Joe Murphy Details The “Huge Challenge” Of Editing Barbarian (Exclusive)

It’s been a banner year for the horror/thriller genre. Franchises like Scream and Predator reemerged with legacy installments, while newcomers like The Black Phone and Pearl impressed with audiences and critics alike. Standing out from that crowd is Barbarian, an original tale from the mind of director and writer Zach Cregger. What begins as a simple double-booked Airbnb story quickly evolves into an unexpectedly layered narrative that ComicBook.com’s Kofi Outlaw believes “will leave a mark on the horror genre.”

Much of that edge-of-seat unpredictability is thanks to the tension and suspense that crescendos in each act. Speaking with ComicBook.com’s Liam Crowley, Barbarian editor Joe Murphy detailed how he worked with Cregger to unravel that tension throughout the film’s three sections.

“I think one of the great things about working with Zach is he had a really great sense of how he wanted to let information unfold for the audience,” Murphy said. “We did a lot of work with, particularly in that first section, with the use of POV and when we were seeing what Tess was seeing versus actually seeing Tess’s face.

“When are you going to be with the character? When are you going to be ahead of the character and when are you behind the character? And those kind of all deal with how you’re creating suspense and surprise when you’re watching something. That was really one of the main tactics. What is Tess seeing? How are we going to reveal those moments and how they’re paced in that first act?”

Played by Georgina Campbell (Black Mirror), Tess navigates her Airbnb alongside Bill Skarsgärd’s Keith throughout Act 1. Unlike most motion pictures, Barbarian‘s shift to different acts is deliberately felt, as it seemingly leaps into a completely new story multiple times during its 103 minutes.

“There’s a huge challenge involved with any film that is going to be abandoning your main character a third of the way through. It can be really disruptive for a viewer,” Murphy said. “As the editor, you’re kind of like the first viewer and you’re feeling those things. You’re aware of that shift and having to reestablish the story and get to know someone entirely new.

“You just have to be aware of the fact that you’re going to start every time that we start a new intro, new character, and it seems like we’re in a new story, you have to be aware of the fact that the audience may feel the film is starting over. How do you deal with that and how much permission do you have to live in that land before you start to lose people? We just were working on a lot of micro trims to make sure that we had just enough in each section to complete the tale and keep us hooked in. Kind of like an accordion, you have to scrunch it down, then you kind of have to open it just a little bit more and kind of go back and forth in that so you find the sweet spot.”

Those acts come together in Barbarian‘s final confrontation, which eventually ends with a classic needle drop into the rolling credits.

“There’s a bunch of different ways that it could have been handled, but we were looking for some other ways to bring some energy to the end of the film,” Murphy said. “Zach had come in one day and was like, ‘Hey, why don’t we just try this gunshot to credits?’ Let’s mock it up in the edit and see how it goes. Then I was experimenting with throwing in some title cards in between picture for Tess’s march onward, which was those couple shots we have at the end. Something really simple but effective came together in that regards to give the film a good sense of completion. So it was a pretty, again, experiment and an organic process to find that, even though we had the material.”

Murphy’s editing work continues on Peacock, as he is credited as an editor on three episodes of A Friend of the Family. His next edited episode, “Outer Darkness,” streams this Thursday, November 3rd. For now, audiences can check out Barbarian in full, which is streaming now on HBO Max.