The Twenty-Six-Year-Old Behind “Obsession,” a Terrifying Tale of a Crush Gone Awry
For the first few minutes, you could be forgiven for thinking that Curry Barker’s début feature, “Obsession,” was a rom-com. The film opens with its shy, sensitive twentysomething protagonist, Bear, struggling to confess his feelings for his childhood friend, Nikki. Their relationship is full of banter and, so far, strictly platonic; he’s smitten and terrified of ruining everything. He stumbles upon an old novelty toy called the One Wish Willow, which promises its user whatever they desire, and, after failing to admit his crush, impulsively wishes for Nikki to love him “more than anyone in the fucking world.” He gets what he wants. Unfortunately for Bear, this is, in fact, a horror movie. During their first night together, just for an instant, Nikki appears to glitch, jerking back mid-kiss and looking at him with blind panic instead of undying affection. Her behavior gets stranger from there. Whether the person he’s with is really “her”—and how much that distinction matters to him—becomes a question of increasing urgency.
When “Obsession” premièred at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, Barker was twenty-five, and best known as a purveyor of comic sketches and horror shorts. (His offerings in both arenas can be equally disturbing.) “I can pinpoint the moment my life changed,” he said, of the midnight screening. “I woke up the next morning to this flood of texts and missed calls.” A twenty-four-hour bidding war culminated in the film being sold to Focus Features for fifteen million dollars—the highest price commanded by a genre movie in TIFF history. Jason Blum, the producer of such hits as “Get Out” and “Paranormal Activity,” came onboard “Obsession” after the première. “I see an enormous number of horror movies, and it’s very hard now to make something that feels unique,” he told me. “This one certainly did.”
Blum and Focus are also partnering on Barker’s next film, “Anything but Ghosts,” which just wrapped in Vancouver. It had a budget of around five million dollars—easily the most money Barker has ever had to work with. (He made “Obsession” for “seven hundred and fifty thousand, max,” and earlier projects for far, far less.) But when we met recently in Burbank at the Mystic Museum, a shrine to all things horror, he still seemed to have the mind-set of someone operating on a shoestring. He eyed what looked like a human spinal column in the museum gift shop, as appalled by the price tag as he was by the object itself. “Eight hundred and fifty dollars?” he mouthed. “This can’t be real, right?”
A clerk explained that there were two adjoining storefronts: one, he informed us, sold “bugs, skeletons, and trinkets,” whereas the other was devoted to “more horror-franchise stuff.” Barker, who has a shock of platinum-blond hair, hexagonal metal-frame glasses, and a game, laid-back attitude, made a beeline for the latter. He took in the blood-smeared signage and life-size statues of slasher villains as thunder crackled from the loudspeakers. “This is my vibe!” he declared. Still, wearing a white T-shirt tucked into light-wash jeans, he stood out amid the darkness. “I’ve been obsessed with horror my whole life, but I’m also not a very gothic person,” he said. During his childhood in Mobile, Alabama, his mother had imposed strict viewing limits: “She didn’t want to have to deal with me crawling into bed with her because I was scared.” When he was eleven, she relented and let him pick out a movie for Halloween. He chose the 2003 version of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
Critics had been largely unimpressed by the film, a remake of the 1974 classic, but for a young Barker it was visceral. “In the first five minutes, a girl pops herself in the head,” he recalled. “Dude, I was not ready for that. It was the biggest shock of my life.” (He ended up sleeping in his mom’s bedroom as she’d predicted, though he spent the night curled up on the floor out of pride.) He continued, “But, honestly, I wanted to chase that feeling. I wanted to be shocked again. Which is kind of reflected in the way I write now.”
After that, he said, he was “off to the races,” devouring “Donnie Darko,” “The Ring,” and considerably less acclaimed fare. “Once I started going down that rabbit hole, I watched all horror movies. I also got to that point where I was, like, these movies sometimes suck,” he said, laughing. His deep dive into the genre left him with some pet peeves, not least the irrational or simply implausible behavior of many horror-movie protagonists. When he writes, he performs what he calls the “eye-roll check”: would a viewer roll their eyes at what was unfolding? “The why of it all—why wouldn’t they just do that?—is so important to me. I’m always thinking, What’s the first thing you would do if this happened?” he said. Bear’s first move after Nikki starts acting strangely is to look up the One Wish Willow on a Reddit knockoff called “Thredit.”
Barker constructs universes where whatever is terrorizing his protagonists is an anomaly. In “Obsession,” even after Nikki is possessed, there are still house parties, admissions letters, and friend-group dynamics to worry about. The One Wish Willow doesn’t have ancient lore; it has a customer-service helpline. The conceit also has a moral dimension. Though Barker was inspired in part by the trope of the monkey’s paw—a cursed object that grants a wish with terrible, unexpected consequences—he sees the One Wish Willow as a neutral entity. The problem, he said, is “the guy, and the wish he made.” The distinction elevates a familiar be-careful-what-you-wish-for premise to a funny, brutal existentialist drama.
