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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