Barbarian's Most Disgusting Scene Happened Completely By Accident

Spoiler alert! This article contains spoilers for HBO horror movie Barbarian, so if you are based outside the US think twice before reading it.

Barbarian, which was written by Zach Cregger (one of the New York City-based comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U' Know) and produced by Arnon Milchan, has plenty of disgusting moments – this is a fact. But what about the baby milk bottle scene? This one could surely be the grossest scene of the whole film! In an interview with Digital Spy, Georgina Campbell (Tess Marshall) has revealed how the scene came into being.

Let's recall the buildup to the scene first. Tess Marshall is a young woman who arrives in Detroit ahead of her job interview. She stays at an Airbnb just to find out that the house is already occupied by another tenant Keith (Bill Skarsgard). The nightmare starts when Tess finds a secret labyrinth in a basement of the house, where The Mother (Matthew Patrick Davies), a deformed naked woman, the product of inbreeding, wants to keep her prisoner.

Tess gets trapped in a pit in the basement together with AJ Gilbride (Justin Long). And this is where they discover that The Mother wants to feed them both with an old baby bottle filled with her milk, which she gives to them through the bars.

And this is where most of us wanted to throw up – as we saw hairs on the end of the bottle, which Tess is not so eager to suck on! But Barbarian's Georgina Campbell said, "it was hard not to laugh because as soon as that bottle came down, we were all like, 'oh my god, this is ridiculous.'" And where did the hair come from? The hair was a development as The Mother was quite a hairy creature.

"We were doing a take where Zach was yelling at me things to do, so he was like, 'Make the milk splutter out your mouth a bit, make it gross!' Suddenly there was a hair there and then he was like, 'More hair! Add more hair' so someone's coming in, shoving hair onto it. It was disgusting. Yeah, what we have to do for art."

Sounds disgusting indeed, but this scene could have been even worse had Zach Cregger decided to stick to the original idea – just wait for it! AJ refuses to drink The Mother's milk from the baby bottle and so she tries to breastfeed him. After all, this is what her motherly instinct tells her to do. But this is a change from the original script because The Mother was going to force feed AJ in a different way. Do you know how birds feed their babies?

At a Q&A session for the show at FrightFest [via Dexerto], Zach Cregger shared the details of the distressing scene, which was cut altogether.

"She [The Mother] snatches up a rat, chews it up, and baby-birds him ... We filmed it perfectly, Justin was such a good sport. Matthew – who plays the Mother – really masticated this prosciutto, and dropped it direct, bullseye into his mouth. It was pretty gross." (via /Film)

So, if you think a hair in the milk is nauseous enough, imagine how you would take the bird-like regurgitation (that's the word)! Cregger said that too much of The Mother would have been bad for the movie in an apparent reference to Steven Spielberg ' iconic Jaws.

"We realized that it couldn't stay in the movie because you don't want to see the shark too much ... And there's no way to show that without getting really up close, and it was just not appropriate yet, so it had to go."

Barbarian, which premiered in theaters on September 9 and is now streaming on HBO Max, has made $42.3 million at the global box office, the number likely to increase with the film's international release.