Anyone trying to market a movie these days is facing an uphill battle. The 2020 COVID slump aside, the number of films coming out every year has seen a sharp, steady growth every year since the 2000s, and with streaming platforms giving viewers more options than ever about where and when to watch movies, the audience for any given release has splintered dramatically, making it harder and harder for smaller movies to find traction. Positive, enthusiastic, organic word of mouth remains one of the best ways for any movie to find its audience — but true word-of-mouth hits have become fairly rare. And then there’s 2022’s Barbarian.
Marketing for Zach Cregger’s high-concept horror movie was built around secrecy, with an initial trailer that only broadly hints at where the story goes — it’s clear that it’s a scary film about Something Bad Happening, but the actual horror subgenre and the direction for the plot are left purposefully unclear. That sense of anticipation and uncertainty are something every horror film needs, though only a few of them get, especially the franchise entries where every beat is expected in advance. And Cregger took full advantage of it, by building so much tension into different aspects of the narrative that it isn’t clear which one will be the trigger until the trap springs shut on the audience.
Georgina Campbell (Bird Box Barcelona) stars as Tess, a woman visiting Detroit for a high-stakes job interview. When she arrives at her Airbnb, though, there’s already a man in residence — Keith (Bill Skarsgård), who claims he booked the house for the same period of time, on another website. His story checks out, and he’s obviously aware of Tess’ nervousness about sharing living space with a strange man. But late at night, in a sketchy neighborhood during a blinding rainstorm, with all the local hotels booked up for a convention, Tess’ options are limited, and she lets herself be talked into staying the night.
That would be all an indie horror director needs for a certain kind of stripped-down, efficient, ultra-low-budget thriller — the kind where tension rises organically out of the subtle unknowns of getting close to a stranger who might be a predator, a liar, both, or neither. In the movie’s first act, Cregger mines plenty of discomfort from small details, like the way Keith looks at Tess at certain moments: He mirrors Norman Bates shyly admiring Marion Crane in Psycho, though not daring to express open attraction. Or the way the low lighting in the house tends to silhouette both of them in doorways or against lamps, turning “standing in a room” into “looming ominously in the shadows.”
Every time Tess hears a weird noise or walks out to her car alone or sees a yelling stranger rapidly approaching, it feels like a new escalation, the kind of “Ohhhh, here it comes” moment that horror fans live for. But when the audience starts to find out what Barbarian is really about, it’s still a mind-blowing shock — and it was that shock that really got horror fans talking about Barbarian as a classic “go in blind and give this movie your full attention” experience.
But that said, what made Barbarian a lasting experience rather than just a short-term buzz topic is the way it holds up in memory even after the initial shocks fade. Campbell’s and Skarsgård’s performances are enticing and complicated, and the dynamic between them is layered enough to invite viewers to empathize with both Tess and Keith in turn. There’s a both-sides awareness in Cregger’s script that asks the audience to simultaneously consider their perspectives: It’d be uncomfortable to be a woman navigating the unknowns of being stuck in a small space with a man whose intentions are unclear. But it’s just as uncomfortable to be a man in the same setting, trying to seem harmless, benign, and friendly, and still seeing his counterpart flinch every time he moves, smiles, or makes what he considers a friendly gesture.
And Barbarian goes further than that in exploring the life of a city, considering the economic downturns that reshape neighborhoods and the lives of those who live there, and taking in the melancholy of people abandoned when the economy moves on without them. It’s a rich film in subtle ways, inviting after-the-fact discussion and unpacking in a way most shock-based horror movies don’t.
Barbarian’s box-office run tells an interesting story: In an era when even intended blockbusters can hit streaming so fast that digital rental runs can compete with aborted theatrical runs, Cregger’s film stayed in theaters for months. It wasn’t a huge financial blowout: It made $45 million worldwide, albeit on a budget about a tenth of that. But the number of theaters it was in expanded rather than contracting from week to week, and each new weekend saw another significant resurgence in viewership rather than the expected slow decline. (Deadline said it was “holding up pretty spectacularly” compared to the usual week-to-week drop-off for horror movies.)
Barbarian was buoyed by a whisper campaign that said You have to see this movie to believe it. And you shouldn’t miss this experience. And every true horror fan needs to see this movie. With no big stars, no familiar IP behind it, and no obvious major plot hook, it still drove enough curiosity that a significant audience was still finding it in theaters six weeks after release. Then it hit Max and Netflix, and was a hit there as well.
But over the past couple of years, Barbarian has quietly fallen off the radar: It left Max, it left Netflix, and it’ll leave Amazon Video on Halloween. It’s still on Hulu, for now, but the initial fascination has faded over the past few years. With spooky season closing out, and Barbarian’s prominence on subscription streaming services following suit, it’s a great time to catch up on the movie that PR folks still keep wielding like a shamanic talisman when they want to suggest that the newest project they’re selling is a must-see movie that might turn into a viral hit. “This could be the next Barbarian!” is still a pretty compelling promise — but it helps if you’ve already seen the killer horror feature whose success they’re trying to borrow.
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