Curry Barker Talks His Rise as a Horror Director

Few directors shoot their debut movie, land it in a big fest, and find themselves at the center of a bidding war. It’s the sort of thing that could mess with your head, especially if you’re in your twenties and your biggest successes to date have been posting shorts to YouTube.

But Jason Blum says that Curry Barker seemed surprisingly calm when they met in person for the first time, a day after the filmmaker’s Obsession screened at Toronto International Film Festival to a rapturous response. The $750,000 film would go on to sell to Focus Features for around $15 million in the following days.

“A lot of times, someone in that position is in shock and off their game,” says Blum. Not so with Barker, who was 25 during September’s TIFF. “He was so grateful and modest, but not falsely modest. He was very clear about what he wanted to do next, and this wasn’t going to change his mind.”

Written and directed by Barker, Obsession tells the story of Bear (Michael Johnston), who uses a mysterious novelty item called “One Wish Willow” to wish that his longtime crush Nikki (Inde Navarrette) would love him more than anyone in the fucking world. His wish comes true to horrifying results that have won over critics, who gave it a 94 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It dramatically over-performed this weekend, where it grossed $17.2 million domestically, up from projections in the $10 million range. Its word of mouth has been strong, with the film declining just 11 percent from Saturday to Sunday, a hold rarely seen.

Barker has already shot his follow-up film, the horror-comedy Anything But Ghosts, based on a spec he wrote and stars in with his creative partner, Cooper Tomlinson. As positive buzz about Obsession swirled before TIFF, Blum and fellow horror titan Roy Lee both wanted in on Ghosts. But in an unusual move, rather than try to outbid each other, they decided to team up for the first time in their history to acquire the package together.

And as Obsession hit theaters last week, Barker closed his deal to write, direct and produce his take on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for A24, a movie he landed without having to jump through hoops, thanks to the TIFF halo around Obsession. His deal grants him an extraordinary amount of creative control, especially for a young director on a big IP project.

It’s all part of a wild, nine-month period that has seen Barker go from relative obscurity to the most in-demand 20-something director in Hollywood.

For Lee, who produces both Anything But Ghosts and Texas Chainsaw, Barker reminds him of another protégé, Barbarian and Weapons filmmaker Zach Cregger.

“Some people just have that ability: What they create is cinematic,” says Lee, who was instrumental in Barker getting the Chainsaw job. “He’s going to be following in the footsteps of Zach, just a few years behind.”

As much as things have changed for Barker, many key things have stayed the same. Those close to the filmmaker describe him as both impressively productive and single-minded in his focus, disappearing into whatever project he’s working on. “Obsessed” might be the right word.

Barker confirms this, and one of the first things he says when hopping on a Zoom with The Hollywood Reporter is he’s really itching to get into the edit on Anything But Ghosts, as soon as this week. (In addition to directing and writing, he serves as editor on his movies.)

He plans on editing Ghosts — a horror comedy about two scammy paranormal investigators who are caught up in real ghostly activity — in his bedroom in the apartment he shares with creative partner Tomlinson. It’s the same place where he also served as the editor of Obsession.

Unlike what you might expect from a 20-something who is the toast of Hollywood, you are unlikely to find Barker hitting Los Angeles hotspots late at night. Case in point: A childhood friend from Barker’s native Alabama attended May 11’s Obsession premiere and wanted to go out after, but it wasn’t in the cards for the filmmaker, who had a day of press and other duties ahead of him.

“I’m always letting down my friends that love to go out and hit the town, because I go to bed at 10 p.m.,” he says with a laugh. (To be fair, that’s not always true. THR left the Obsession party after 10 p.m., and Barker was still there, posing for photos with Tomlinson and friends.)

Barker came to Los Angeles from Alabama for film school, where he met Tomlinson and quickly dropped out to build their sketch channel, That’s a Bad Idea. The duo wrote Anything But Ghosts the same way they write their sketches, which take simple concepts to extreme places.

“We hook our laptop up to our TV, and we let the story unfold and see where things take us,” says Tomlinson. “Curry doesn’t like to be constrained to an outline. That puts you in a box. We like to see where the story goes, and so many fun things come out of it.”

