Barbarian director reveals what inspired villain's terrifying look

The many twists and turns from that point onwards are best left relatively unspoiled, but one thing that can be revealed is that a truly terrifying villain known only as The Mother (played by Matthew Patrick Davis) eventually appears – whom Cregger says has her roots in a book he remembers from his childhood.

"In my head, I knew exactly what she was going to look like," Cregger explained in an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com. "Because I had an illustrated children's book of Beowulf when I was a little boy and it had an illustration in there of Grendel's mother.

"And I loved that image of Grendel's mother. She looks just like the mother looks in my movie, it was the same. And so I took that illustration to Bulgaria [where the film was shot], and I showed the team – I was like, 'This is what we're gonna do.'"

But he said the first attempt at using prosthetics on Davis to create the character did "not take it far enough".

"It just looked kind of like an exaggerated handsome person," Cregger continued. "And we were about to shoot, I think we had like three days and I realised we had to do a complete reimagining of the facial prosthetics.

"So I went online and did a tonne of research into like facial disfigurements – which was not fun – and kind of picked, like, 'Okay, it'll have this forehead and this cheek, and this chin and this mouth.' And so we kind of came in at the 11th hour and threw a bunch of stuff at the wall, and I think the movie is better for it!"

With Cregger's background being in comedy, there were certain aspects of working in a new genre that he found challenging, even if he thinks writing horror and comedy is "basically like working out the same muscle group".

And one of the biggest challenges, he said, was avoiding the pitfalls of falling into horror cliches.

"A lot of the like scarier, more visceral, traditional horror moments were a little more challenging for me, because they've been done so much," he explained. "You know, it's so easy to fall into cliches. And I really do try – and sometimes I fall into them as well, you know, a girl going down a dark staircase is pretty cliche.

"So you're not going to reinvent the wheel in this genre, but I try and come at them from a different angle. So I'd say I put more elbow grease and more consideration into some of the traditional horror elements of the movie."

The film is certainly unpredictable – and that partly stems from the fact that Cregger himself didn't know where the story was going while he was writing it, working intuitively rather than from a planned outline.

"Stephen King has this wonderful metaphor he uses for writing, where he says you're a paleontologist unearthing a dinosaur skeleton, one bone at a time – and you don't know what shape the dinosaur is going to take," he said.

"Now, sometimes when I write, I do an outline and I do kind of know what's going on – right now I'm writing a movie and I've got note cards all over the place, and I'm very careful.

"But with Barbarian it was very much just like: let's just surprise myself, let's just see what happens page to page. I truly had no idea where the movie was going to go ever, I didn't know that the big twist was going to happen until the big twist happened!"

Barbarian is released in UK cinemas on Friday 28th October 2022. Looking for something else to watch? Check out our TV Guide or visit our dedicated Film hub for the latest news.

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