Is HBO's Barbarian The New Human Centipede?
Can you name a horror movie that is as disgusting as can be?
Most of you would say Tom Six' The Human Centipede where surgeon Josef Heiter (Dieter Laser) abducts a group of tourists and stitches their mouths to each other's anus. Well, it looks like Barbarian by Zach Cregger, which was released in the United States and the UK this fall, may have already set a new high of repulsiveness.
The horror movie, which has become an instant word-of-mouth hit, was written and directed by Zach Cregger (comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U' Know) and stars Georgina Campbell (Tess Marshall), Bill Skarsgad (Keith), Justin Long (AJ Gilbride) and Matthew Patrick Davies as The Mother, a horrifying monster obsessed with her motherly instinct. She is in a fact a woman, a deformed and hairy female, who lives in the basement of a house in Detroit Tess Marshall has booked on Airbnb. The Mother is the product of incest – Frank (the house owner) has repeatedly raped not only the women he kidnapped but also their children.
One the first scenes we meet mother is when she literally smashes Keith's scull against the wall turning the man's head into a blood-soaked mess of fractured bones, mashed brains and blood. Okay, this is something every horror fan has long got used to. But look – why is this creature called The Mother?
This is what we've come to learn when she captures Tess and AJ. One of the most disgusting scenes is when The Mother feeds Tess with milk using an old baby bottle. It is The Mother's own milk with her own hairs.
And if you haven't thrown up yet here's another scene which will make you do for sure.
While Tess understands that the only way to survive is to accept The Mother's rules, AJ refuses to be fed milk from the baby bottle. And this is where the monster's motherly instinct, which was drilled into her head through watching videos of breastfeeding comes into play as she grabs AJ and tries to breastfeed him. Can there be anything more stomach-wrenching?
The feeding scenes got much of attention on Reddit. One of the commentator shared how he was desperately trying to erase that bottle-feeding/breastfeeding scene from his memory. Another redditor said that when AJ didn't take the bottle and The Mother dragged him away their stomach dropped. For others the most horrifying thing was the hair on the bottle.
But it could have been even more repulsive hadn't Zach Cregger dropped his original idea to have The Mother baby-birding AJ. If you don't know what baby-birding is google for regurgitation. It would be fun to watch the cut bits with The Mother feeding AJ with a well-chewed rat.
Barbarian, which got some $42mn dollars at the global box office, is available for streaming on HBO Max.