Growing up in the Palestinian diaspora between the UAE and the US, 46-year-old filmmaker Rolla Selbak became fascinated with her Palestinian heritage through the stories shared by her family.
But these weren’t any stories. These were folk horror tales, featuring ghouls, spirits, djinns, monsters, and all sorts of supernatural beings and events.
One time, her grandmother told her she had a djinn family living in her backyard. Another time, her uncle told her that when he was playing football as a child, a mysterious spirit appeared, kidnapped one of his friends, and turned him into a rabbit.
Rolla says her family believed these stories, although she herself was sceptical, but hearing them “always captured” her imagination.
She learned from a young age that “each [Palestinian] village has a monster, its own folklore.”
These tales have inspired the filmmaker in writing her third feature film, The Visitor, a Palestinian folk horror that centres on a young man in Jerusalem who must protect his family from a Ghouleh, a female demon, when it arrives in town and threatens to destroy their home.
“It's always fascinated me — this way of exploring Palestine in terms of the monsters that we tell each other are in it,” Rolla tells The New Arab.
“But then, when I thought of monsters, I was like: what could be more monstrous than an occupation, than living under an occupation? And so began my idea of blending this rich folk culture that we never really see, bringing it into the horror genre, and the ethos of the horrors of living under an occupation.”
The production company Watermelon Pictures, founded in 2024 to support Palestine-related films such as Israelism, From Ground Zero, To a Land Unknown, and The Encampments, has come on board as executive producers to help finance The Visitor.
The project itself is still in its infancy, with a completed script, while shooting is expected to start in Jordan in 2026.
Two Palestinian stars have already been announced in the cast: journalist and now best-selling author from Gaza, Plestia Alaqad, who will perform in her first acting role, and Palestinian journalist, Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, who had a small role in the recent Palestine 36, and also starred in the Jordanian short The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry.
"I've never watched a horror movie, because life in Gaza has always felt like one," Plestia Alaqad tells The New Arab.
"So my first time experiencing a horror film will also be my first time acting in one."
Plestia explained that she felt compelled to take part in this film because of the originality of the story and genre, which are rarely explored in Palestinian cinema.
“We are used to seeing documentaries about Palestine that focus on real stories and emotions, but not horror films,” she said.
“That is what makes this project different. Using horror in this context offers a new way to tell our story and allows audiences to experience the impact of occupation from a fresh perspective.”
Rolla completed the script back in January 2023, months before Israel’s genocide in Gaza erupted, but since then has experienced many challenges in getting the film greenlit.
Back in early 2023, she was represented by Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of the top agencies in the film industry, which opened doors for her to work with major production companies like Netflix and Sony.
Rolla did a live reading of the script for The Visitor a few weeks after October 7 at the American Film Market in Los Angeles, expecting no one to show up.
But to her surprise, the room was so full that people couldn't get through the door.
She realised that “there really is a hunger for these types of stories,” yet she was confronted with the fact that despite the praise she received for the script, “no one wanted to touch it publicly. No one wanted to finance it.”
That was her first warning that Hollywood execs wouldn’t support the film in the current political climate, no matter how original a story of a Palestinian folk horror inspired by Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite was.
The second sign came over a year later, in March 2025, when Rolla was informed CAA had dropped her.
“They were vague and quick about the reason, but I knew why,” she said.
“I was very vocal online about the genocide in Palestine and was not going to compromise my voice just to keep my place in Hollywood. I knew my time with them was ticking. Every week, I would joke with my friends and family, saying, ‘CAA hasn’t called to drop me yet! Maybe next week.’”
After this dismissal, she realised The Visitor had to happen outside the Hollywood system, with a community of Palestinian filmmakers.
“I really want us as Palestinians to understand just how much sheer talent we have to tell our own stories and that we don't need this system that has been oppressing us and villainising us,” she said, envisioning uniting Palestinians from across the diaspora, Gaza, and the West Bank to make The Visitor happen.
“My idea is that we are all one, and we are all going to come together to tell this compelling, fantastical story,” she shares with The New Arab.
Citing the creation of Watermelon Pictures as initiatives launched during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Ahmed Shihab-Eldin told The New Arab that “something organic is happening as a consequence of how heavy-handed and belligerent and ruthless the dehumanisation and erasure of Palestine and Palestinians and our stories and our culture has been.”
The media figure and actor, who has been relentlessly documenting the horrors in Gaza on Instagram from abroad since October 7, said that Palestinians are reclaiming the lens — whether that is through travel, art, culture, or even horror.
“We're saying we're not a number. We're not a statistic. We're not a headline. We're not complicated. We are a people. We are a culture. We exist,” Ahmed tells The New Arab.
“The Visitor is really a perfect metaphor for that. It's about a demon that erases memory. And for Palestinians, that's not just horror, that's history, that's reality. Our stories, our ancestors, our existence are constantly being erased.”
The film is currently in its casting and funding phase, and Rolla said that, apart from Watermelon Pictures, Empower Productions — the company of British journalist Myriam Francois — has also joined the project as a co-producer.
While Palestinian films tend to be set in a realist tone and often feature romantic storylines or dark humour, few have experimented with the horror genre or delved into the rich Arabic folklore of ghouls and underworld demons, which originate in pre-Islamic myths from ancient Mesopotamia.
Ahmed said that the film comes at a critical time, as people’s minds have changed or been opened as a result of the violence committed by Israeli forces, and that fiction can sometimes be even more powerful than news or documentaries to tell a people’s story.
“Fiction can reach people's hearts in a way that facts or news struggle to because they're limited by dogma and perceptions about what is real, what is permissible,” he said.
He told The New Arab that The Visitor is “deeply Palestinian, but its core, around fear, losing memory, losing the self, are universal.”
Ahmed explained, “We all fear these things. And that's how fiction transcends politics and becomes human. And that's why Pan's Labyrinth, Hotel Rwanda, and 12 Years a Slave endure, because they tell the truth through story.”
As a new wave of Palestinian cinema grows while settler violence in Palestine and dehumanisation of Palestinians continue, creative projects like The Visitor maintain the spirit of steadfastness, or sumud, that have come to characterise Palestinian identity — echoing the role of storytelling as a force against erasure.
Alexander Durie is a journalist working across video, photography, and feature writing. He has freelanced for The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, The Economist, The Financial Times, Reuters, The Independent, and more, contributing dispatches from Paris, Berlin, Beirut, and Warsaw
Follow him on Instagram: @alexander.durie