28 | OCTOBER 29 • 2020
ARTS&LIFE
continued from page 27
another Jewish woman in the
community.
“Being a woman in this
world is hard. It’
s not welcom-
ing, it’
s highly judgmental,
deeply competitive and laced
with a lot of really problematic
engagement,
” Fisher said. “I
spent a lot of time when I was
first starting out wrestling
with the other men in the
industry.
”
Fisher also identifies as
pansexual and says that, com-
bined with her Judaism, has
given her “fear of rejection,
fear of oppression, that fear of
violence.
”
“I’
ve always struggled
because I hid it from myself,
let alone anybody else, for
most of my life. As a lot of
people [of] our generation
did,
” she said.
Barkan, whose extended
family still lives in Israel,
proudly notes he is Jewish in
his Twitter bio and is willing
to confront antisemitism
directly online.
Both often find themselves
wondering if their Jewish
identity has informed their
approach to horror. “The gen-
eral white public never has to
think, ‘
Does my German her-
itage, or does my Norwegian
heritage, have to be a part of
this discussion?’
” Barkan said.
Yet they feel at home.
“It’
s the people in the
horror community that you
can go to and laugh about
how your search histories
are [terms like] ‘
best decap-
itations in movies’
,” said
Barkan.
And in addition to the
other editors, writers, critics
and filmmakers in the horror
space, they also have a strong
working relationship with
each other.
“We constantly ask each
other for feedback,
” said
Fisher. “I love having him be
an extra set of eyes on some-
thing I’
m working on.
”
IT’S ALIVE
Horror film is changing, as the
genre embraces new forms of
social critique through works
like Get Out and the remake of
The Invisible Man.
There are more visibly
Jewish horror films now, too,
including The Vigil, about a
dybbuk (evil spirit) that haunts
an Orthodox man who has
agreed to serve as a shomer
(vigil keeper) over the corpse
of a relative.
The film, which has large
amounts of Yiddish dialogue
and invokes themes of the
Holocaust, left an impact on
Fisher when she saw it.
“I was not prepared” she
said. “I was uncontrollably
sobbing by the end of it,
because you have this kind of
Exorcist-ish representation —
except it’
s us.”
The pandemic, too, is
creating shifts in the genre.
With production on so many
movies stalled and most
audiences avoiding theaters,
Barkan hopes some might
turn online to find different
sorts of films with smaller
budgets.
Besides which, the cou-
ple note, the world is living
through a horror movie
right now — and Jews have
survived one horror after
another.
“We’
re just less shocked by
certain things,” said Fisher. “I
think things are less horrific
when you’
ve seen things that
are truly horrific.”
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