• Curry Barker’s supernatural horror film Obsession opened to $2.6M in previews and holds a 95% score on Rotten Tomatoes from both critics and audiences
• The 26-year-old director went from TikTok sketch comedy to a $15M Focus Features acquisition out of TIFF — almost overnight
• Jason Blum, who executive produced Obsession, has called Barker one of the most exciting emerging voices in horror
• A car-kill scene had to be trimmed to avoid an NC-17 rating, and the film’s original ending had Nikki dying by suicide
• Barker has two major projects lined up: Blumhouse’s Anything But Ghosts with Aaron Paul and Bryce Dallas Howard, and A24’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Not long ago, Curry Barker was posting sketch comedy videos on YouTube under the brand “That’s A Bad Idea.” Now he has a billboard next to his car wash, a $15 million Focus Features deal, and Jason Blum in his corner. At 26 years old, Barker is having a moment — and if Obsession‘s opening weekend is any indication, it’s only getting started.

The supernatural horror film, which Barker wrote and directed, earned $2.6 million in Thursday previews and Wednesday early access screenings alone — a striking number for a movie that cost just $1 million to make. It’s playing in 2,542 locations across North America, including 435 large-format and premium screens. And it arrives with a rare 95% score on Rotten Tomatoes from both critics and audiences, the kind of double approval that studios dream about.

Obsession centers on Bear (Michael Johnston), a shy, 20-something music store employee who has been quietly in love with his childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) for years. When he can’t bring himself to just tell her how he feels, he cracks open a vintage “One Wish Willow” toy — an ’80s novelty item that promises to grant one wish — and uses it to wish that Nikki would love him more than anyone in the world. She does. Immediately. Terrifyingly. What follows is 108 minutes of possession, obsession, jealousy, and gore, as Nikki transforms into a self-destructive, dangerously violent version of herself, incapable of letting Bear go.

“We wanted it to feel grounded, and we wanted to really lean into, ‘OK, magic is real in this world, fine. Let’s accept that, let’s move on,'” Barker explained. “And now, what you’re left with is a pretty tragic story about a man and a woman, and leaning into the realism of that was really important to me.”

At its core, the film is about consent and the cost of avoiding an uncomfortable conversation. Bear’s inability to simply tell Nikki how he feels is what sets everything in motion — and the movie doesn’t let him off the hook for it. Navarrette’s performance walks a razor’s edge, playing Nikki as both a villain and a victim, with the real Nikki occasionally breaking through her possessed state in tortured, horrified outbursts. It’s the kind of dual performance that earns a star a reputation, and reviews have already started calling her a scream queen in the making.

From YouTube Sketches to TIFF Bidding Wars

Barker’s path to this moment is genuinely unlike most directors working today. He and his longtime creative partner — and Obsession co-star — Cooper Tomlinson met in film school, dropped out together, and started making content online. Their sketch comedy brand “That’s A Bad Idea” built them a real audience. Then Barker made Milk & Serial, an $800 found-footage serial killer film that he released for free on YouTube. It went viral. Hollywood noticed.

He signed with UTA. Buyers came calling. And when Obsession premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, it sparked a full-on bidding war — Focus Features beat out both Neon and A24 to acquire it for around $15 million, with Universal Pictures coming aboard to handle international distribution.

“My agent looked at me after TIFF — this is someone who’s had clients that have made it and who knows what this industry is like — saying to me, ‘Your life is never going to be the same. Your life just changed,'” Barker recalled. “I was hearing him and taking that in, but also being, like, we’ll see. It’s too much for a human to comprehend at that time.”

The pinch-me moment came later, walking down a street and seeing an Obsession billboard next to the car wash he always uses.

Focus leaned into an inventive marketing campaign that matched the film’s eerie tone. Replica One Wish Willow toys sold out within hours of going on sale. An in-world commercial for the toy has racked up more than 4.4 million views on YouTube. And fans across Los Angeles and New York have been encountering cryptic billboards featuring Nikki’s obsessive handwriting alongside a phone number — call it, and you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of Nikki’s increasingly unsettling texts, voice notes, and special deliveries.

The Scene That Almost Got an NC-17

The film’s most talked-about sequence involves Nikki killing Bear’s female co-worker — slamming her head into a steering wheel in a jealous rage — and in its original cut, it was significantly more extreme. The MPAA pushed back, and Barker had to reduce the number of head impacts to avoid an NC-17 rating.

“I was so upset about that at first and scared that it was going to change the integrity of the scene,” he said. “I was scared to touch it, because I had already seen the reaction at TIFF. I didn’t want to mess up whatever good is happening here. But it was fine. I think the integrity of the scene is still there.”

He’s already dreaming about a director’s cut that restores it — along with an alternate ending and a cut monologue from Nikki at the car where she talks about love and romance. “Let this movie breathe just a little bit more,” he said. “It would be fun to experiment and do a new cut of it.”

That alternate ending is its own conversation. In the script, Nikki wakes up from her possession with a gun already in her mouth. She looks around, sees Bear, realizes for the first time in a while that she has control over herself — and then puts the gun back in her mouth and ends her life, unable to live with the horror of what she’s done. Barker ultimately decided against it.

“We just decided that it was more brutal if she stays alive,” he said simply.

Jason Blum’s Stamp of Approval

One of the more striking elements of Barker’s rise is the support he’s received from Jason Blum, the producer behind the Halloween franchise, Get Out, and the entire Blumhouse empire. Blum serves as an executive producer on Obsession and has publicly described Barker as one of the most exciting emerging voices in horror.

