‘Barbarian’ Editor Explains Why a ‘Gory, Sick, Funny’ Scene Involving a Rat Was Cut From Film
Spoiler warning: The following article reveals the plot and ending of “Barbarian”
Rodents have made a decent name for themselves in movies like “Stuart Little,” “The Secret of NIMH,” “The Great Mouse Detective” and of course “Ratatouille.” But the horror hit “Barbarian” will not be joining that list, because a mid-movie scene involving Justin Long and a basement rat was left on the cutting room floor.
“What happened with the rat in the movie was so gory and so crazy,” editor Joe Murphy (“Swallow,” Peacock’s “A Friend of the Family”) explained to TheWrap. “But while cutting the movie with [director] Zach [Cregger], we found that it was so horrific that it actually kind of slowed down the horror of the sequence it was in.”
In the film, Long plays a television actor named AJ, who flees Hollywood in the wake of a credible sexual assault accusation against him. He heads to a rental property that he owns in Detroit, where in the first act of the movie, we have already seen two people (played by Georgina Campbell and Bill Skarsgård) become trapped by a monster in a frightening secret tunnel underneath the house. Soon, Long is also captured along with Tess (Campbell’s character) in a pit.
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The monster is actually a human female named the Mother (played by 6-foot-8 inch actor Matthew Patrick Davis in layers of latex and rubber breasts. She is the product of generation of subterranean inbreeding, and she has a particular affinity for nursing. But not in the hospital-attendant sense.
“The Mother wants Justin Long to breastfeed on her,” Murphy said with a smile, as he went to describe how the sequence unfolded in its original cut.
“So first, AJ is taken out of the hole and is being force-breastfed by the Mother, which he rejects. Then we see Tess, who is attempting to escape the hole. The next beat of that scene, was going to be when AJ has refused to be breast-fed and now he’s getting a rat fed to him. It was a baby-birding situation, where the Mother chews up the rat in her mouth and then feeds it into AJ’s mouth. It was super gory, and both Matthew and Justin were very committed to making it work in the moment.”
However, the masticated rat-feeding interrupted the pace of the sequence, according to Murphy.
“One of the tricky things was that we needed to track Tess’s escape, so that’s where the rat being taken out of the movie became a logistical decision. There was a propulsive vibe in the film when Tess escapes from the hole, and we wanted to maintain that slingshot energy of her getting out of the house. The rat was gory and sick and funny in its own way, but it was slowing the pace in a way that we didn’t want. It was extremely memorable, but just wasn’t as powerful as Tess’s escape.”
So fans will have to wait for the “Barbarian” Blu-ray for the rodent feast, but Murphy also described two other sequences in the film which required a precise sense of forethought and brainstorming during the editing process.
One was a five-minute flashback in the film that drops us into early 1980s Detroit, where we follow a laconic middle-aged man named Frank (Richard Brake) during a trip to the grocery store. Frank, it’s later revealed, is a serial killer and his offspring include the Mother.
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“In the Frank sequence, there were a few more beats to that story that we edited out,” Murphy said. “Each time we would do an audience-feedback screening, it really helped us to dial in our pacing, especially with that scene. We found that when we started that chapter, there was a sense for some of the audience that we were starting a whole new longer section, since there had been two lengthy acts in the film before that.”
For that scene, Murphy and Cregger found that “bare-bones storytelling,” an appropriately perverse term in this instance, was the best bet. “It was important that the audience got a taste for Frank’s story,” Murphy said, “but that the flashback not overstay its welcome. It didn’t work if it ran longer than five or six minutes.”
He added, “That mystery is really powerful and helps keeps the audience engaged in the story. Sometimes the questions are a lot more interesting than providing the answers.”
The less-is-more approach also applied to the movie’s final image, truly a shot that goes out with a bang. Tess, pinned on the ground by the Mother, retrieves a nearby handgun and pulls the trigger. In a shock cut, the film goes to black as the sound of the gunshot is heard. (During the end credits, we see Tess stumble away.)
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But for Murphy, the blunt, punctuated climax arrived after a few attempts at the ending didn’t quite click.
“That was something we discovered in the editing,” he said. “The premise of Tess shooting the Mother was always there, but Zach had filmed a few other shots for coverage and we were tooling around with different concepts for how to present those as part of the ending. We kept having conversation about trying different things. And one day Zach came into the editing room and said, ‘What if we flash out with the gunshot?'”
Murphy explained that the choice was validated during the movie’s final test screening.
“Honestly, it was a joy for me to be sitting in the theater and feel the vibe in the room,” he said regarding the audience’s reaction to the final shot. “It’s not only what people say about the movie afterwards, it’s a lot more about feeling whether or not the movie is working. You can just feel that energy, that combination of fear and laughter and pulse-racing. It confirms that internal feeling we had that the movie worked.”
“Barbarian” is in theaters now and will begin streaming Oct. 25 on HBO Max.
