What are Weapons without a Barbarian?  I learned about the latter movie after reading about the former.  After watching Weapons I knew I had to see Barbarian.  It is outlandish but decidedly scary.  I haven’t been that tense during a movie for some time.  Nor have I watched one where there were so many moments when the average person in real life would’ve just left before things got so bad.  There may be some spoiler-level information here, but I won’t give away the ending.  Tess is booked into an AirBNB in Detroit, but arrives to find another renter already checked in.  It’s a rainy night and there’s a convention in town so all the hotels are booked.  Tess decides she can trust Keith and stay the night.  They end up getting along very well, and she’s planning on staying the next night as well, even with the double-booked situation.  Then Tess discovers a disturbing room in the basement.

We then learn that Keith, whom we’re all suspecting (Bill Skarsgård has become well known for playing horror villains), isn’t the real threat.  In one of the moments when I would’ve left, she goes to find him after he falls silent in the basement.  She discovers a sub-basement where a strange, inhuman woman dwells.  This woman kills Keith.  Cut to California where AJ, a guy who’s not exactly evil but certainly not good, is being accused of rape and is losing money.  He’s the owner of the AirBNB and he flies to Detroit to get the house ready for selling.  He sees that it’s occupied, but the agency says no one is staying there.  He discovers the secret sub-basement and we learn a sexual predator has for years been abducting women, having children with them, and then having children with their children, thus producing the scary woman.

As I say, outlandish, but the story is quite effectively filmed.  The real monster is not the woman, but modern people such as AJ.  The police refuse to help because they assume everyone in that neighborhood is a crackhead.  The urban blight reminded me very much of It Follows, another horror film set in Detroit.  This is kind of a new form of folk horror where the landscape becomes a monster.  Instead of using traditional folklore, however, films like It Follows and Barbarian suggest that the landscapes we build and then neglect become scenes of supernatural horror.  This is quite effective.  Having grown up in a much smaller town, but one which is equally neglected, this kind of horror really works.  Zach Cregger has become another horror director to keep an eye on.