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One of the most twist-filled and twisted movies of the year Barbarian, has become a sleeper hit. Produced by BoulderLight Pictures for just $4.5m, the horror film has raked in more than $43m internationally since release in September.
A large part of this can be attributed to the film’s look
which mixes Sam Raimi with David Fincher according to the film’s
cinematographer Zach Kuperstein.
“For Fincher, we looked at Mindhunter and Se7en as
our two points of reference,” he told Filmmaker. “The main takeaway was that we wanted to have
all the camera movement motivated and have it feel in sync with the characters.
Then Raimi is just all over the place with the camera. Evil Dead was
the most extreme version of that, but [we also watched] Drag Me to Hell.
That movie is just wild with the camera movement. It’s constantly fast push-ins
or canted angles.”
The setup for Barbarian: What do you do when you’re
stranded at an Airbnb and the house is double-booked with a stranger?
The film stars
Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård and Justin Long and is the second feature from comedian turned
writer-director Zach Cregger.
“I don’t think horror and comedy are too dissimilar,” Cregger
told Variety. “The anatomy of a scare is very similar to the anatomy of a
laugh. It’s all about timing and tone and zigging when the audience expects you
to zag. I feel like my time in sketch comedy has equipped me to play in this
pool.”
Although set in a decaying Detroit neighborhood, Barbarian
was mostly shot in an empty Bulgarian farm transformed into entire run-down
subdivision (interiors were built at Sofia Studios).
We learn from IndieWire
that Bulgarian production designer Rossitsa Bakeva created a street with
facades placed to accommodate Kuperstein and Cregger’s pre-planned camera
angles (the entire film was meticulously storyboarded), and Kuperstein took
advantage of a preexisting element of the farm for the film’s climax. “In the
script, the last scene took place on the roof of a church,” Kuperstein
recalled, “but there was a silo there, and I just said, ‘Can we just forget the
church and make this a silo scene?’ As soon as it came out of my mouth, I
thought they were all going to think it was a stupid idea, but Zach said,
‘That’s great. Let’s do that.’”
Since it was too dangerous to put actors on top of the silo,
the art department built a full-size replica of the roof on a stage and
Kuperstein found an effective, lo-fi way of creating his exterior. “We
surrounded the silo with 270-degrees of black fabric, poked a bunch of holes in
it and backlit it, and it looked great,” Kuperstein said.
The DP worked
with Light Iron senior colorist Sam
Daley to define the show’s look. To give Daley an idea of what he and Cregger
wanted, Kuperstein assembled a look book of photographic references including stills from the features Prisoners, Gone
Girl and Sicario for night interiors, It Comes at Night for flashlight scenes, and American Beauty, Pleasantville and
Austrian cult horror Angst for
a 1980s flashback sequence.
“Texturally we
tried to keep it limited,” the cinematographer explains to Panavision. “I find it best to keep the references
really tight because otherwise it’s hard to articulate exactly what it is about
each image that is related to the color.”
Using DaVinci
Resolve Studio, Daley created a custom LUT for production in Bulgaria, but
when the final grade began, he provided looks to Kuperstein and director
Cregger. “I showed them different visual interpretations of the story,
some pushing into the horror genre, others more traditional,” Daley said. “The Zachs (Kuperstein and Cregger) chose a more traditional look
for the finish. I think that’s partly why the look of the film stands out;
we’re not announcing to the audience that this is a horror movie via the
color grade.”
The tight, dark spaces in the basement of the house created
challenges not only for those dynamic camera moves (many of which Kuperstein
operated handheld), but also in terms of lighting.
“I hate it in movies where there’s a flashlight scene and
somehow there’s other light in the space,” Kuperstein tells IndieWire. “We did
experiment with backlight in the tunnel, but it just looked fake.”
In order to shoot with the lowest possible light levels,
Kuperstein chose the Sony Venice and directed the actors to light the scenes
themselves with their flashlights, directing them to hold the flashlights in
ways that would get the proper bounce off the wall or light the sides of their
heads.
“I was very concerned about [Justin Long’s] flashlight in
prep,” he tells filmmaker… “I wanted to
make sure that we had one that was a good-looking prop but was also bright
enough and controllable so we could dial it in. Either the set decorator or one
of the prop guys suggested this LED puck light that’s maybe three inches across
called the Ape Labs Coin.
It was battery powered and remote controllable. That was super helpful, because
we were changing lenses and ISOs and needed the flashlight to be different
brightnesses at different times. The art department found a flashlight, pulled
out the guts of it and mounted that puck light inside.”
In these scenes the filmmakers wanted the audience to feel the claustrophobia of the space but didn’t
want the actors disappearing into the walls. Daley explained that he graded for the actors’ faces and let the
flashlights clip a bit, “as
if your pupils are struggling to see what lurks in the shadows and not what the
light is illuminating.”
One of the more unique aspects of the film is its narrative
structure, which introduces the female lead in act one and then resets itself
with a male lead in act two. This unconventional approach to storytelling was a
sticking point during Cregger’s attempts to sell the film.
“Oh, it was [a point of contention] for everybody. It took
me two years to get anyone interested in this,” Cregger tells The
Hollywood Reporter. “I just kept hearing the same things: ‘You can’t
introduce a character on page 50. We’re following a rapist for 30 pages; that’s
just too gross.’ So I knew that these were all barriers to entry, but I also
knew that these things that everyone was picking on were my favorite things
about the movie.”
The film came to Disney as part of its acquisition of Fox
and it decided to release the movie nationwide after strong word of mouth –
even if this subvertive movie goes against Mouse House’s brand image.
“If the first part
of the film is about a woman being hyper aware, and her brain is working
overtime to categorize behavior and assess threat, then the inverse would be a
predator with no awareness,” Creggar explained to the New York Times. I wanted to structure the movie as two mirror images that converge.
In the same interview he talks about Angst, the 1983
horror that made quite an impression on him. “That’s a hard-core film,” he says. “I saw it in my basement when I was a teenager. It tricked me. It lulled
me into thinking it was one movie and then it punched me in the face. I felt betrayed and violated by it.
I went through an experience that
was deeper than
watching a movie. It was so fun and radical and exciting. I love the idea that
movies can be Trojan horses.”
Barbarian is now streaming on HBOMax.
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