While Mother is the movie’s monster, Long strongly asserts that his character AJ is the worst and that the audience was rooting for him to get what he had coming by the end of the feature. Needless to say, AJ gets what he deserves as horrific things happen to him.
Long indicates that AJ may have realized his audacious persona by the end, but Cregger’s script had unexpected twists, which the actor didn’t see coming.
'AJ has that brief moment at the end where it dawns on him that he may be a bad person or a good person doing bad things. Trying to come to terms with that is the closest to the character's accountability. So, I thought, maybe AJ will have his redemption, but a couple of minutes later, that goes out the window as he throws Georgie off the tower,' he says.
Justin notes that Barbarian’s end reminds him of other classic horror films like King Kong and Frankenstein.
“When AJ finally dies, the moment was surreal to watch with fans at Comic-Con. Everyone cheered, which says a lot about human nature,” he adds.