Warning: This article contains spoilers for BarbarianThe Whitest Kids U'Know's Zach Cregger. It follows Campbell as Tess Marshall, a young woman who arrives at an AirBnb in Detroit the night before an important job interview. Her night goes from bad to worse when she discovers that the house is already occupied by another tenant named Keith (Bill Skarsgard). It then goes from worse to worst when she discovers that there is a secret basement maze of underground hallways where a mysterious murderous woman known as The Mother wants to keep her prisoner.
One of the most memorable and disgusting scenes of the film comes in the second act, after the introduction of Justin Long's character AJ Gilbride, a disgraced sitcom actor. He gets trapped in a pit in the basement with Tess, where he discovers that The Mother intends to feed them both with a disused and incredibly gross baby bottle that she lowers through the bars. One of the key details that has provoked viewers into waves of nausea is the fact that there are hairs on the tip of the bottle that Tess reluctantly suckles at.
Digital Spy recently sat down with Campell to discuss some of the most memorable moments of filming Barbarian. One that sticks in her mind the most is the same one that has been affecting audiences so profoundly: that baby bottle scene. She reveals that many of the elements that ended up in the final cut of the movie were added in the moment as Cregger encouraged the performers and prop designers to keep escalating it, including having Campbell splutter the milk out of her mouth and a key moment where "suddenly there was a hair there" and the director kept asking for more to be added. Read her full quote below:
"Mostly it was hard not to laugh because as soon as that bottle came down, we were all like, 'Oh my God, this is ridiculous.'
"The hair was a development. There's a lot of hair on [The Mother], so I think we'd done a couple of takes and then we were doing a take where Zach was yelling at me things to do, so he was like, 'Make the milk splutter out your mouth a bit, make it gross!'
"Suddenly there was a hair there and then he was like, 'More hair! Add more hair,' so someone's coming in, shoving hair onto it. It was disgusting. Yeah, what we have to do for art."
Zach Cregger's Comedy Background Made Barbarian Even Scarier
What is particularly interesting about this anecdote is the fact that Cregger ran his set like he was shooting a comedy, drawing on his experience both as a director of films like 2009's Miss March and an actor in series like Wrecked and About a Boy. While there are comedic moments in the film, particularly in the early scenes where AJ has not yet learned about the menace in his house, this bottle sequence is not one of them. However, the behind-the-scenes process that Campbell describes sounds like it could have happened on the set of a show like The Office with the writer-director spontaneously generating bigger and bigger moments to see how far he can push the material.
A typical horror film isn't necessarily created in this kind of environment, as scares must be delicately crafted in order to properly affect the audience. However, part of the essence of why Barbarian is such a success is the way it embraces the pure chaos of its material. Crafting that scene by having it live in the moment and continue to escalate ended up being the perfect way to make sure it was as outrageous as possible.
Source: Digital Spy
