In a recent interview with Deadline, Barry creator Bill Hader teased what he wants to do next with his career, following the HBO show’s upcoming series finale. Among his hopes is to produce one of several film scripts he’s been thinking about writing, including—most excitingly—a horror movie.
Hader described that project as “Barry-like in tone, but instead of a crime thing, it’s like a horror thing.” And while this “horror thing” is not officially in the works yet, last night’s Barry episode, “it takes a psycho,” was a brilliant proof-of-concept. The half-hour was chilling in ways beyond the crime drama’s previous peaks, with three stand-out scenes in particular leaving us to beg Hader to get that horror movie in pre-production ASAP.
Directed by Bill Hader, as all of Season 4 has been thus far, Episode 4 saw our doomed anti-heroes spiraling headfirst into rock bottom. For NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan), that involves the tension between his love for Cristobal (Michael Irby) and his desire for power. This comes to a head with Cristobal and Hank’s “sand business” (dubious!), which seemed like a much more clean-cut way to attain the financial success these mobsters crave. But despite Cristobal’s excitement for it and friendship with the fellow mobsters they’ve corralled to join them, Hank clearly wants something bigger—which leads him to do something heinous, made only more so by Hader’s brilliant direction.
Hank and Cristobal invite their workers to check out the giant pit of sand they’ve collected, to their delight. Hank implores everyone to walk around, take their shoes off, and take a group selfie with him. But it’s all a ruse, one which even Cristobal was unaware of—Hank asks his lover to leave the room with him for a second, but Cristobal doesn’t come with Hank immediately. Hank, unaware, then does something horrifying: He activates a mechanism that collapses the floor, sending everyone plummeting to a sand-choked demise.
The way Hader choreographs it is brilliant: First, there’s a static wide shot, in which we see the entire group sink into the sand. Then, the camera zooms forward to find that Cristobal’s head is still free, poking above the grains. He yells for Hank to help him, until the camera cuts behind Cristobal. Panning downward, we slowly sink down into the sand alongside him, taking us away from the beachy playground into a screen that’s gone completely black. The sound design contributes to the nightmarishness here, as we hear Hank run back into the room and call out for Cristobal from Cristobal’s perspective; Hank’s voice is muffled and far away.
Death by quicksand would be a fitting fright for any horror movie. (Thankfully, Cristobal gets out. Unfortunately, he doesn’t survive for much longer after this.) But Hader doesn’t want it to be the centerpiece scare here. Nor is the next, more traditional scream-inducing scene the episode’s most fearsome, where Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) thinks Barry is about to break into his home and shoots “him” through the door, only for the camera to cut to a slow-panning reveal that it’s his son. Instead, Hader himself appears in the episode’s most unforgettably haunting moment, one that still made me gasp even the second time I saw it.
Toward the episode’s end, Sally (Sarah Goldberg) returns to Barry’s old house, after hearing that he’s broken out of jail. (That’s already a disturbing development.) It’s dimly lit when she enters, and it’s eerily quiet too. The camera pans across the room, landing on a wide, open doorway. Cut back to Sally: “Barry?” Her face is fear-stricken; the silence of the room emphasizes the anxiety she feels. We stay on the doorway—a little too long, which is key—until Barry stumbles out of the literal darkness. He’s bruised and beaten and in horrible shape, courtesy of his time in prison. Barry appears to be, in a word, a monster.
Of course, Hader quickly reminds us that Barry is something of a gentle giant, when Sally insists that the two should split town ASAP. This is the greatest thing Barry’s ever heard, and we can tell it from his voice, as he asks Sally for affirmation.
But even that sweetness can’t take away from how closely Barry reached jump scare territory with this moment. An unknown figure slowly making his way toward an unarmed woman through the darkest of black, in a previously unoccupied house, where there’s only the dimmest of lighting? That’s horror movie material—the intellectual kind, which aims to unnerve you as much as it tries to make you gasp.
And gasp I did, reader. I can’t unsee that haunting, bloodied figure, moseying his way through the shadows. And after you catch up with Barry, you won’t unsee it either. Someone needs to connect Hader with A24, Blumhouse, or some other studio, stat, because I’m craving more of Hader’s quietly horrifying artistry.
