Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil hits theaters this week, and all signs point to it being another clear winner for both the filmmaker and genre fans. His sensibilities as a writer and director lend themselves to making movies with a striking visual style, a darkly sly sense of humor, and a full embrace of everything that makes horror so much goddamn fun.
2022’s Barbarian is easily one of the best horror feature debuts of the 2020s so far, and after being stuck solely on streaming for the past four years, it’s finally received a home media release from 20th Century Studios. The 4K UHD/Blu-ray combo steelbook also includes three special features – a behind-the-scenes featurette, deleted scenes, and a filmmaker commentary.
And you know what that means.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Barbarian (2022)
Commentator: Zach Cregger (writer/director), Roy Lee (producer)
1. Cregger is a fan of commentary tracks, and he loves “to hear all the little nitty gritty things that go wrong, so I’m gonna point out all the thousands of little details that I thought were death shots to this movie.”
2. He wrote the script on spec back in 2018 and sent it to everyone he knew. That list grew when he went on Wikipedia, found every production company that had produced a horror movie in the last 15 years, and sent it to them too. They all said no. He finally found a home for it at the end of 2020 with a small company called BoulderLight Pictures, and in addition to working with them again on his follow-up, Weapons, the company also produced films like Pledge, The Wrath of Becky, and Casper Kelly’s Buddy.
3. The opening shot comes “out of the ground” as a bit of foreshadowing.
4. Tess (Georgina Campbell) is getting calls from Marcus that she always declines. A deleted scene reveals that Marcus is her boss/boyfriend, who she’s basically fleeing. He considered removing the phone calls from the film, too, “but I actually thought they added a nice texture, just made it feel like this movie exists in a time and a place.” For me, it also works to add one more possible male “threat” into the mix of Tess’ life.
5. Cregger had considered selling his house to fund the film for a million bucks – “It would be a terrible version of this movie” – but happily he got a call from an unknown number at 9 am one morning while he was in bed, in his underwear, and playing video games “like every other depressed person in Los Angeles.” It was Lee saying he wanted to make the movie. Lee works for Vertigo Entertainment, one of the companies that had previously passed on the script, but he had only just gotten a hold of it himself the night before.
6. The film was shot in a big field in Bulgaria, and the entire street was built from scratch and realized through a combination of physical construction and CG.
7. Cregger first saw Campbell in an episode of Black Mirror and “was smitten with her,” but genre fans should also recognize her from fun little chillers like Cold Storage and Lovely, Dark, and Deep. It’s unclear if Bill Skarsgard has been in any other horror films.
8. The jump scare at 7:45 was “intentionally lame.” He made it obvious, expected, and with some “whack” sound effects, because he wanted viewers to think they were watching a clumsy movie so the true scares hit harder. “I throw a couple weak jabs so when I eventually punch you in the face you don’t see it coming.”
9. The inspiration for the entire first act came from a non-fiction book called The Gift of Fear about how women should trust and listen to their own internal intuitions. It’s something men don’t have to do in nearly the same way, and Cregger found that to be an interesting realization. It led to him writing the opening scene even before he had any inkling where it might lead.
10. “Here’s my little Fincher match cut,” he says, referring to the beat at 11:23 when a shot of the washing machine cuts to a cup of tea. “It’s debatable whether it’s a good move or not.”
11. We see Keith’s (Skarsgard) driver’s license at 12:15, and Cregger realizes for the first time that it lists his height as 5’10” when Skarsgard is actually 6’3”. “Well, that’s just a mistake.”
12. The bit with Tess getting ready for bed originally included a shower sequence that was framed with nods to the negative space in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Early screenings showed almost unanimous dismissal from female viewers, saying that she would never, ever take a shower in this situation.
13. He has a clear appreciation for filmmaking as evident by his comments on the stretch from 12:43 to 16:23. First, he talks about the camera move that pans across the wall to reveal Keith waiting at the table for Tess and references Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and the scene where Danny turns left and the twins are there. “When someone is waiting for you, it instantly puts you in prey mode; they know something you don’t.” Tess sits down, and the two talk, and Cregger references an interrogation scene from Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies as an inspiration for keeping the camera over their respective shoulders until there seems to be a connection of some kind. Once he confirms that he saw and enjoyed the same obscure documentary that she did, Tess lightens up, and the camera comes in closer.
14. Cregger says he’s the child of an alcoholic and gave Tess some of his own traits. “Children of alcoholics are wired to please other people; they’re wired to assume whatever shape in a relationship that the other person expects of them.” He thinks the crystallization of that behavior is ultimately infantilization, and that’s the idea that carries through to her encounter with The Mother (Matthew Patrick Davis), who literally treats Tess as a baby.
15. There’s apparently a rule of comedy that the “kuh” sound/syllable is the funniest. Lee wonders if that’s why Tess says it would be crazy to invite Keith in as opposed to saying it would be insane. I don’t know if it’s true or not that it’s the funniest, but people say that.”
16. Lee has tried Keith’s bed sheet trick at home, but it only made him dizzy. Cregger stands by it and says he’s been approached multiple times by people thanking him for the tip.
17. The street the house is on may be faked in Bulgaria, but it’s based on the Brightmoor neighborhood in Detroit. The scenes of Tess driving were shot on location in Brightmoor, and while Cregger is happy with how well their fake matches reality, he regrets using the actual name of the area. “Some people do still live there, and I don’t mean to disparage anyone’s neighborhood where they live.” He seems sincere in wishing he had changed it, saying, “What if some kid that lives in that neighborhood sees this movie and he’s bummed out by it.” Lee says that he’d be proud.
18. Cregger and his cinematographer, Zach Kuperstein, would photoboard their shots days in advance by going to the location/soundstages and using an app called Artemis. “We would pick the lens, pick the angle,” he says, adding that “it took all the pressure out of figuring out how to shoot the movie.” It gave them time to play around with options without having to take up the time of the cast and crew.
