‘Obsession’: How Curry Barker became the next great horror director with $800 and a YouTube channel
If the 2020s continue like it’s going on, it could well become the single best decade for horror cinema ever.
2026 shows no sign of the genre’s hot streak slowing up, with 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Hokum, Backrooms, Iron Lung, and Send Help all making waves at the box office. That’s not even mentioning the genre’s biggest success story of this year.
Made for just under a million dollars, Obsession looks set to make a hundred times that number at the global box office. A truly remarkable achievement that puts it alongside fellow overachievers The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. However, it could also be set to go one further than those two movies, because it looks like Obsession won’t just be a flash in the pan hit, it will also make a star out of its director, writer and editor, the infuriatingly young Curry Barker.
At 26-years-old, Barker joins the likes of the Phillipou Brothers, Chris Stuckman, and Kane Parsons as horror directors who got their start as YouTubers.
Barker, along with his friend Cooper Tomlinson, was one-half of the brains behind the channel ‘That’s a Bad Idea’, where the duo would post comedy and horror sketches while studying at the New York Film Academy campus in Los Angeles. After cutting their teeth on short sketches, Tomlinson and Barker decide to make their first forays into proper filmmaking.
The first came in 2023, when Barker wrote and directed the short film The Chair. After uploading it directly to YouTube, Barker suddenly got the attention of several important Hollywood movers and shakers, several of which wanted to do as several other directors had done in the past decade.
Like Mama and Lights Out before them, they wanted Barker to take The Chair and convert it into a full-length movie. Something Barker was unwilling to do, as he’d had another idea that he felt was better suited to a full-length film.
That idea was Obsession, a film that was greenlit and Barker got to work on in due course. However, he wasn’t one to rest on his laurels. While in pre-production for Obsession, on a budget of $800, Barker and Tomlinson spent four months making Milk & Serial, a 62-minute found footage horror picture so shoestring that said budget was pretty much entirely spent on a Sony camcorder and the one actor in the film that wasn’t a friend of Barker and Tomlinson.
After completing it, the duo spent the next year shopping the film around to distributors and came up short. Which is strange, because Milk & Serial isn’t just an achievement for a first time director making a film for the kind of money a month of work at a weekend job will get you, it’s an achievement full stop. The film is genuinely disturbing in a way the vast majority of found footage films with ten times the budget just aren’t. Vitally, its funny, grounded and deeply compelling.
As a calling card film, there are few better. It shows what Barker was capable of on a tiny budget, so one could only imagine what he’d be capable of with a bigger budget behind him. Yet, no distributor was willing to take a punt on it. So Barker and Tomlinson said screw it and, like with The Chair, they chucked the whole thing on their already successful YouTube channel, where anyone could view it for free.
At the time of writing, Milk & Serial has nearly three million views. The Chair looks set to break 10 million views. Both of which came not from knowing the right people or waiting for the right opportunity, but by studying their craft and getting to work. Now, Barker has the world of horror at his feet, but what’s even more exciting is the fact that it probably won’t be long before someone comes along to become the next “next big thing in horror”.
Could that be you?