“It starts from a very innocent place with Bear. I wanted it to be relatable. We’ve all had a crush on someone who didn’t like us back—which is kind of a creepy concept, when you think about it,” Barker went on. “You imagine this whole reality that may never be.” Such obsession can be a frightening emotion both for the person experiencing it and for the target. One of Bear’s first lines, as he talks about his love for Nikki, is “I feel like I’m coming apart.” The fact that he never manages to confess this to her is part of the horror: Barker wanted to play on the very modern fear, among young men, of “not saying the right thing, or not wanting to come off like a creep.”
We made our way into the museum’s Séance Parlor. Ouija boards were enshrined in glass cases throughout the room; periodically, a small silver bell tolled without warning, moving as though on its own. In one corner, a pair of headless mannequins were prostrated before a crowned, decapitated head: a tribute to the final scene of Ari Aster’s “Hereditary.” Barker gasped in recognition and delight. “I was only seventeen when that movie came out. It left a huge impression on me,” he said. “It kind of sparked for me that movies can be artsy.” Jordan Peele’s “Get Out”—also released when Barker was in high school, and shot a few miles from his home in Alabama—similarly changed his sense of what horror could do.
A24, which produced “Hereditary,” has enlisted Barker to direct a “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” reboot. When I raised it, he became, briefly, more guarded. “Dude, I have to be so careful now with what I say in public,” he said. He was still smarting from the (modest) backlash to a comment he’d made, a few days earlier, about the original being “really good for its time.” But he grew animated again as he explained his interest in the psychology of the family at the heart of the story. “What kind of person do you have to be to kill as nonchalantly as the Sawyers do?” He invoked a scene in which two brothers encourage their decrepit patriarch to finish off their latest victim, cheering him on as he struggles to lift a hammer they’ve placed in his hands. “It tells you that this old man has been killing his whole life, and this is fun for this family. That’s so fucked up,” Barker said. “But there was only a little bit of that in the original, and the rest of the remakes were just, like, Leatherface with a chainsaw! We’re gonna have that, too. But we have to earn it.”
Barker’s first dream was to be an actor. When he was eighteen, he left home to study at New York Film Academy’s campus in Los Angeles. During his first week of classes, he met a fellow-student named Cooper Tomlinson; they started making videos together that weekend, which they posted on YouTube. “It became our film school outside of film school,” Tomlinson told me. Barker, who’d spent his senior year of high school teaching himself about the properties of various camera lenses and microphones to make his sketches feel “cinematic,” insisted on shooting horizontally, rather than tailoring their material to Instagram or TikTok. (Eventually, he allowed vertical video.) The skits, which Barker writes with and acts in opposite Tomlinson, tend to involve an abrupt turn from observational comedy into darker or more surreal territory. In a video about an erratic Uber driver, a recognizable dynamic—awkward small talk, impatience to set off—escalates into a life-threatening one. Another sketch revolves around a guy failing to text his friend when he gets home safely; after a sleepless night waiting for word, the spurned bro descends into madness.
The high production values and frequent genre-hopping were inspired by the sketch-comedy duo Key and Peele, whom Barker grew up watching religiously. Emulating them required a genre-savvy shorthand: the ability to conjure up the feel of a cop show or a sci-fi comedy in minutes. (Barker deploys this ability to great effect in “Obsession,” interspersing moments of genuine fear with, say, an idyllic falling-in-love montage.) Barker and Tomlinson had been at it for a year when the pandemic started, and their classes migrated to Zoom. They dropped out, moved in together, and committed to making films. Barker worked at Starbucks and spent every free moment writing and shooting. “He’s a simple man,” Tomlinson told me. “There was no Plan B.” Their YouTube channel, That’s a Bad Idea, gradually gained traction, amassing upward of a million subscribers. One of Barker’s horror shorts, “The Chair,” attracted interest from Hollywood producers.
Another turning point came in 2024, when the pair released “Milk & Serial,” an hour-long slasher they’d made for eight hundred dollars. Barker wrote and directed it, starring alongside Tomlinson and other friends who were willing to work for free, and shot several scenes in their shared bedroom. (The two still live together, though they now have rooms of their own.) He bought a Sony camcorder to capture the precise look he wanted, then sold it at a markup when they were done. The result was a found-footage flick with a meta twist: the characters are YouTubers themselves, engaged in a prank war that goes violently awry. Variety named it one of the best horror films of the year, ranking it a few notches below “The Substance.”
