The 2023 holiday season has brought out several great new Christmas horror films, including There’s Something in the Barn, starring Martin Starr. In this holiday horror comedy, Bill (Starr) moves his American family — wife Carol (Amrita Acharia) and children Nora (Zoe Winter-Hansen) and Lucas (Townes Bunner) — to Norway where he’s inherited a family estate. While Bill dreams of turning the adjourning barn into a bed and breakfast, his family struggles to adapt to Scandinavian life.
Eventually, Lucas discovers a mischievous barn elf (Kiran Shah) from ancient folklore living in the barn with a set of rules the family must follow. When Bill dismisses Lucas’s warnings and fails to follow sacred holiday traditions, the elf plots to get rid of the American intruders at any cost. Recently, PopCulture.com had a chance to speak with Starr (Spider-Man: Homecoming, Knocked Up) about the movie, and he had a lot of positive things to say about working with Shah, saying, “He is such an accomplished actor and just super talented” with “so many random stories that you just wouldn’t have expected.”
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Starr added, “He has a very full life that he has led and continued to share his life with us to make this movie, and I think he’s so good in the movie. He is really the core or the heart of this movie in such a huge way because without that bond between [Lucas] and Kieran, I don’t think that you can get as invested in it.”
Starr also shared that Shah, who is 67, “did so many stunts through the shooting… He was rolling around and falling on the ground and swinging hammers and he was badass, but it was super fun to do real stunts.”
Starr went on to explain that the whole cast and crew worked really well together on the Norwegian film shoot, saying, “They naturally were all in tune with what it needed to be, especially with the language difference with just working in Norway.”
He added that while most “everyone spoke English…sometimes language can become a little bit of a barrier there, but everybody seemed to just get what was happening pretty quickly, which is great because it can be such a time-intensive process just trying to communicate.
There’s Something in the Barn, directed by Magnus Martens from a script by Aleksander Kirkwood Brown, is now available to own on digital platforms.
