Meet Curry Barker, Horror’s Most Exciting New Voice

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Curry Barker is only two films into his career, and horror already feels like it belongs to him. His new movie Obsession — a brutal, relentless, genuinely nerve-shredding wish-gone-wrong story — opens this Friday, and it arrives carrying the kind of critical momentum that most directors spend a lifetime chasing. The film currently holds a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, making it not just the best-reviewed horror movie of 2026, but the best-reviewed wide-release film of the year, full stop. For context, Sinners finished 2025 with a 97%. Barker is in that conversation now.

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And he’s just getting started.

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A Wish That Goes Very, Very Wrong

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Obsession centers on Bear (Michael Johnston, Teen Wolf), a hopeless romantic who can’t bring himself to tell his co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette) how he feels. So he does what any desperate, lovelorn person would do in a horror movie: he snaps a cheap novelty toy called a “One Wish Willow” — a $6.99 trinket he picks up at a novelty shop — and wishes that Nikki would love him more than anyone in the world. It works. Immediately. And catastrophically.

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What follows, according to The Hollywood Reporter’s review, is a film that “takes typical aspects of dysfunctional romantic relationships to initially comic and then horrific extremes” — one that’s as darkly funny as it is genuinely terrifying. Navarrette, in particular, is being singled out as a revelation. THR called her performance “virtuosic,” noting she “delivers such intensity she’ll induce nightmares for anyone who’s ever wondered what exactly the hell is going on with their romantic partner.” It’s being described as a breakthrough turn that should change her career trajectory entirely — a significant pivot after her supporting role in Superman and Lois and a smaller part in the Dave Bautista action film Trap House.

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The film also stars Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, and — in a genuinely delightful bit of casting — Andy Richter, all of whom joined Barker and his leads at a special Los Angeles screening at the Hollywood Legion Theater on May 11.

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Where the Idea Came From

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The origin story has become one of the more charming footnotes in the film’s press run. Barker had been sitting with a vague idea about obsession for a while — the consuming, all-encompassing kind, whether it’s about a job or a person — but couldn’t quite crack the structure. Then he rewatched the “Monkey’s Paw” episode of The Simpsons.

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“That Simpsons episode struck the idea of making it a wish-gone-wrong type of movie,” Barker said. “The idea of being obsessed with another person was something that I hadn’t really seen done to its full glory. The wish thing really unlocked the full potential of that.”

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His writing process is deliberately loose. He outlines, but he doesn’t treat the outline like scripture. “You can really allow yourself to discover things a little bit more when you don’t treat the outline like a bible,” he explained. “Maybe you outline that by this scene, they should be going to the restaurant. But maybe as you’re writing, you discover that the car swerves over, and now they’re on the side of the road.” He goes in with specific moments he wants to include and figures out where they fit — carefully, because forcing a scene into the wrong spot, he says, can cost you the story.

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The “Modern Jump Scare” — and Why He Doesn’t Actually Do Jump Scares

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Here’s something interesting about a horror director who’s being praised for how scary his movie is: Curry Barker doesn’t really believe in traditional jump scares.

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“Jump scares can be kind of predictable, and sometimes unearned,” he told GamesRadar+. “Someone opens a closet and a ball falls out but because the music is loud, it’s supposed to be a jump scare? A modern audience kind of rolls their eyes at that.” Instead, Barker has developed what he calls his own “modern jump scare” — which isn’t a jump scare at all, but something stranger and harder to shake. “If you have two or three, even four, moments in your movie where you can make the audience go, ‘Oh, I didn’t like that. That was weird. That made me feel…’ — to me, that’s a modern jump scare.”

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The philosophy comes from comedy. “Tricking someone is kind of how you make someone laugh,” he said. “You make them think that something’s going one way, and then if you surprise them, you’ll usually get a laugh. My job is to trick you.”

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It’s an approach you can trace back to Barker’s YouTube roots. He and collaborator Cooper Tomlinson built a following through their channel That’s A Bad Idea, with shorts like The Chair and Warnings that leaned into uncanny dread rather than cheap shocks. His debut feature, Milk & Serial — a found-footage film he released entirely for free on YouTube in 2024 — earned strong reviews and real buzz, and set the table for everything that’s happened since.

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The One Wish Willow Is Already a Phenomenon

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When Barker invented the One Wish Willow, he knew it had franchise potential baked in. The film establishes that these trinkets exist all over the world — a detail that quietly leaves the door open for an entire cinematic universe of bad wishes. “It clicked in my head once I kind of came up with the idea,” Barker said. “I knew that there was the potential for this to be, like, kind of an iconic thing.”

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What he didn’t anticipate was that the prop replicas would sell out on the Focus Features website before the movie even opened — and start flipping on eBay for around $200. “People haven’t even seen the movie yet,” he said. “It’s crazy.”

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He does have more One Wish Willow stories in his head, and yes, they’re all horror. As for the film’s more mysterious elements — the creepy phone number, the ambiguous purgatory-like space — Barker is deliberately keeping the lore sparse. “I like that it’s in the people’s hands to come up with their own theories and ideas,” he said. “Your movie is so based in reality except for that one little outlier.”

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The Road to TIFF — and the Version You’ll Actually See

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The version of Obsession that got Barker into the Toronto International Film Festival was, by his own admission, a very early cut — one with a completely different opening and scenes that hadn’t yet been shot. Getting into TIFF from that rough state was, he said, “mind-blowing,” and it changed everything. “It kind of greenlit our additional photography. It kind of knocked everybody into place. It got us a post-supervisor! I had never had a post-supervisor before. I was just kind of editing this thing in my free time.”

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The theatrical version is close to what screened at the festival, with a few additional sound and color passes — and some cuts made to secure the R rating. “There were a couple of head smashes that we had to take out,” Barker said, which tells you something about just how far this movie goes.

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The brutality was always intentional. “All I’m interested in doing is pushing the boundaries of horror,” he said. “I get kind of disappointed when the films that I watch pull their punches or don’t really go there, or they kind of promise that they’re going to go there and they don’t.”

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As for when he knew the film was something special — that took a test screening. Every single person who watched it said they would recommend it to a friend. “I was told that’s unheard of,” Barker said. “No one’s ever had every single person saying ‘Yes’ to that.”

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What’s Next: Ghost Hunters and Leatherface

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Barker has already finished shooting his follow-up, Anything But Ghosts, which he stars in alongside Tomlinson as a pair of ghost hunter con artists. He describes it as living in the same tonal world as Obsession — real stakes, real dread — but funnier by nature of its premise. “That premise alone just lends itself better to comedy,” he said. “But we take the stakes very seriously.”

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And then there’s the Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot, which Barker recently signed on to direct. It’s the kind of franchise attachment that could mean anything — another tired cash-in, or a genuine reimagining. Based on everything Barker has shown so far, it sounds like the latter. “It’s loving the original but also knowing that there is something left to be shown with that family and with the series in general,” he said. “I actually think there’s a lot to be explored that they haven’t dived into.”

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His strategy for handling the pressure of one of horror’s most iconic properties? “Isolating myself and trying not to think too much about that pressure because that’s the killer of creativity. You’ve got to kind of throw it away, honestly.”

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Obsession is in theaters now. The film reportedly cost under $1 million to produce — and Focus Features paid at least $15 million for distribution rights. Before a single ticket has been sold at the box office, Curry Barker has already won.

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“category”: “Movies