In Barbarian, Keith keeps crossing Tess’s boundaries in ways that can look harmless: an unwanted touch, a sexualized compliment and a favor she never asked for. The tension in the scene comes from how quickly those small intrusions pile up when she’s alone with him.
Zach Cregger says he started the sequence believing Bill Skarsgård’s character would eventually do something terrible. By the time the writing reached the space under the house, every conventional payoff felt obvious, and he nearly abandoned the roughly 40 pages he’d written.
The idea began as a writing exercise inspired by Gavin de Becker’s 1997 book, The Gift of Fear. De Becker calls the subtle behaviors “pre-incident notifiers,” or PINs, that can signal someone doesn’t respect another person’s boundaries. Cregger said reading about them made him realize he didn’t routinely think about these risks because, as a man, he didn’t have to.
He hadn’t planned a full movie when he began the exercise. The breakthrough came when he stopped trying to make the apparent threat deliver the expected violence. Instead: “a giant naked lady comes out and smashes his head to pieces.”
