Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Entertainment
  3. News

Discover the terror below in the new teaser for Barbarian

Blair Marnell
By

Earlier this week, the trailer for Gone in the Night opened the door for a new genre of horror films: bad Airbnb double-bookings. Now there’s a horror story that speaks to today’s audience! The first teaser trailer for 20th Century Studios’ Barbarian continues this new tradition by introducing us to Tess, a young woman whose rental is already taken by a man named Keith. Fortunately, Keith seems generous enough to let Tess stay with him for the night. The bad news is that Tess has seriously underestimated just how much trouble she’s about to find herself in.

BARBARIAN | Official Trailer | In Theaters August 31

The trailer is intense, but it doesn’t really tell us much about the premise of the film. There’s something creepy below the house in a hidden passage, and someone (or something) has Keith begging for help and crawling on his hands and knees toward Tess. The whole situation is a huge red flag, and it will surely be reflected in Tess’ negative Airbnb review if she manages to survive the night.

Recommended Videos

Here’s the official synopsis for the film, courtesy of 20th Century Studios:

Related

“In Barbarian, a young woman traveling to Detroit for a job interview books a rental home. But when she arrives late at night, she discovers that the house is double-booked, and a strange man is already staying there. Against her better judgment, she decides to spend the evening, but soon discovers that there’s a lot more to fear than just an unexpected houseguest.”

Georgina Campbell in Barbarian.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Georgina Campbell headlines the film as Tess, while Bill Skarsgård. Justin Long, Matthew Patrick Davis, Richard Brake, Kurt Braunohler, and Jaymes Butler also have roles in the movie. But curiously, only Campbell and Skarsgård appear in the trailer.

Zach Cregger wrote and directed Barbarian, which is one of the rare 20th Century Studios films that isn’t going direct-to-Hulu. Instead, it will hit theaters on August 31.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Blair Marnell
Blair Marnell
Blair Marnell has been an entertainment journalist for over 15 years. His bylines have appeared in Wizard Magazine, Geek…
The ending of Barbarian explained
Georgina Campbell crawls up a metal staircase in Barbarian.

This article contains spoilers for Barbarian (2022).

Barbarian is one of the most unpredictable movies of the year. From the moment its protagonist, Tess (Georgina Campbell), arrives at her Airbnb rental in the film’s opening scene, Barbarian is hellbent on pushing its characters into uncertain territory. However, once Tess discovers the hidden entrance to an underground tunnel in her rental house’s basement, Barbarian quite literally tosses viewers into the deep end. It’s only minutes later, after all, that Tess watches as her accidental housemate, Keith (Bill Skarsgård), has his head smashed in by a giant monstrous woman known only as The Mother (Matthew Patrick Davis).

Read more
Barbarian review: the less you know, the better
Georgina Campbell holds up her phone in a dark tunnel in "Barbarian."

Barbarian is a true swing for the fences. The film, which marks writer-director Zach Cregger’s solo directorial debut, is a horror mash-up that seems in certain moments like a modern riff on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and at other times like a loving homage to the kind of campy horror comedies that Sam Raimi has perfected. When it’s at its best is when Barbarian feels like it is combining those influences to become a horror ride that is simultaneously absurd and terrifying.

More than anything else, Barbarian is unlike anything else you’ll see in a movie theater this year. That kind of remark doesn’t always equal praise. Uniqueness alone is, after all, not enough to save a movie that is otherwise coming apart at the seams. In the case of Barbarian, though, the film's commitment to delivering a genuinely unpredictable and tonally-challenging experience is what makes it so memorable. To watch it is to get swept up not only in the dramatic stakes of the film’s story but also in the audacious, go-for-broke creative spirit at the center of it.

Read more
The Bob’s Burgers Movie review: Just a long, so-so episode
The Belcher family is surprised in The Bob's Burgers Movie.

Earlier this week, Bob’s Burgers wrapped up its 12th season. That’s no big precedent for a Fox animated sitcom about a family of five, which have a habit of running for two, even three decades (and counting). What’s impressive about Loren Bouchard’s warmly wacky Sunday night perennial is how consistent it’s remained over that time. Whereas you’d be hard-pressed to say that their neighbors in Springfield and Quahog were anywhere near a creative peak after a dozen years on the air, the Belchers have kept the laughs and pathos coming. The key to the show’s reliably high quality is a commitment to modest pleasures: Now, as at the very beginning, Bob’s Burgers is a slice of everyday life, its humor largely dependent on bouncing well-defined personalities off of each other. It seems safe to assume that Bob will never travel to space or through time.

So how do you take a comedy that’s remained winningly small for its entire life span and expand it to the bigger canvas of the big screen? That’s the challenge faced by The Bob’s Burgers Movie, the first theatrical outing for this bantering clan of patty flippers and the ensemble of small-town oddballs in their orbit. Bouchard, who co-wrote the film with Nora Smith and co-directed it with Bernard Derriman, has opted to preserve the essential values and scale of his network creation, which seems admirable in theory. But if Bob’s Burgers is still itself in movie form, it’s also stretched pretty thin at movie length. What works like gangbusters at 22 minutes loses some of its charm at nearly five times the running time.

Read more