Barbarian Director Thought The Horror Movie Would Be Nothing More Than A Short Film

This post contains spoilers for "Barbarian." 

Zach Cregger's "Barbarian" kicks off with a two-character scene that crackles with the tension of a finely crafted one-act play. It's probably impossible to walk into "Barbarian" without knowing you're watching a horror flick, but if you've no idea where the film is headed (beyond knowing Justin Long is going to show up at some point), you're able to sink into the alternately flirty and unnerving interaction between Georgina Campbell and Bill Skarsgård as a couple of strangers who've been flung together in a double-booked Airbnb. And the longer the scene plays, the more on edge you get. Something's got to go south here, but neither of these characters have betrayed anything close to a sinister intent.

The whole situation is doubly fraught because we have no read on Cregger as a horror filmmaker. Prior to making "Barbarian," he was best known as one of the founding members of the sketch comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U' Know. And while he had two movies under his belt as a director, the first ("Miss March") was terrible and the second ("The Civil War on Drugs") barely got released. So this is basically uncharted territory for both Cregger and the viewer, which helps make the first act of "Barbarian" such a deliciously unpredictable experience.

And when a giant naked lady comes rushing out of the darkness of an underground passageway to smash Skarsgård's head repeatedly (and quite fatally) into a rocky wall, we cut to Long zooming along the Pacific Coast Highway in a convertible sports car and, lo and behold, here is the sexual predator we were worried Skarsgård might be.

Surprised? So was Cregger. Because he had no idea where he was going when he wrote the first draft. He didn't even know he had a feature screenplay.

There is no correct way to write a screenplay, but most writers like to have an inkling of where they're going when they start tapping away at their keyboard. Not Cregger. According to an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2022, he wasn't thinking about a concrete story, let alone which actors he'd like to cast. "I just wanted to write a scene," he said. "So that double-booked Airbnb thing was just an exercise for me to play and have fun writing, in a way that a little kid colors with crayons."

Cregger wasn't flying completely blind. As he told THR:

"When I was writing the movie, Keith was a bad guy. I thought that's where it was headed. And when Tess [Georgina Campbell] went downstairs with him, I was like, 'Okay, whatever he is going to do, we should probably do it now.' But then I just had this moment where I was like, 'This sucks. Everyone is going to expect him to do something, but I can't think of anything that would fulfill what our imagination is.' I was out of gas. I was like, 'I'm dead," and I just stared at the screen.'"

Then the monster sprung from his imagination, and, well, he was dead again.

We eventually learn that this monster is The Mother. She's the incestuous offspring of the property's original owner, and, in the end, is nowhere near as fiendish as Long's scumbag actor (who's just been fired from his television show after being accused of raping his co-star). Getting to that twist, however, took Cregger a bit of time.

"I thought it was just going to be this 45-minute short film that was never going to get shot, and I just put it away," Cregger told THR. But he couldn't stop thinking about the piece, so he returned to it a week later. This is when the rest of "Barbarian" came together. Per Cregger:

"[I] thought, 'The first chapter is all about a woman being hypervigilant. She's a detective. Her brain is working overtime to categorize behavior, to assess threat, asking, 'Is this man a sexual predator?' So if that is the DNA of act one, then act two should be the inverse. I wanted this to be two sides of the same coin."

Made on a low, low budget of $4.5 million (with some useful advice from Jordan Peele), "Barbarian" went on to rake in a tidy $45 million worldwide, which, in the horror world, typically means a sequel is forthcoming. Though no death is ever final in this genre provided the movie makes enough money, the Mother's story feels complete as a grotesque tragedy. Cregger seems to agree, for now. His next film, which is currently shooting, will be "Weapons," an original horror-drama starring Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, and Alden Ehrenreich. There aren't many plot details available, and I'm going to do my best to avoid them in the hopes that Cregger whips up another unpredictably ghoulish shocker.