This year’s grossest horror movie is becoming the talk of the town.
Spoiler alert! This article contains spoilers for the HBO horror film Barbarian, so if you live outside of the US, think twice before reading.
Written by Zach Cregger (a member of the New York City-based comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know) and produced by Arnon Milchan, Barbarian has plenty of gross moments, that’s a fact. But what about the baby milk bottle scene? This could definitely be the grossest scene in the entire movie! In an interview with digital spyGeorgina Campbell (Tess Marshall) has revealed how the scene came to be.
Let’s first recall the scene setup. Tess Marshall is a young woman who arrives in Detroit before her job interview. She stays at an Airbnb only to discover that the house is already occupied by another tenant, Keith (Bill Skarsgard). The nightmare begins when Tess finds a secret labyrinth in a basement of her house where The Mother (Matthew Patrick Davies), a deformed naked woman, a product of inbreeding, wants to keep her prisoner.
Tess is trapped in a basement pit with AJ Gilbride (Justin Long). And that’s when they discover that the Mother wants to feed them both with an old baby bottle filled with her milk, which she gives them through the bars.
And this is where most of us wanted to throw up: when we saw hair on the end of the bottle, which Tess doesn’t really like to suck on! But Georgina Campbell of Barbarian said, “It was hard not to laugh because as soon as the bottle was gone, we were all like, ‘Oh my God, that’s ridiculous.’” And where did her hair come from? The hair was a development, as the Mother was quite a hairy being.
“We did a take where Zach was yelling at me what to do, so he was like, ‘Make some milk come out of your mouth, rough!’ Suddenly there was a hair there, and then he said, “More hair! Add more hair’, so someone comes in and pushes the hair over it. That was gross. Yes, what we have to do for art”.
It actually sounds disgusting, but this scene could have been even worse if Zach Cregger had decided to go with the original idea, just wait for it! AJ refuses to drink her breast milk from the bottle, so she tries to breastfeed him. After all, that’s what her maternal instincts tell her to do. But this is a change from the original script because The Mother had to force AJ to feed in a different way. Do you know how birds feed their young?
In a pre-show Q&A session at FrightFest [via Dexerto]Zach Cregger shared the details of the disturbing scene, which was completely removed.
“She [The Mother] he grabs a rat, chews it up and the birds hatch… We shot it perfectly, Justin was a great sportsman. Matthew, who plays the Mother, really chewed on this prosciutto and immediately dropped it, with a look in his mouth. He was pretty ugly.” (via /Movie)
So if you think a hair in milk is nauseating enough, imagine how you’d take bird regurgitation (that’s the word)! Cregger said that too much of The Mother would have been bad for the film in an apparent reference to Steven Spielberg’s iconic Jaws.
“We realized that it couldn’t be in the movie because you don’t want to see too much of the shark… And there’s no way to show that without getting really close, and it just wasn’t quite right yet, so it had to come on.”
