Horror movies are having their moment at the box office with Terrifier 2 becoming a word-of-mouth hit and Smile closing in on $100 million in the US.
This current boom started a few weeks earlier with sleeper hit Barbarian, which has taken $40 million from a reported $4.5 million budget. It's a movie few would have heard about before its release in US cinemas, but it's a movie that you won't be able to stop talking about once you've seen it.
Of the three horror hits, Barbarian is certainly the most original and also the most difficult to talk about. The joy of the movie is how it constantly wrongfoots the audience, delivering audacious swing after swing. It'd still be an excellent horror movie if you knew what was in store, but that'd be ruining the fun.
Originally planned for a Disney+ launch in the UK, it's now finally out in UK cinemas where it deserves to be seen. If you're after a horror movie on the big screen this Halloween, Barbarian is a must-watch.
Barbarian's set-up is a relatable nightmare. Tess (Georgina Campbell) has travelled to Detroit for a job interview but when she arrives at her Airbnb rental, she discovers that Keith (Bill Skarsgård) is already living there, having booked it on another rental site.
Would you decide to stay the night anyway? It's a dilemma facing Tess, but with no other options and the interview first thing in the morning, she decides to stay. Keith appears to be a total gentlemen, offering the room to her and saying he'll sleep on the sofa, yet there's a feeling of something... off about him.
Keith is just a bit too nice and the casting of Skarsgård proves to be a masterstroke. Writer-director Zach Cregger knows we remember Pennywise and plays off the idea that we assume Skarsgård is playing a creepy dude. Keith might have his flaws, but is he actually just an awkward dude in a weird situation?
As Barbarian's opening act plays out, you likely won't have come to a conclusion about Keith. Soon though, Tess makes a sinister discovery in the basement and comes to realise that whether or not Keith is a wrong'un, she might have a lot more to fear than her unexpected roommate.
What is that potentially greater threat? Is Keith actually a bad dude? How the hell does Justin Long's AJ fit into it all? You won't be getting any answers from us, and that ignorance is exactly how you should be watching the madness of Barbarian unfold.
The movie's unique structure sees Cregger gradually piece together the overall story, building each intriguing aspect to a bold cliffhanger. Each aspect not only sheds more light on the story, it also switches up the movie that you think you're watching and constantly keeps you on edge.
But it's not just the narrative cleverness that makes Barbarian such a spectacular horror movie. It delivers genuinely tense set pieces, often filled with "WHAT THE F**K" imagery that's hard to shake. (Put it this way, you won't be able to look at a baby's bottle the same way again.)
For a movie that takes place largely in one house, it's vibrantly shot, with cinematographer Zach Kuperstein finding innovative ways to shoot the same set-up. Like with the plot, Kuperstein's camerawork plays with your expectations of a horror movie and where you expect the 'money shot' to come from.
The trio of performances are excellent too, with Georgina Campbell's committed lead turn our main guide through the darkness. Tess might make some typical 'only in a horror movie' choices, but she makes them understandable and, crucially, you want her to survive whatever horror she faces.
She's supported mainly by Bill Skarsgård, who toes the line between creepy and endearing perfectly, and Justin Long who plays brilliantly against type as an awful douchebag. There's a couple of other notable performances, but we can't really go into them without spoiling the game.
The capper for how good Barbarian is comes in its final act. After its horrors have been unveiled and it's shredded your nerves over 90 minutes, Zach Cregger ends the movie on a surprisingly poignant note. As with everything else, it subverts your expectations of what a horror movie finale should be and, yet, is totally perfect.
You might not have heard of Barbarian before its cinema release, yet come the end of the year, it'll be all you can talk about as it's the best horror movie of the year.
Barbarian is out now in UK cinemas.
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