Barker’s The Chair, a 2023 horror short about a young man (Anthony Pavone) who takes home an antique chair he finds on the side of the road — and, in Barker fashion, it wrecks his life — got him on the radar of 47 Meters Down producer James Harris of Tea Shop Productions.

“You can go on TikTok and you can find 8,000 filmmakers making kind of cool shit, right? But some of it, you’re like, ‘Oh, that looks like you made it in your house and you just used some filters,’” says Harris. Barker’s stuff was different. It looked like a real movie. Harris recalls thinking, “I can feel you have the cinematic language — and if we just give you more money and get you to do the same thing, that’s actually really interesting.”

Barker pitched Harris a few concepts, and the producer chose Obsession, lining up financing for a 20-day shoot while Barker wrote (and rewrote) the script.

Collaborators say that Barker knows what he wants and often goes with his gut feeling. Casting director Skyler Zurn, who cast Obsession and Anything But Ghosts, recalls having many conversations about how Barker wanted the actors to make him feel — that’s what he cares about, more than if a performer is famous.

“Curry provided a freedom to discover that was really refreshing,” says Zurn. “So we really could search for the feeling. We were waiting to be moved by each person, and that’s what led our casting decisions.”

Barker built his career by playing moneyball, finding ways to stretch a dollar and enlisting strong collaborators who weren’t yet too expensive. Now, Barker will have more options than ever. If he wanted to hire a seasoned, name-brand cinematographer for Texas Chainsaw, he could, for example.

But as he gets bigger, he does not feel the need to rethink who his partners are; he seems to have already found his creative soulmates, using cinematographer Taylor Clemons as an example when asked about having the resources to hire so-called bigger names in the field.

“Taylor is going to be a name in the space,” says Barker. “Taylor is a genius, and I actually think that he’s going to be one of the greats.”

Just as Barker represents a new generation of filmmakers who came up on YouTube, the team he has assembled behind the scenes is next gen as well. The oldest member on his UTA team is 35. His manager at Underground is in his early 30s. These are people who perhaps have a different understanding of the business than their more established peers.

And, of course, he is taking in advice from the elder statesmen of the horror genre, like Blum and Lee, melding it all together. Blum paraphrases a passage from Lena Dunham’s memoir to describe Barker’s approach.

“Judd Apatow says to her, ‘You should listen to people a lot more,’ and Noah Baumbach says to her, ‘Don’t listen to anybody,’” Blum says with a laugh. “And the thing is, both are true. The challenge when you’re young is figuring out how much to do of each one. It’s really, really hard to do — and I think Curry has done that incredibly well.”

Lee Barker up with Cregger, to talk over the things he will have to navigate now that he is becoming a name brand director. The two bonded over screenwriting, and Cregger gave him some advice after reading Anything But Ghosts: cut down the page count.

“Here’s me being stubborn because I was like, ‘No, I’m not gonna do that.’ It’s funny because looking back at it, I’m like, ‘Damn, Zach Cregger was right, because it was so stressful,’” Barker says with a laugh. (Cregger was worried Barker was biting off more than he could chew in the number of days he had to film, but it all worked out.)

Barker re-iterates he is stubborn when it comes to his vision, and his collaborators recall multiple Obsession moments he fought that others others doubted. But collaborators also recall people throwing out ideas on set that he incorporated into the movie.

“You’re guiding the ship. You know what the voice of the movie is, you know what you’re chasing and you should know the story better than anyone else,” Barker says. “But any person can come up with a good idea and being open to that — I think it’s really important.”

Moving forward, he could see Obsession becoming some sort of anthology series, where it’s a different wish for every episode. And he could also see himself launching a horror banner, ala Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw.

But for now, he’s really ready to get into his bedroom and edit Anything But Ghosts. He says he has ADHD, and while for some creatives, that means multitasking, for him it manifests in becoming obsessed with one thing at a time. But he’s already scribbling out ideas for Texas Chainsaw, something he hopes will feel like an original movie rather than simply an IP extension.

Says the filmmaker: “I like to create worlds that have an iconicness to it. I’m always thinking, ‘What’s the Halloween costume?’”

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Obsession is now playing in theaters. Check out all of The Hollywood Reporter‘s coverage here.