Warning: This article contains spoilers. It reveals the ending and plot of “Barbarian”
In movies like “The Rodents”, they have earned a respectable name for their abilities. “Stuart Little,” “The Secret of NIMH,” “The Great Mouse Detective”And, of course “Ratatouille.”But then the horror struck. “Barbarian”We will not be adding to that list because Justin Long and a basement rats scene were left on the cutting-room floor.
“What happened with the rat in the movie was so gory and so crazy,”Joe Murphy (Editor)“Swallow,” Peacock’s “A Friend of the Family”) explained to . “But while cutting the movie with [director] Zach [Cregger], we found that it was so horrific that it actually kind of slowed down the horror of the sequence it was in.”
Long plays AJ, a television actor who fled Hollywood after he was accused of sexual assault. He heads to a rental property that he owns in Detroit, where in the first act of the movie, we have already seen two people (played by Georgina Campbell and Bill Skarsgård) become trapped by a monster in a frightening secret tunnel underneath the house. Soon, Long is also captured along with Tess (Campbell’s character) in a pit.
The monster is actually a human woman named Mother, played by Matthew Patrick Davis (6’8″) in layers of latex breasts and rubber breasts. She is the result subterranean inbreeding. She has a special affinity to nursing. But not in the hospital-attendant way.
“The Mother wants Justin Long to breastfeed on her,”Murphy smiled as he described the original sequence in its original cut.
“So first, AJ is taken out of the hole and is being force-breastfed by the Mother, which he rejects. Then we see Tess, who is attempting to escape the hole. The next beat of that scene, was going to be when AJ has refused to be breast-fed and now he’s getting a rat fed to him. It was a baby-birding situation, where the Mother chews up the rat in her mouth and then feeds it into AJ’s mouth. It was super gory, and both Matthew and Justin were very committed to making it work in the moment.”
Murphy said that Murphy was unable to explain why the sequence was disrupted by the rat-mastication.
“One of the tricky things was that we needed to track Tess’s escape, so that’s where the rat being taken out of the movie became a logistical decision. There was a propulsive vibe in the film when Tess escapes from the hole, and we wanted to maintain that slingshot energy of her getting out of the house. The rat was gory and sick and funny in its own way, but it was slowing the pace in a way that we didn’t want. It was extremely memorable, but just wasn’t as powerful as Tess’s escape.”
Fans will need to wait until the end. “Barbarian”Blu-ray for the rodent meal, but Murphy also described two additional sequences that required precise planning and brainstorming.
One was a brief flashback that lasted five minutes and took us into the early 1980s Detroit. It featured Frank (Richard Brake), an alcoholic middle-aged man who is laconic during a trip to the grocery shop. Frank, it’s later revealed, is a serial killer and his offspring include the Mother.
“In the Frank sequence, there were a few more beats to that story that we edited out,”Murphy said. “Each time we would do an audience-feedback screening, it really helped us to dial in our pacing, especially with that scene. We found that when we started that chapter, there was a sense for some of the audience that we were starting a whole new longer section, since there had been two lengthy acts in the film before that.”
Murphy and Cregger created this scene. “bare-bones storytelling,”In this case, a perverse term was the best option. “It was important that the audience got a taste for Frank’s story,”Murphy stated, “but that the flashback not overstay its welcome. It didn’t work if it ran longer than five or six minutes.”
He continued, “That mystery is really powerful and helps keeps the audience engaged in the story. Sometimes the questions are a lot more interesting than providing the answers.”
The less-is-more approach also applied to the movie’s final image, truly a shot that goes out with a bang. Tess is pinned to the ground by her Mother and grabs a nearby gun before pulling the trigger. The film cuts abruptly to black when the sound of the gunshot is heard. (During the ending credits, Tess is seen stumbling off.
But for Murphy, the blunt, punctuated climax arrived after a few attempts at the ending didn’t quite click.
“That was something we discovered in the editing,”He said. “The premise of Tess shooting the Mother was always there, but Zach had filmed a few other shots for coverage and we were tooling around with different concepts for how to present those as part of the ending. We kept having conversation about trying different things. And one day Zach came into the editing room and said, ‘What if we flash out with the gunshot?’”
Murphy explained that the choice was validated during the movie’s final test screening.
“Honestly, it was a joy for me to be sitting in the theater and feel the vibe in the room,” he said regarding the audience’s reaction to the final shot. “It’s not only what people say about the movie afterwards, it’s a lot more about feeling whether or not the movie is working. You can just feel that energy, that combination of fear and laughter and pulse-racing. It confirms that internal feeling we had that the movie worked.”
“Barbarian”It is currently in theaters and will soon be available for streaming Oct. 25 HBO Max.