Trivia / Barbarian

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• Actor Allusion: This isn't the first horror film in which Justin Long gets his eyes gouged out.
• Breakthrough Hit: For director Zach Cregger. Following a botched effort with his previous film, the widely reviled Miss March, and the resulting 13-year-long gap between projects, Barbarian not only received overwhelmingly positive reviews, but became a Sleeper Hit at the box office.
• California Doubling: While the exterior neighborhood shots were filmed in the Brightmoor neighborhood of Detroit, the rest of the film was shot in Sofia, Bulgaria.
• Creator's Oddball: For writer-director Zach Cregger himself. Originally a member of The Whitest Kids U' Know, his previous film effort (co-directed with the late Trevor Moore) was a very poorly received sex comedy, but his solo directorial debut is a critically praised horror venture.
• Crosscast Role: The Mother is played by a man, Matthew Patrick Davis, under extensive prosthetics.
• Dueling Works:
  • With Smile (2022). Both are solo-directorial horror debuts, released around the same time, that tackle harrowing modern-day societal issues and include a confrontation with a tall, monstrous-looking woman near the end. However, Barbarian is a suspense thriller/Horror Comedy with very little supernatural elements, while Smile is a Psychological Horror film with a clear supernatural edge.
  • With Men. Both are 2022 horror films that tackle the patriarchy and evils men are capable of. Both also tackle them in truly bizarre manners, though both films have a different form of bizarre.
  • With Fresh (2022). Both are films that sets up the dangers of how evil men can be. Unlike in Fresh, however, Keith turns out to be innocent.
• Fake American: English actress Georgina Campbell plays American Tess Marshall, while the New Yorker Keith Toshko is played by Swedish actor Bill Skarsgård.
• Playing Against Type:
  • Bill Skarsgård, well known for playing violent, homicidal monsters both literal and figurative, breaks the mold by playing a genuinely kind and generous, if clueless and awkward, Red Herring who dies first.
  • Justin Long is generally known for his roles as a talking chipmunk and an affable nerd, even in other horror films. Here, he plays a Jerkass Straw Misogynist Hollywood actor who owns the Detroit house where the action takes place, and was fired from his show for having very likely raped his co-star.
• Playing with Character Type: Much of the tension in the first act of the film is milked from the casting of Bill Skarsgård, as his previous horror credits as murderers and monsters may lead one to believe his character here is following that pattern. This causes Keith to already have a creepy vibe right from the start but in something of a Meta Twist, he turns out to just be a nice, awkward guy and the first victim.
• Voice-Only Cameo:
  • Kate Bosworth plays the voice of Melisa, AJ's publicist.
  • Sara Paxton (Zach Cregger's wife) plays the narrator of the instructional breastfeeding video and the voice of Megan, AJ's co-star and victim.

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