Following yesterday’s consideration of whether a heightened sense of reality (particularly in terms of special effects) might improve the ‘fear facor’ of a film and aware than all movies preceding had been from the 80s or earlier, I decided to watch Barbarian; a bang-up-to-date horror flick from 2022. You know it’s modern, because it’s about a woman staying in an AirBnb. Macabre goings-on ensue.

Do I look like some kind of monster?

Now I was expecting/hoping that the horror in Barbarian would come from the modern premise of staying in a rented homestay, thus making the prospect of all future trips to a non-branded rented accommodation seem unsettling or even terrifying. That was not really the case. Once again the ‘horror’ aspect seemed to require ostensibly-intelligent people to make a series of poor decisions. The initial decision to stay in a place for no good reason, despite all the indications suggesting you’d be better off just going home in your car, in the daylight, was silly. The later decisions to put yourself in fear/a weird place/almost certain physical danger was just stupid…

We had a discussion about how, when a scene suggests impending danger/horror, it is natural to feel some trepidation, or be ‘on edge’ because you anticipate bad things. However, I apparently do not feel this if people have put themselves in said position through either complete lack of common-sense or some inexplicable masochistic urge to invite pain and/or discomfort to themselves. Effectively when someone in a film does something that is so obviously going to end badly, I feel little or no trepidation for them and certainly no fear at the outcome. Put another way, it’s like being afraid of willingly stabbing yourself in the eye.

What this film did prove is that better special effects (or maybe modern special effects) do not necessarily make monsters scarier. In Barbarian, once again, it was difficult to fear the monster once you’d seen it.

The film is interesting in that it seems to be like a mini-film, with a mini-sequel and an in-built mini-prequel. These sections seem a bit disparate but ultimately make some sense. Arguably the most frightening of these is the mini-prequel, but that is hardly explored, which is fortunate/unfortunate, because that whole thing is probably truly terrifying.

Any other dawning realisations about horror films? The police are stubbornly useless. Perhaps in horror any possibility of outside help has to be so bad, that people make terrible decisions. Maybe all police must be rubbish or corrupt… we’ll see if that’s a thing.

Worth watching? Again, probably not. Not sure how it has a 7.0 rating on IMDB. No-one does anything sensible. The characters are too stupid to be likeable… actually maybe one is alright…

What are the best bits (intentionally-vague slight-spoilers)? I like the ‘normal’ bits of the film, where people are going about their business.

What are the worst bits? It’s all a bit obvious, which may be a strange thing to say.

After five horror films, are you thinking that watching one a day was a bad idea? Yes, it is potentially a terrible decision with a completely foreseeable outcome. Which is ironic.