Curry Barker might feel like his wish has been granted.
The 26-year-old filmmaker saw his work debut in theaters nationwide for the first time on Friday with “Obsession,” a film he wrote, directed and edited. The horror movie follows Bear (Michael Johnston), a young man who, lacking the courage to ask his longtime best friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) out on a date, wishes that she would love him “more than anyone in the whole f—king world” — a wish that yields disastrous results.
“(Being here is) insane,” Barker told TheWrap at the film’s Los Angeles premiere. “It’s life-changing.”
Before this theatrical debut even hit theaters, “Obsession” distributor Focus Features already acquired Barker’s follow-up feature, “Anything but Ghosts,” while A24 tapped the rising filmmaker to reboot the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” franchise. It’s a dream come true for Barker, who moved to Los Angeles from Alabama for film school.
But Barker didn’t gain the confidence of Hollywood producers, managers, distributors and talent agents through a simple wish. He set his career in motion by picking up a camera and uploading short films to YouTube.
Barker is just the latest example of a crop of filmmakers who built a following of their own online before springboarding to Hollywood success. In just the last few months, YouTube critic Chris Stuckmann made his directorial debut with “Shelby Oaks” and Mark Fischbach (also known as Markiplier) saw box office success with “Iron Lung.” Meanwhile, 20-year-old Kane Parsons will soon release a feature-length adaptation of his “Backrooms” web series as A24’s youngest director yet. In Barker’s case, there wasn’t any question about jumping into the medium at an early age.
“I moved out here when I was 18 and started making stuff right away. It’s even shocking when I look back at it myself and I’m like Whoa. We started making ‘Roommates,’ like, that week,” Barker told TheWrap. “It’s really crazy looking back at how quickly we got started.”
The “we” Barker refers to is himself and Cooper Tomlinson, his creative partner who stars in “Obsession” as Bear and Nikki’s friend Ian. He also co-wrote and co-stars opposite Barker in “Anything but Ghosts.” The pair met attending New York Film Academy’s Los Angeles campus, eventually dropping out to pursue filmmaking full-time by uploading sketch comedy and short films online as a duo known as That’s a Bad Idea.
“This is something we’ve always wanted,” Tomlinson told TheWrap at the “Obsession” premiere. “That’s how we gravitated towards each other the first day we met. We knew we wanted to make movies and television. Now we’re here. It’s just insane, you know? This is the dream.”
That’s a Bad Idea
When he started developing “Obsession,” Barker had the opportunity to play Bear himself, just as he had starred in many of his own shorts and sketches. A look at some of his favorite filmmakers encouraged him to decline the offer.
“Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, Zach Cregger, those people — they’re not in their movies. They’re just directors,” Barker reasoned. “I wanted to introduce myself to the industry as Check it out, I’m a director! and not kind of force myself into the film.”
Barker’s love of Aster permeates “Obsession,” a film filled with startling possessions and frightening figures lurking in dark corners not unlike “Hereditary.” (“I was 17 when that movie came out, and it really shocked my system,” Barker acknowledged.) Yet the young filmmaker comes from a growing group that Peele and Cregger belong to themselves: writer/directors who started in sketch comedy (both in front of and behind the camera) and went on to make horror.
“It’s the same kind of muscles,” Barker said. “To make a scare and make a laugh are very similar.”
Just a few months after “Hereditary” came out in 2018, Barker and Tomlinson uploaded the first episode of a comedy web series, “Roommates,” to YouTube. The videos, directed by Barker and written by the pair, feature the duo as an odd couple that’s just moved in together. Barker plays Grant Baker, an unworldly aspiring “music person” who’s just moved from Alabama to L.A. and has a camera crew follow him around, while Tomlinson plays wannabe chef Chad Churchill (“Not to be confused with Winston Churchill or Chad Michael Murray”) from smalltown Minnesota.
