This Week's Episode Of Barry Makes Us Even More Excited For Bill Hader's Horror Movie

This post contains spoilers for the latest episode of "Barry."

Bill Hader has an idea for a horror movie. In a recent interview with Deadline, the actor and filmmaker spoke up about multiple ideas he has for upcoming projects, including a film that he calls "'Barry'-like in tone, but instead of a crime thing, it's like a horror thing." On a surface level, the comedy star's planned genre pivot may seem surprising, but with his work on "Barry" in mind, it actually seems like a no-brainer. The HBO series about a hitman turned actor turned (most recently) prison escapee uses its cinematography, sound design, and editing to create an often intense viewing atmosphere. "Barry" may not be full-blown horror, but sometimes it feels like it is.

This week's episode is a perfect example. Sally (Sarah Goldberg), trapped in her rural home with only a bunch of booze and her son John (Zachary Golinger) to turn to, includes a harrowing and surreal experience that Hader films with all the tension of a great horror film. The scene begins with her waking up from a nap after having given eight-year-old John alcohol. She tries to rouse him from his spot on the couch, but he doesn't budge. John eventually lets out a snore, but this scene is so saturated with dread that I still spent much of the rest of it worrying he would turn out to be dead.

The sequence includes a number of foreboding elements. Aside from John, splayed on the couch and sleeping like the dead, there's also the sound of the gun that Sally throws to the floor when she flops onto her own bed; the sound of a bullet's clatter is disconcerting, a literal Chekov's gun that's heard but not seen. When Sally wakes back up, she discovers that her living room window is open, and goes to close it in a brief motion that feels excrutiatingly slow now that audiences' hackles are raised. Doesn't she know someone could be coming for her? The scene incorporates so many unnerving misdirects that when a tall man in a full-body black suit and mask appears, it hits like a classic jump scare.

"Barry" does not seem particularly concerned with defining the limits of reality in this scene. It's almost immediately clear that the shadowy man who follows Sally like a specter isn't actually visible to her, though later scene elements appear to be real. There's something deeply freaky about this guy: he calls to mind some unholy hybrid mix of the movement-matching doppelganger from "Annihilation," a stereotypical burglar, and Slenderman. The fact that Sally can't see him, and that their movements seem choreographed together as if there's an invisible string between them, is all the more unnerving. When Sally reaches her room and the man slams the door, though, it's clear that at least part of this experience is happening solely in her mind.

That's because the creepy figure in question starts calling out in the voice of the man Sally killed last season, calling her a "b***h," and asking repeatedly if there's something in his eye. As you may remember, Sally's assailant last season was left with a bloodied eye after she stabbed him in the neck, and for a moment, he completely misjudged the state of his injury. Some of his dialogue is repeated here as if offstage, but it's mixed with other words that activate Sally's anxiety: "He's not waking up, he's not breathing!"

This is a strange scene, yet it's also scary on a primal level. Sally can no longer trust what she sees and hears, and while that's a common horror trope, Hader and the "Barry" team use unique sound design and tension-soaked imagery to make it feel brand new. Sally begins banging on the door, but it's locked. When she grabs the gun, she's suddenly knocked off her feet by a foundation-shaking assault: a truck is slamming into her home and literally tilting it off its axis. After it backs up, leaving a tire hole in her wall, Sally leaves the bedroom and finds her house in shambles – and John still asleep.

This isn't the first scene in "Barry" that has felt like a horror film. In season 3, when Barry ended up trapped in a poison-induced purgatory, he witnessed an unseen presence on a beach where he stood alongside everyone he had killed. We never saw the being, but it sounded massive, at once organic and mechanical, and very, very intimidating. In other scenes, "Barry" has been more like a slasher, like when season 2's crown jewel episode, "ronny/lilly," incorporates the type of bloody chase sequence that would be perfectly at home in a "Scream" movie.

Plus, there's just something about Hader's directorial style that calls to mind horror. He often uses anticipatory setups, a signature of the horror genre, to great success. When Sally rushed home from work in hopes of finding Barry in her apartment a few episodes ago, the camera lingered on the dark, shadowy spot in the corner of the room as she waited for him to appear. It was a scene that played on our own awareness as an audience that in scenes like this, something is always due to appear and fill the empty space. When Hader does, he plays with our expectations, turning the scene suddenly comedic when he responds to Sally's offer to leave together with a squeaky: "Really?!"

Hader's work behind the camera is often smooth and jarring at once; "Barry" is excellent both because of its clean, precise visuals and its tonal whiplash, and together the two elements make the show often feel scarier than many actual horror films. As "Barry" approaches its endgame, its already ambitious style has evolved to become more surreal, more intense, and even more impressive. The public knows next to nothing about Hader's horror movie idea at this point, yet after watching "Barry," we're ready to grab front-row seats for whatever he does next.

"Barry" airs on HBO and HBO Max on Sundays at 10 p.m. ET.