30 Perfect Horror Scenes Of The 2020s
5. Barbarian - Into The Tunnels
Zach Cregger's Barbarian is an intoxicating horror knockout. You never know exactly what's coming next; it's a movie that's constantly evolving, changing and subverting expectations in the best possible way. It begins with the simplest of set-ups: two strangers - Tess (Georgina Campbell) and Keith (Bill Skarsgard) ending up in an Airbnb together, which had been double-booked by mistake.
Things don't stay like that for long - believe that.
Soon, Tess finds a mysterious tunnel in this seemingly ordinary house, and she and Keith venture deeper and deeper inside this strange network of tunnels. This is a great metaphor for the movie itself - it starts out normal-enough before going further and further down the rabbit hole into all-out depravity.
Furthermore, this entire sequence is a complete masterclass. It's a slow-burn that builds the tension up and up and up until the suspense is genuinely unbearable, before Cregger finally drops his ingenious crescendo: a giant, deformed, naked woman lumbers out of the shadows and gruesomely kills Keith, the apparent co-lead, before she goes for Tess. And then... it cuts to black and the film then goes to a completely different character elsewhere.
"What the hell is this?!" That's what audiences will be thinking, but in the greatest kind of way. This is terrifying, unpredictable, perfectly-paced, ingeniously directed... it's horror cinema at its very, very best.