“Roommates” was relatively short-lived, wrapping up after nine episodes in July 2019, but the duo went on to make numerous sketches following this general formula: Barker as a strange agent of chaos, Tomlinson as a loserish straight man. Many of these sketches riff on relatable premises, like “When You Run Into Someone From Your Past” or “When You Order the Wrong Thing on the Menu.” Some of their videos play more directly with film culture, like a “Talk to Me” parody starring Barker as an early 2010s ghost who’s an extraordinarily bad hang.
But things really started taking off for Barker in 2023 when he uploaded a 20-minute horror short film titled “The Chair.”
“’The Chair’ was the first one where I was like, I need a real DP, I want to cast it through the casting process. The budget for that was like $2,000, and it was just me saving up my money, but also writing on a budget,” Barker said. “Any aspiring filmmaker’s worst nightmare is being paralyzed and having some sort of script that’s been written for months and months and months and you’re like, ‘Oh, don’t worry, one day I’m going to do it,’ but you never do because it just becomes too overwhelming. (We were) writing things that we could do right then.”
This caught the attention of James Harris, a producer who wanted to see if this short filmmaker had a feature in him. Knowing that nothing was guaranteed, Barker wrote something that could be made on the cheap, with “Obsession’s” final budget reportedly sitting at less than $1 million.
“He didn’t say, ‘I’m greenlighting your movie.’ He said, ‘Write a script and we’ll see,’” Barker said. “So I’m writing the script thinking, Even if James says no, I’m gathering all my friends, and we’re making this. With that in mind, I had a low budget. I’m always thinking about budget, and I think it really changes my style quite a bit.”
By the time they got on set for “Obsession,” Barker and Tomlinson already had one feature under their belts. The pair collaborated on “Milk & Serial,” a 62-minute found footage horror film they released directly to their YouTube channel. With a budget of $800, the movie follows the pair as two prank vloggers who get in too deep when their games start turning deadly. The video became a viral hit and currently sits at 2.4 million views on YouTube.
“Those kinds of exercises have really helped me write low-budget,” Barker said. “Now I almost want to keep the voice of some of those choices.”
Your new horror obsession
Barker had long been obsessed with obsession, wanting to see how far he could take the idea of one person’s fixation on another through a horror lens. It wasn’t until he watched a “Treehouse of Horror” episode of “The Simpsons” in which the titular animated family gets a monkey’s paw that the idea of a wish pulled it all together.
“You’ll see in my next film, I kind of approach What if a ghost movie was set in the real world, like this one is What if magic was set in the real world? That just really attracts me as a writer,” he said.
This premise required a committed performance from whoever would play Nikki, the object of Bear’s affection who quickly becomes the cause of his nightmares. Thankfully, Barker had Navarrette.
“She was amazing,” he said. “I wanted to create an environment where we felt like we could all play and be silly. When you’re doing something that requires so much out of somebody, you kind of have to keep it light and fun. If she’s going to scream, if she’s going to make a fool of herself, I need to be able to make a fool of myself in front of everybody too. That was the attitude we would have. I would sometimes cry or scream or demonstrate for her, and I would look really silly doing it in front of everybody — because she had to do the same thing. I didn’t want her to feel alone in that.”
Whatever environment they created on set worked out. Navarrette’s unhinged performance has gained significant attention from early audiences and critics alike. Some effects to heighten the creep factor, such as Nikki changing her demeanor on a dime and appearing with her face entirely shrouded, had been tested in Barker’s earlier horror shorts, giving him further confidence to try them on the big screen. In fact, the whole idea of a woman “trapped in her body” was something he wanted to develop into a feature after toying with it in “The Chair.”
“It’s almost like one of those things where I’m like, ‘Damn, now what am I going to do?’ I used all my tricks in my toolbelt,” he laughed. “But hopefully you discover new tricks and new ideas.”
Navarrette and Barker played around with the character’s movement and mannerisms as she further descends into this obsession possession. In some cases, Navarrette acted scenes out backwards so Barker could reverse the footage to make her movements look even stranger.
