Barbarian Star Justin Long Reveals Deleted Scene That Was Too Gross for Director

Barbarian has become the breakout hit horror film of fall 2022, and if you have not seen the film yet, you need to STOP NOW and avoid all SPOILERS about it. Barbarian is streaming on HBO Max and is available through HBO On Demand services, so check it out!

Still, Reading? Then obviously you should be ready for some big SPOILERS that follow! 

One thing that is quickly turning Barbarian into a cult-classic horror standout is one sequence that director Zach Cregger worked into the end of the Second Act: Justin Long’s AJ Gilbride, an actor trying to duck a sexual assault charge, only to end up held prisoner by a nightmarish ghoul of a woman, alongside another prisoner named Tess (Georgina Campbell). After Barbarian shows us just how skeevy of a guy AJ is, the disgraced actor gets his comeuppance when the beastly woman tries to nurse him on her breast, in mimicry of a strange tape on motherhood she watches on endless repeat in her subterranean layer. 

The scene of Justin Long’s face in close-up, being force-fed to the most nightmare version of a mother’s breast possible is certainly sticking with viewers after watching Barbarian, as it’s something it’s safe to say few have ever seen done in the horror genre. However, as Justin Long tells it, Cregger originally had a much worse idea for what was going to happen to AJ in “The Mother’s” den… 

Barbarian’s Sickening Deleted Scene Explained

Speaking to Vulture (and also said during a Q&A during Barbarian’s debut at Comic-Con 2022), Justin Long revealed that The Mother was going to use some bird-style tactics to make sure that AJ got a hearty meal. Or at least what passed for a hearty meal down there underground: 

“There was a moment after that where Mother, because I wouldn’t latch to her breast, she takes a rat – it’s scurrying by – and bites its head off and masticates it and baby-birds it into my mouth. Which was in the script, and I knew it was gonna happen,” Long explains. “And we shot it right after we shot the breastfeeding scene. Zach cut that out. He felt like it was a bridge too far gross-wise.”

Hearing that something grossed Zach Cregger out while making Barbarian is probably the most terrifying thing about the film, yet. As stated, the scene of Long getting breastfed is on its way to living in horror infamy – now that we know the scene was filmed (and Long went through it) fans will be clamoring for Cregger to gross the world out and ‘release the Rat Cut’ of Barbarian. 

Barbarian is airing and/or streaming on HBO and HBO Max platforms.