal. Or so I learned recently from watching a brilliant new short film called The Knock Knock Game at the Rhode Island International Film Festival (RIIFF) (dir. Mac Hendrickson). It is a horror film about an adolescent, Tess, who plays a game that might bring someone back from the dead. The game, as their peers explain, requires that you take a dead rat to someone’s grave, knock on their tombstone three times, and then go home and wait. Sometimes, when it works, “their spirit will come and knock on your door in return,” says Tess’s friend Mikey. “And you could talk to them?” Tess asks. “I guess,” says Mikey, (seemingly unsure why you would want to), “but you cannot open the door – no matter what happens!” “Why?” Why? Because terrible things might happen.
“I think we should play,” says Tess. “Tonight.” They don’t really believe this silly game will work, and yet they surely hope it does. Else why choose their father’s grave? Tess has questions they want answered. “Sometimes people say this stuff about dad,” they explain later to their mom. “I just want to know if he was who we thought he was.” But their mother is no help: “I wish every day your father was still here,” she says. “So I could ask him that same question.”
Tess has by then followed Mikey’s instructions and, later that night, someone does turn up at their door. What starts as a gentle, persistent knocking becomes increasingly demanding as the scene unfolds. “Tess?” a man’s voice. “Tess, it’s me.” “Dad?” “I’m here.” “Dad, I’ve been hearing all these really horrible things and I need to know the truth, I’m really confused.” “I’ll tell you everything Tess, I promise. But right now, I need you to open the door.” … “I can’t; I can’t open the door,” says Tess.
They want to, but they also don’t. We see Tess’s yearning as keenly as we feel their terror. They try to ask their questions through the door, without opening it. But the voice demands entry, again and again; first promising, then wheedling, then belligerent. Finally, Tess opens the door. There is nothing there! Or is there? Then, in the house, we see a spritely rat scoot into their bedroom, and we glimpse a man inside. The foretold bad things happen. It doesn’t matter what. Well, it does, but not here.
Here what matters is the trauma-inflected realization I had while watching the film that this was not just a fanciful film about a silly game gone wrong. It was about my family! Well, not only. It was about all families or communities, and the deep desire of those left behind to ask questions left unresolved. It is about how we seek answers even when we know they might devastate us. It is about the yearning and terror that lead us to open some dangerous doors and keep others tightly barred.
In the film, the home’s address is momentarily visible and it felt like a nearly Kabbalist revelation to see its four-numbers were the same as the last four digits of my childhood phone number. And then, another strange serendipity: this particular short horror block included The Littles, a film about mini-people living beneath the floorboards of a young girl’s bedroom. The floorboards made me think of my grandfather, who survived the war in such a fashion. And then The Knock Knock Game, screened just 10 minutes later, featured one more detail that brought my grandfather back to me.
The Knock Knock Game happens to star my younger offspring, Naomi Honig. They do not know my childhood phone number, nor the story of the rat who befriended my grandfather when he was hidden under the floorboards at a neighbor’s house in Poland from 1939-1945. My father told me the story: isolated in his hiding place, my grandfather welcomed the rat and looked forward to its visits. He even shared his meagre bread with the creature. But one day, the rat did not return. My grandfather prayed for it to come back but it did not. And, when he realized the creature was never coming back, that it was likely dead or gone, my grandfather wept.
This is the only one of my father’s war-related stories that was not somehow humorous. Usually, his stories were funny and triumphant, about the times when he, an unarmed Jew, somehow outwitted or outran an armed soldier. But not so this story.
I still recall my father’s face filled with bleak wonder as he got to the end of my grandfather’s story: imagine living like that, he all but said, such that a rat is your best friend and you cry when it is gone. He could not imagine it.
In The Knock Knock Game, it is Tess’s adolescent longing for clarity that makes them vulnerable to their father’s promise to tell them “everything,” though “everything” can never be told. Courtesy of this great short film, I see that the horrifying politics of our moment have forced diasporic Jews into a version of the Knock Knock game, too, but not because we long for clarity; unlike Tess, we don’t lack clarity. What we lack is a place from which to voice our horror and shame.
Boxed in by charges of antisemitism, those who want to reject Israeli state violence conjure the dead so that we have a place to speak from. Thus, we learn again what we have always known — that even the dead can have no peace as long as genocide unfolds. And it is thus not surprising that horror as a genre, in times of horror, becomes a parable for politics.