The sketch-comedian-to-horror-auteur pipeline is surprisingly robust: after Peele came Zach Cregger, the writer-director of “Weapons,” who got his start as a founding member of the Whitest Kids U’Know. Barker’s other heroes include Nathan Fielder and Tim Robinson, comics whose work contains an undeniable dark streak, and who share his prankster’s spirit and high tolerance for unease. For Barker, as for many, the two genres go hand in hand. “My bread and butter is uncomfortable conversations. That’s what I love to write,” he told me. “So when I go to a bar or I have a weird experience with a waiter, I’m always thinking about how it could be a skit,” he said. “Being aware of the way people interact with the world is funny and scary—and it’s a tool.” The vibe of the ensuing sketch could go either way. As Peele once put it, “The difference between comedy and horror is the music.”
When Barker and I returned to the entrance of the Mystic Museum, the clerk greeted us cheerfully: “Welcome back! Congratulations on surviving!” Barker was polite, but I got the sense that the experience had not passed the eye-roll check. After we left and stepped out into the sunlight, he explained his disinterest in cheap thrills elicited by sudden noises or alarming imagery. “To me, it’s all about making you feel uneasy, and less about a jump scare,” he said. “And the way you achieve that is with the unknown, or not knowing someone’s intentions.” He likes to let a scene run long, without the kind of release audiences have been primed for. Inevitably, there’s something to make you squirm—but often it’s what’s not happening rather than what is.
“Do you want to get pizza?” Barker asked. Over deep dish, we discussed his upbringing in Mobile, where he was, as he put it, “a straight-C and -D student.” He made up for it with extracurriculars, playing in the marching band, landing gigs around town with his rock band, Culture Shock, and appearing in “all the local plays,” including a star turn as Oliver in “Oliver Twist.” As a teen, he launched a YouTube channel with his little brother and some friends. (“We had, like, a thousand subscribers—we thought we were hot shit.”) He founded a film club and got involved with his high school’s broadcast-news association. Even there, he thought in terms of sketches: he developed a segment where he approached other students as though for a real interview before asking nonsensical questions, willfully misinterpreting their answers, or feigning a breakdown mid-taping.
Barker speaks of his family with obvious pride, and seems determined to bring them along as his star rises. His mom, a graphic designer, helped to develop the look of the One Wish Willow. His dad, inspired by Barker, recently quit his job as a psychiatric nurse practitioner to become a full-time screenwriter. “We wrote a screenplay together called ‘Deep Snow,’ which I actually do plan on one day pursuing,” Barker told me. (His father also contributed a monologue to “Obsession.”) His older brother, Jeffrey, was a P.A. on “Obsession”; his younger brother Riley shoots all of his and Tomlinson’s sketches, and aspires to become a cinematographer.
His own aspirations have pulled him in several directions. “I’m the busiest I’ve ever been,” he said. He’s writing a TV show (“a hard comedy, which is so different”) set in a slightly heightened world akin to that of Tim Robinson’s “The Chair Company,” as well as entering postproduction on “Anything but Ghosts,” whose cast includes Bryce Dallas Howard and Aaron Paul. The new movie follows a pair of faux ghostbusters who don’t believe in ghosts at all, scamming their clients and justifying it to themselves as a way of “bringing peace” to the tormented or bereaved. Then, as in “Obsession,” a rupture occurs: for the first time, they encounter a real spirit, and one who’s decidedly unimpressed by their act. Barker stars alongside Tomlinson, with whom he co-wrote the script. The collaboration recalls their earliest sketches, though Barker noted a “welcome change”: instead of identifying him as a YouTuber, people are starting to call him a filmmaker.
Barker displays a winning mix of self-deprecation about what he’s achieved so far and supreme confidence in what he’ll do next. He called his first short, “Real World,” “pretty bad,” noting its “stupid title”; already, he sees the flaws in “Obsession,” or at least feels the absence of the shots he couldn’t afford. But he’s still high on “Anything but Ghosts,” and on the reboot looming after that. “There’s almost no possible way to make everybody happy with ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’ ” he said. “But if I couldn’t see myself bringing something new to it, I wouldn’t have said yes. If I were like, Well, nothing beats the original, then the argument becomes: should it exist at all? So I’m striving to make the absolute best version that anyone’s ever seen. That’s an exciting pursuit. And it’s worth the scrutiny that comes with it.”
Before we parted, he reflected on another early love: “Scare Tactics,” a hidden-camera prank show on Syfy. Tracy Morgan, the host, conspires with the unwitting “victim” ’s friends and family to put them in horror-movie-esque scenarios: a home invasion, a haunting. The series was frequently ridiculous; it also terrified one victim so badly that she had to be hospitalized, after which she promptly sued the producers, the network, and two of the actors involved. “I don’t even think this show would be allowed to happen nowadays,” Barker said. (Incidentally, it briefly was—in 2024, it was revived for a single season by Jordan Peele.) Barker had rediscovered the series as an adult, and had come to appreciate it as a corrective for the “bullshit Hollywood version” of fear: a showcase for our sometimes embarrassing, sometimes damning reactions to what we don’t understand. “You can learn a lot from watching people react to crazy, scary things,” he told me. “Most people don’t even scream. They just book it. There’s something really funny about that—but it’s also the most genuine you can be.” ♦