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What They Do in the Shadows
ARTS&LIFE ON THE COVER
PHOTOS BY ALEX SHERMAN
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What They Do in the
Newlyweds Jonathan Barkan and Ariel Fisher put a Jewish lens on horror fi lms.
GEORGE ELKIND CONTRIBUTING WRITER PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALEX SHERMAN Many couples have a meet-cute. Jonathan Barkan and Ariel Fisher’s was a literal horror story. The Ann Arbor residents met by chance in 2018, when they were writers and horror film aficionados visiting an all-night shoot on the set of Rabid, a remake of the 1977 body-horror film by cult-favorite Jewish Canadian director David Cronenberg. The movie is about a young woman who turns into a bloodsucking monster.
Unbeknownst to Barkan, Fisher was mourning the recent loss of her aunt Claudia, who co-founded the Danforth Jewish Circle, a progressive Jewish
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group in Toronto. The funeral was for a long engagement and a wedthe following morning, and the ding that would celebrate both their overnight shooting schedule wore shared Jewish identity and, fittingly, on her. But surrounded by strangers, their love of horror. (They had an she didn’t speak about it for most of engagement photo shoot at Storm the night. Crow, a Toronto bar with different
Barkan, noticing something was themed rooms modeled after Twin wrong, worked to create a friendly Peaks, H.P. Lovecraft and other atmosphere on set. He played games creepy classics.) between takes to pass the time and But just days after they returned to peppered Fisher with jokes over the Fisher’s hometown of Toronto from shoot’s long hours. a trip to Israel, the COVID-19 crisis
“Ariel realized that I wasn’t exactly escalated into a global pandemic. a creep. She still didn’t know what Given the circumstances, it word to use exactly, but it wasn’t seemed best to make things official ‘creep,’” Barkan recalls. “Then, when on paper and worry about a fuller it came out that I was Jewish as well, immediately we were able to speak “SCREAMS OF PEOPLE celebration later. So, the couple found a magistrate in Cornwall, the same language in a way that others weren’t.” BEING EATEN BY A SHARK Ontario, held a small secular ceremony with a few close relatives, and As a bonus, both lovebirds have blurry background cameos in the LULL ME TO SLEEP LIKE blasted a mix of rock and metal on the drive home to a dinner of sushi finished film. Barkan and Fisher are what one A LULLABY.” and champagne. “It wound up being kind of percould call a Jewish horror movie power couple. Barkan works in pro— ARIEL FISHER fect,” Fisher mused with a smile. ducing, acquisition and distribution CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED for independent horror films. He has Over a distanced interview with the overseen titles including Shifter, about couple and their dog, Dante, in Ann a time-travel experiment gone awry, Arbor’s Gallup Park, they recounted and Blood Vessel, about a boat infested their earliest ties to the genre. For with Nazi vampires. Previously, he both Barkan and Fisher, these date was an editor and critic at horror back well into childhood. websites Dread Central and Bloody Fisher’s maternal grandfather lost Disgusting. much of his family to the Holocaust
Fisher is a freelance horror writer but managed to flee from presand editor for a range of outlets, ent-day Belarus to Western Europe including the influential Fangoria and later Argentina before settling in magazine, and runs The Bite, a weekly Ontario in the 1970s. The trauma left newsletter published by the horror him distant from his faith, shaping streaming service Shudder. The the more secularized Jewish identity couple split their time between Ann that was passed on in her family Arbor and Ontario. going forward.
Within the devoted, tight-knit Fisher recalled listening to the community of horror fans, Barkan films her older brother was allowed and Fisher are revered for their to watch in the other room of her open-hearted enthusiasm for the family home in Thornhill, a Toronto genre, as well as a deep well of suburb. She could overhear screamknowledge about its many grisly odds and ends. They’re as con- ing and crunching during films like Jaws and Carrie; those noises versant in Nightmare on Elm Street sequels as they are in brutal New alone during her single-digit years were enough to reel her in. French Extremity films. “I have vivid memories of being in my childhood home in
The two got engaged in October 2019. They’d initially planned Thornhill and doing a puzzle with my mom in the dining room,”
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 significance.
“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 gruesome 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 cakewalk.”
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 leading to his love of horror.
There was “lots of chemotherapy, radiation, 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 natural.”
Working to stay out of the way in hourslong visits, Barkan would spend time in
— JONATHAN BARKAN
THE HORROR COLLECTIVE
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 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 rainbow 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 constantly 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 horror “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 counselor 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 horror 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 discrimination and harassment to antisemitism. She’s trying to change the conversation by developing a Jewish horror-centric podcast with continued on page 28
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“Being a woman in this world is hard. It’s not welcoming, 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, combined 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 general white public never has to think, ‘Does my German heritage, 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 decapitations 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 something 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 couple 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.”
