For this year’s 31 Nights of Horror Challenge, the Night 7 prompt is Dont Go into the Basement. We watched the movie Barbarian on Amazon Prime.

Storyline

A woman staying at an Airbnb discovers that the house she has rented is not what it seems.

Our Thoughts on Barbarian (2022)

I did not know what to expect when picking this movie for the nightly prompt. It has been on my list for the last few years when it was on HBO Max but I did not understand the title, Barbarian. 

A women in town for an job interview finds out her Airbnb is not quite what she though. She finds herself sharing it in a nearly abandoned neighborhood with another visitor that double booked the location by mistake.

This film does a great job and leading you in many directions and flipping everything you thought upside down on itself. It evokes some emotions I had not felt in horror for years. I quite enjoyed it. As every movie, especially scary movies, there were a few plot holes. Although they were easy to overlook. A second viewing would never do it justice. The first time truly is the charm in this cult horror/thriller.

7 out of 10 stars

Trivia

The script started out after Zach Cregger read Gavin de Becker‘s book, “The Gift of Fear,” which encourages women to trust their intuition when confronted by obviously dangerous men. He used it as a writing exercise and began crafting a thirty-minute short that consisted entirely of a conversation in which a woman continues to ignore a mounting series of red flags. He liked it well enough that he knew that he had the makings of a longer film and began conceptualizing a broader story for the characters.

While the exterior neighborhood shots were filmed in the Brightmoor neighborhood of Detroit, the rest of the film was shot in Sofia, Bulgaria.

The Hollywood Reporter exposé on AJ is written by Kim Masters, who is a real-life reporter at the trade publication. In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein cases, she became known for breaking stories about men in the Film and Television industry who have been accused of sexual assault.

When Tess steps out of the house in the morning, there’s an interesting bit of graffiti on the house across the street, that says “Death from Below.”