Curry Barker dropped out of the New York Film Academy’s Los Angeles campus after meeting Cooper Tomlinson. The two of them built a YouTube and TikTok sketch channel called “that’s a bad idea,” a Key and Peele-influenced dark comedy duo that ran from around 2017 through the early 2020s. Barker worked at Starbucks during the pandemic. He’d been teaching himself to edit since he was 11.
His 2023 short ‘The Chair,’ a cursed-object piece, pulled between 5.5 and 9 million views and became the bridge into horror.
Then came ‘Milk & Serial.’ The budget was roughly $800, most of which went to a single outside actor and the Sony camcorder he later resold for $100. Barker plays “Milk.” Tomlinson plays “Seven.” They’re prank YouTubers whose birthday stunt on a neighbor escalates into something much darker. The found-footage style was so grimy and so close to the duo’s actual existing prank channel that viewers thought the footage was real. The Guardian, Variety, and Bloody Disgusting reviewed it.
‘Obsession’ is the follow-up and his first theatrically distributed feature. It cost about $1 million to make and sold to Focus Features for around $14 million after its TIFF premiere. Michael Johnston plays Bear, a meek young man who uses a novelty toy called a One Wish Willow to wish that his crush Nikki, played by Inde Navarrette, would fall in love with him. The monkey’s paw does what monkey’s paws do. Reviews are putting it next to Hereditary, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Zach Cregger’s Weapons. Barker edited it himself. It opened in theaters May 15.
A24 won the bidding war for the Texas Chainsaw Massacre rights in February, beating Blumhouse. Variety confirmed on April 21 that Barker would write and direct the feature reimagining of Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel’s 1974 original. In the Phantasmag interview, he says he wants the reboot to be brutal and emotional, that he wants the audience to care whether the characters survive beyond the chase. He’s also developing ‘Anything But Ghosts’ with Blumhouse, a project about fraudulent paranormal investigators who run into real ones.
Jordan Peele went from comedy to horror. Ari Aster made Hereditary, the film Barker has said changed how he saw the genre as a teenager. Barker is 26 and he just got handed Leatherface.
