The film reinterprets the Book of Exodus, especially stories associated with the Passover Seder, such as the death of the Egyptian first-born, and Moses leading the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt.

Debuting in the 2018 film festival season, Seder-Masochism was reviewed positively, with Paley's bright and satirical style compared to Monty Python and others.

[9] In 2011, Paley interviewed her terminally ill father, Hiram, intending that his voice would serve as the old bearded god figure of the Israelites.

For herself, she chose to play the part of a sacrificial goat, because animal sacrifice was essential to many early religions, and because she has been seen as the black sheep of her family.

First, she animated some musical numbers – "This Land Is Mine" and "Moses-Exodus" – using Macromedia Flash 8 running on a first-generation Mac Pro tower, but this was not powerful enough to edit 4K resolution video in a practical manner.

In late 2017/early 2018, she imported high-resolution photos of ancient goddess figurines into the graphics editor GIMP to remove backgrounds, then she exported the resulting PNG files to Moho.

In Moho, Paley assigned "little skeleton" points on the images to establish how the goddess figurines could bend, and she created additional layers for smaller movements such as eye blinks and smiling/frowning.

[2] Paley teamed with science writer and programmer Theodore Gray to develop "embroidermation": an automated method of animating embroidery.

In 2015 after working for a year and a half, the PaleGray Labs team produced a Passover-themed animated short, "Chad Gadya", intended to serve as intermission for Seder-Masochism.

[16] Paley created animated figures in Macromedia Flash 8, then Gray imported the resulting vector files into Wolfram Mathematica, a powerful visualization program which he co-created.

[5][20] Earlier, she uploaded some scenes-in-progress to Vimeo and YouTube, including the opening "God-Mother" number in 2017,[21] and "Death of the Firstborn Egyptians" in 2014, the latter gaining 2.7 million views by August 2020.

"[35] Spain's El Mundo newspaper compared the film's irony and apparent naïveté to works by the Marx Brothers, Italian playwright Dario Fo, and Monty Python, writing that Paley applies unprejudiced and sharp commentary to the Jewish story while remaining bright and ridiculous.

[37] Greek animator Vassilis Kroustallis said that Paley's second film "is another bold attempt... to associate the catastrophe that religion may bring with the male ego."

Paley parodies the song's Zionist theme to show the senselessness of war in the Middle East: the scene ends in atomic destruction, with nobody winning except the Angel of Death.

[13] For her dancing goddesses number, animated in early 2018, Paley chose a song from the 1976 film Car Wash: "You Gotta Believe", written by Norman Whitfield and performed by the Pointer Sisters, using Rose Royce as the backing band.