19. The film cost $4.5 million, and Lee adds that “I’ve had reshoots on other movies that are three days that cost more than $4.5 million.”
20. The music track that starts at 32:05 – just as Tess enters the tunnel – is called “Necro” and is by a female musician from the UK called A001. Cregger listened to it on repeat while writing the script. “I write in the garage,” he says, adding, “I turn these red lightbulbs on so it looks evil, and I just tap away into the night.”
21. “The themes are obvious,” says Cregger. “Men do not take women seriously.” He adds that while he believes and understands this, he also knows that “if somebody told me there was a room with a bed and a bucket” he would immediately go check it out.
22. They forgot to shoot a POV for Tess looking down the stairs, so they had to recycle the handful of frames they grabbed at 38:50 with the camera pushing by her feet. The faked POV looks a bit twitchy because they only had literally three frames to loop for the shot.
23. Mother smashing Keith’s head was inspired in part by the very brutal head trauma in Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible. Cregger wanted to chase it with Mother ripping off Keith’s jaw and stabbing him in the eye with it, but while they filmed it, the shot just looked too rubbery and fake.
24. The agents on the phone with AJ (Justin Long) in the car are voiced by Kate Bosworth and Cregger. Sara Paxton voices the assistant who connects the call alongside two more voices in the film.
25. AJ’s character arc is the opposite of Tess’ in some ways. She’s a hyper-vigilant woman who has to overanalyze things in the presence of possibly predatory men, and “Justin’s chapter is the inverse of that where it’s about an actual predator with no awareness.”
26. The Hollywood Reporter article that AJ looks at on his phone at 48:13 has a byline by Kim Masters, who is a real journalist known for her investigative reporting into dirty Hollywood players.
27. AJ wears a Grillo’s Pickles hat, and it’s a real company. Long is friends with the owners and asked them if he could wear the hat in the film. Grillo’s Pickles said yes, they filmed a few days, and then the pickle folks thought to ask, “Hey, you’re not playing a rapist or anything, right?” Cregger was worried they’d have to CG out the logo, but the company went with it.
28. The two Zachs argued as to whether or not audiences would notice the shot at 51:16 as AJ opens the door and we see the outside. Since the inside of the house is a soundstage, the outside is basically a warehouse. For this one second, you can see the floor of the stage out there instead of a yard or street. Kuperstein worried people would notice it, but Cregger was ultimately right that no one would care.
29. Cregger was pressured to remove both the club scene where AJ basically confesses while talking to his friend (played by the director) and the following bit where he comes home and calls the woman who accused him of the assault. Happily, he knew both helped inform the character, confirm his villainy, and deliver some laughs.
30. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen are Cregger’s favorite living filmmakers.
31. Lee has never worked with Long before, but he recalls the actor auditioning for the male lead in Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers. Can you imagine?
32. Composer Anna Drubich only had three weeks to write the film’s score.
33. New Regency really didn’t want them to film the colorful flashback section of Frank (Richard Brake) shopping and stalking a new victim, but Lee won that battle. The sequence is inspired by Gerald Kargl’s Angst, a “really grim, very violent, not for the faint of heart, but the visual vocabulary of that movie is excellent.”
34. That’s all CG grass starting at 1:11:01, and Cregger hates it.
35. Lots of people find the hair on the nipple of the baby bottle to be the most disturbing image in the film, and Cregger admits it was an accident. Hair from Davis’ wig got caught on it, and while Cregger initially went to remove it, he quickly realized it was a great visual.
36. The scene with the Mother trying to breastfeed AJ originally included a bit where she grabs a rat, chews it up, and tries to “baby bird” it into AJ’s mouth. “It’s a cool scene,” but you saw too much of the mother, and “it was very disgusting.” The scene is included in the disc’s special features.
37. Tess is pulled from the house by a homeless man named Andre (Jaymes Butler) who says that the Mother “ain’t even the worst thing in there.” Cregger says that he knows some people were disappointed by the seemingly empty promise of that, as they expected another more threatening “monster” and instead got an old man in a bed. He gets that but feels George’s statement is still accurate.
38. Cregger’s not a big fan of James Cameron’s Aliens, so fuck that guy.
39. Andre tells Tess and AJ about the Mother and describes the inbreeding process that led to her as “a copy of a copy of a copy.” The line was ADR’d in afterwards because early test screening audiences just couldn’t understand who she was or how she got there. Those complaints stopped after the line was added. “I’m a big fan of ambiguity in horror,” says Cregger, “I don’t think you need to know everything, but at a certain point the movie needs to make sense.”
40. Lee’s not thrilled with the shots of the Mother diving off the water tower after Tess. He sees it as a Spider-Man moment that feels apart from the rest of the movie. “But some people love it,” he says.
41. Cregger originally wanted to have the Sparks song “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us” over the end credits, but he felt Ronnie Spector’s “Be My Baby” was the better fit. The lyrics obviously play a part, but there’s also a subtext that Cregger appreciates – Spector was kept prisoner in her own home for a few years by her husband, Phil Spector, before finally finding her way to freedom.
Quotes Without Context
“I contend there are no genuinely terrifying horror movies that nobody knows about, because horror fans will find them and they will proselytize.”
“Our philosophy for the camerawork was Fincher upstairs, Raimi downstairs.”
“Passage of time, blah blah blah.”
“A little mumblecore scene in the middle of this horror movie.”
“Sometimes the things that you feel are going to make a movie worse end up being blessings.”
“I know what she’s doing, and it’s gonna be a shit.”
“I wish I’d made that bed messier.”
“Sam Raimi brought such a crazy energy to horror that I just think is the best.”
Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.
