On the day before Christmas, I present to you all a rather intriguing horror short film I caught from filmmaker Ramone Menon. As a kid, Menon always thought the birth of Jesus must have been terrifying so he decided to make a horror film about it.

Casting Lebanese/Palestinian actress Jessica Damouni as Miryam (which would have been the historically and geographically accurate name for “Mary” and daresay I the correct ethnicity to play the part) who is completely astounding in this film, Virgin premiered at this year’s FilmQuest, which took place from October 24 to November 2.

From filmmaker Ramone Menon:

When I was growing up and listening to the Biblical stories, I always thought the Nativity Story sounded like it was a scary haunted house story to me. I couldn’t imagine being Mary and Joseph all alone out there while Mary was about to give birth to baby Jesus. The idea of what could have been going on in Joseph’s mind at this time — wondering if his fiancee and the woman he loves, Mary’s pregnancy is immaculate or not – was fascinating especially since this aspect of the story is very seldom analyzed or written about in detail.

Since I grew up in a household where multiple religions were worshipped — Hinduism from my mother’s side and Christianity from some part of my father’s side — my relationship with religion was always complex and ambiguous as I was exposed to both religions and went to a Catholic school.

I wanted to make a movie that was similar in tone of The Shining, The Witch, and Beyond The Hills. The idea of mixing retelling the Nativity Story as a Haunted House movie is what I wanted to do — this would allow the themes of love and faith to be explored in an entertaining genre fashion. I wanted to ensure that throughout the film you cannot tell for certain if Miryam and Yosef are being haunted or if the hauntings are the projections of Yosef’s jealousy and/or Miryam’s guilt.

Making the film in the Aramaic language added an extra depth and challenge as I wanted to ensure the characters and story was grounded in reality before the story is invaded with the supernatural and scares. Both the actors had to learn and rehearse their dialogue in English first and then translated it to Aramaic with the help of an Aramaic translator that I found to help with the translation of the script.

We shot this film over three days in a desert location outside LA with a tiny crew. I wrote and directed the film and co-produced it with Annalea Fiachi. This film was made as a proof of concept and we are developing the feature version of this film to be shot in early 2025.

In addition to Jessica Damouni as Miryam, the cast also includes Herman Gambhir as Yosef and Katie Lynn Stoddard as The Beast (or The Devil).