Ishana Night Shyamalan’s directorial debut film The Watchers has one major connection to one of the most surprising and universally-acclaimed pure horror movies of the last few years. An adaptation of A.M. Shine’s 2022 novel of the same name, The Watchers follows Mina (Dakota Fanning), a young woman with a haunted past as she finds herself trapped with a group of strangers in a mysterious forest in Ireland. Together they must work to find a way out of the forest and escape from the creatures that watch them every night.

The Watchers is driven by powerful performances from its cast, which features Olwen Fouéré, Olvier Finnegan, and Georgina Campbell as the three strangers Mina is trapped with. While The Watchers may lean more fantasy than horror, it benefits from having an experienced horror veteran in a key role in Campbell. She plays the young woman Ciara who was trapped months before Mina, and who awaits the return of her missing husband. Her performance in The Watchers calls to mind her breakout role in a 2022 box office and critical smash hit.

The Watchers’ Georgina Campbell Starred In 2022’s Barbarian

She played Tess Marshall in the surprise hit

Georgina Campbell’s powerful performance in The Watchers balances calm with terror, which is very reminiscent of her role as Tess Marshall in Barbarian, the 2022 horror-thriller hit from Zach Cregger. Barbarian stars Campbell as a young woman whose Airbnb happens to conceal the den of a monstrous, deformed woman who kidnaps and imprisons her. The first half of the modern classic takes a slow burn approach to its scares, not unlike The Watchers. It builds tension and fear without relying on the monster at its center, a trait it also shares with The Watchers.

Barbarian currently holds a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Campbell’s performance has been singled out for praise many times over. Campbell flexes her scream queen muscles throughout, and gets to progress through a few different levels of fear in Barbarian; from quietly nervous at first to full-fledged Final Girl terror in the movie’s climax. Her performance in The Watchers is strangely similar and every bit as good, and invites comparison.

The Watchers & Barbarian Give Georgina Campbell 2 Horror Hits

The English actor has a growing horror filmography

Both Barbarian and The Watchers were wide releases, and introduced Georgina Campbell to a much larger audience than she had previously been exposed to. Campbell has had TV roles as far back as 2010, and has had notable roles in widely acclaimed series including One Of Us, Broadchurch, Black Mirror, and His Dark Materials. Her role in Barbarian was her true mainstream breakout, however, and The Watchers gives her a second notch in the belt as a go-to horror actress. Those are not Campbell’s only horror roles, however.

Campbell has quietly become one of the top names in horror/thriller cinema in the last few years, and her turns in Barbarian and The Watchers are evidence that her popularity in those genres will only continue to grow. Between those two movies, she starred in Netflix’s follow-up to the streaming sensation Bird Box, which starred Sandra Bullock, titled Bird Box: Barcelona. She also starred in the critically-acclaimed Lovely, Dark, and Deep, which currently holds an 89% on Rotten Tomatoes. Georgina Campbell’s status as a horror mainstay is certainly in the process of being cemented.

Source: Rotten Tomatoes