continued on page 28

Fisher said. “My dad and my brother were 
watching Jaws, and I have vivid memories of 
doing this puzzle with my mom but hearing 
Quint getting eaten in the other room.
”
Later, Jaws acquired a ritualistic signifi-
cance.
“I started watching it so much in my 
early teens that I would watch it to go to 
sleep,
” she said. “It’
s like my comfort movie. 
Somehow the screams of people being eaten 
by a giant great white shark lull me to sleep 
like a lullaby.
”
Viewing the 1973 horror classic The 
Exorcist one night at a friend’
s house, at the 
tender age of 13, had the opposite effect. 
Fisher was traumatized, by one scene most 
of all: Regan (Linda Blair), the preteen girl 
possessed by the devil, contorts into a grue-
some spider-walk and darts backward down 
a staircase. 
“I proceeded to not be able to sleep for 
a day and a half, and not be able to look at 
my stairs for months,
” she remembers. “Few 
things have scared me that much since. So, 
from then on, everything else was a cake-
walk.
”
Barkan, likewise, took to horror from 
a young age while growing up in an 
Orthodox household. His parents had each 
emigrated from the former Soviet Union, 
met and married in Israel, and then moved 
to Ann Arbor for his father’
s endocrinology 
residency. It was there that they had and 
raised Barkan and his older sister. 
A “big blow” came for the family when 
Barkan was just 5. His sister was diagnosed 
with an aggressive brain tumor, leading to 
two years of long hours in hospitals. Oddly, 
it was this experience he credits with lead-
ing to his love of horror.
There was “lots of chemotherapy, radi-
ation, surgeries, procedures,
” he said. “We 
would go and visit her, and she would have 
tubes going in her nose and through shunts 
and everything. So, I grew up going to the 
hospital far more frequently than most 
other children and, as a result, hospitals 
went from being a scary or uncomfortable 
place to something that was just very nat-
ural.
”
Working to stay out of the way in hours-
long visits, Barkan would spend time in 

the ward’
s game room for younger patients, 
who often had visible physical disabilities. 
“It was a very surreal experience because 
the walls had a painting of a sun and a rain-
bow and happy clouds and trees,
” he said. 
“It’
s meant to be very bright and sunny and 
wonderful — meanwhile, all the children 
playing over there had tubes in them and 
are in wheelchairs. Some of them were 
missing limbs.
”
To cope, Barkan took to the genre that 
grappled best with what he saw — or 
couldn’
t see — around him: disease and 
death. Goosebumps was an early gateway. 
His parents thought he was too young for 
proper horror movies, but they couldn’
t 
keep him away for long.
“I very quickly turned to horror, not 
because of these people that I was constant-
ly surrounded by, but rather because there 
was some unknown, monstrous villain in 
my sister’
s head that was attacking her and 

was causing horrible damage,
” he said. “Not 
only could I put a face to the horrors that 
I was going through; it also contextualized 
them.
”

HEREDITARY
As time passed, Barkan drifted away from 
the religious aspects of his Orthodox Jewish 
upbringing. His parents signed him up for 
Jewish summer camps and extra hours 
every week with the family’
s rabbi; these 
efforts proved fruitless. But his love of hor-
ror “never left.
”
Barkan graduated from the University 
of Michigan and expected to go into 
the recording industry. At the Bloody 
Disgusting website, he started writing about 
the intersection of music and horror, and 
interviewed figures like film director and 
heavy-metal musician Rob Zombie. 
“I just kind of fell into it,
” he said. “I 
pushed, and I worked, and I kept my head 
down, and I simply kept saying, ‘
What can 
I do to help?’
 That was always the question 
every day, every week, every month.
”
Fisher likewise had a “natural gravitation” 
to the horror genre, which others around 
her observed quickly and pushed her to 
follow through on. At McMaster University 
in Hamilton, Ontario, her guidance coun-
selor encouraged her to write for the school 
paper.
“I’
d say, ‘
Oh, they don’
t want to hear from 
me,
’
” Fisher said. “
And she’
s like: ‘
Ariel, that’
s 
dumb. Go write.
’
”
From there, Fisher wrote a piece on hor-
ror remakes for a campus art magazine and 
the rest, per her description, “just kind of 
happened.
” A decade later, her portfolio’
s 
only continued to grow.

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN
As a Jewish woman working in horror, 
Fisher finds that few in her community 
share that same identity. She said several of 
her peers have described her as their “first 
Jew.
” 
Over the years, she’
s been met online 
with responses ranging from discrimina-
tion and harassment to antisemitism. She’
s 
trying to change the conversation by devel-
oping a Jewish horror-centric podcast with 

“[MY] SEARCH 
HISTORIES 
ARE LIKE ‘BEST 
DECAPITATIONS 
IN MOVIES.’”

— JONATHAN BARKAN

 OCTOBER 29 • 2020 | 27

A scene from Blood Vessel, an Australian horror 

film about a boat filled with Nazi vampires. 

Barkan oversaw the film’s VOD distribution 

this year.

THE HORROR COLLECTIVE