“I was just scared that it wasn’t going to work out. Those things are so silly on the day,” the director admitted. “You have to be so confident. As a director, you have to be the guy. Because if I’m starting to question it, then everything falls apart. So I’m telling everyone with my heart and soul that this is going to be awesome, and you’ve just got to trust me, and this is going to work. But in my mind, of course I’m like, ‘Oh God, I freaking hope it does.’”
But it’s often said that films are born three times: when they’re written, when they’re filmed and when they’re edited. Barker had a hand in all three. For his big-screen debut, the actor took to the editing bay to hone his vision, fighting for the right pacing and rhythm — how long to hold shots on his actors before letting the audience in on the scare — as his own editor. It’s not unlike finding the right buildup for a joke before granting the punchline.
“It’s comedy. It’s tension and release. That’s my bread and butter, I think. As a director, you get to force the perspective, and you get to choose when people look at things,” he said. “What a great power to have.”
A new voice in horror
Curry Barker boarded a plane to return to Los Angeles after coloring “Obsession” in New York. The film was just weeks away from premiering at TIFF, announcing a new voice in horror to the wider world. As the plane prepared to take off, Barker got a phone call from Adam Hendricks, a producer to whom he’d previously pitched “Anything but Ghosts.”
Hendricks called to let Barker know a new producer wanted to board his paranormal feature: Blumhouse founder and horror shepherd Jason Blum.
“We’re taking off on an airplane and I’m like, ‘Wait, hold on, the Jason Blum? Is this real?’ and he’s like ‘It’s real!’ and then we lost connection,” Barker said. “On this three-hour flight, I’m waiting like, how real is this? Is this actually going to happen? What’s the budget going to be?”
With “Obsession” having yet to screen, Blum was only able to see Barker and Tomlinson’s voices through their YouTube projects like “Milk & Serial.” Barker remarked that Blum probably breathed a sigh of relief after credits rolled at TIFF.
“He really took a chance on me,” Barker said. “By the time we went to Toronto, we had already signed our deals for ‘Anything but Ghosts,’ so it was happening whether ‘Obsession’ was a hit or not. I’m sure he was the most relieved person at that screening.”
That film will see Barker and Tomlinson both in front of the camera, joined by Aaron Paul and Bryce Dallas Howard. Focus Features is onboard to distribute the film (which follows ghost hunter con artists who encounter a real dangerous spirit) but a release date hasn’t yet been set.
“It’s just a different situation because me and Cooper wrote it together in the hopes and dreams that we would star alongside each other,” Barker said. “It just felt like a Curry/Cooper movie, so it didn’t feel like I was forcing myself into it. It felt like I was the only person that could play it, so that was a different circumstance for me — and was really quite the challenge to do both (acting and directing).”
And the opportunities keep coming for Barker, now tasked with creating a new spin for “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Barker’s untitled feature for A24 joins a TV series from Barnstorm’s Glen Powell and Dan Cohen, directed by “Strange Darling” filmmaker JT Mollner, as a two-pronged approach to revitalize the franchise created by Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel.
“I’m constantly writing down ideas. I’m constantly excited about it, and I’m like, thank God,” Barker said. “Imagine having an IP and having that pressure and telling everyone in the press that you’re excited about it but not actually being excited about it. But I am. I have the same feeling that I did when I was writing ‘Obsession.’”
Barker hasn’t started writing his “Texas Chainsaw” film yet but will be “sinking my teeth into it pretty quickly.” The writer/director is still trying to iron out the specifics of the film, including its potential setting — whether that be in the modern day, the ‘70s or somewhere in between.
Whatever it is, Barker’s take is sure to be a terrifying one.
“I want to capture the feeling of, If you and a couple friends were driving down the road, and you went down the wrong road, this could happen to you,” he said. “If I can accomplish that feeling within ‘Texas Chainsaw,’ I’ll be proud.”
The post How ‘Obsession’ Filmmaker Curry Barker Became Hollywood’s Next Horror Sweetheart appeared first on TheWrap.