Barker said the support has been “awesome” and made clear it isn’t a one-time thing. The two are already deep into their next collaboration — Blumhouse’s Anything But Ghosts, which Barker just finished shooting alongside Atomic Monster and Spooky Pictures.

The film stars Aaron Paul and Bryce Dallas Howard as con artists who call themselves ghost hunters but are, as Barker puts it, “glorified magicians” who don’t actually believe in ghosts. Until, presumably, they have to. Barker and Tomlinson also star in the film — a first for both of them at this scale.

“I was nervous at first, because I have very specific ideas of what the scene looks like for me,” Barker admitted about directing Paul and Howard. “But my dad said, ‘They want to be directed and you’re going to let them down if you don’t give them direction.’ That really meant a lot to me.” He added that both actors were “literally both the most sweet people I’ve ever met in Hollywood.”

Texas Chainsaw and What Comes After

Beyond Anything But Ghosts, Barker is also attached to direct A24’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre — a project he’s been openly excited about since A24 acquired the rights to the franchise. His pitch for it sounds exactly like what you’d hope: grounded, brutal, and character-first.

“It’s gonna be grounded, brutal, raw. It should be very, very uncomfortable,” he said. “I want to make you care about the characters that we’re on the journey with. Just like Bear, Nikki and Sarah are characters that you never knew before — I mean, we all know Leatherface and the Sawyers — but what are the characters that I can invent that we can grow to care about? If they do die brutally, we’ll actually be sad that they died.”

And if all that weren’t enough, Barker is also quietly entertaining the idea of returning to the world of Obsession. He’s acknowledged, with good humor, that the One Wish Willow’s rules don’t entirely hold up to scrutiny — “if the One Wish Willow actually works, which it does in this lore, and people are just making wishes left and right, there would be some crazy — like, dragons would exist” — but that hasn’t stopped him from thinking about what comes next.

“I obviously have a couple more things that I’m excited about next, but I do see Obsession 2, maybe,” he told Total Film. “Or even what really is exciting to me is maybe an anthology, like a one-hour episode. Each episode is a different wish that goes completely off the rails. Maybe I’ll direct the pilot with the same DP, and you could invite other filmmakers to kind of give their spin at it. That would be really cool.”

For a filmmaker who was posting YouTube sketches just a few years ago, Curry Barker is now operating at a level most directors spend decades trying to reach. And from everything he’s said about Texas Chainsaw, Anything But Ghosts, and whatever version of Obsession he eventually gets to make without anyone telling him to pull back — he’s just getting warmed up.

Obsession is in theaters now.

The post Curry Barker Is Horror’s Most Exciting New Voice appeared first on Cream.

• Obsession, starring Michael Johnston and Inde Navarrette, opens in theaters May 15 from Focus Features
• The film currently holds a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the best-reviewed wide-release movie of 2026 across any genre
• Prop One Wish Willows sold out on the Focus Features website and are now reselling on eBay for around $200
• Director Curry Barker has already wrapped his next film, Anything But Ghosts, and recently signed on to direct a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot
• Barker’s debut film Milk & Serial was released free on YouTube and quietly built him a devoted horror following

\n\n

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.

\n\n

And he’s just getting started.

\n\n

A Wish That Goes Very, Very Wrong

\n\n

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.

\n\n

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.

\n\n

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.

\n\n

Where the Idea Came From

\n\n

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.

\n\n

“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.”

\n\n

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.

\n\n

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

\n\n

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.

\n\n

“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.”

\n\n

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.”

\n\n

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.

\n\n

The One Wish Willow Is Already a Phenomenon

\n\n

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.”

\n\n

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.”

\n\n

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.”

\n\n

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

\n\n

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.”

\n\n

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.

\n\n

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.”

\n\n

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.”

\n\n

What’s Next: Ghost Hunters and Leatherface

\n\n

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.”

\n\n

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.”

\n\n

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.”

\n\n

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.

“,
“category”: “Movies

The post Meet Curry Barker, Horror’s Most Exciting New Voice appeared first on Cream.

• A24 has tapped Obsession director Curry Barker to write and direct a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot
• Barker says he wants to explore the full Leatherface family dynamic, not just the iconic killer himself
• He cites Marcus Nispel’s 2003 remake — his first-ever horror film as a kid — as his favorite entry in the franchise
• Barker’s upcoming film Obsession already holds a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes ahead of its May 15 release
• No release date has been set for the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Leatherface is getting a new lease on life — and the director A24 has chosen to swing the chainsaw this time around has a clear, genuinely intriguing vision for where the franchise can go next.

Curry Barker, the rising horror filmmaker behind Obsession, has been tapped to write and direct a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre for A24. And in a recent interview with Total Film, he laid out exactly what’s driving his approach: he wants to go deeper into the family at the heart of the story — not just Leatherface, but the whole terrifying household behind him.

“I think of it as respecting the source material,” Barker said. “I absolutely love the original film, but I want to do something that’s different. I’m not going to stray away too far from what we know, but just making it stronger. Really, I want to lean into the uncomfortability of the family. I want to lean into the rawness of what’s going on there. There’s some really messed-up stuff happening at that farm. I genuinely feel there’s so much potential for that concept that has not been realized.”

It’s a smart angle. Leatherface has been the face of this franchise for over 50 years, but the character’s motives have always been rooted in family — he’s less a lone predator and more a product of the deeply disturbed people around him. The Hewitt family has popped up in a handful of installments, most notably in the second and third entries, but no film has ever truly put them front and center as the main event. Barker clearly sees that gap, and he wants to fill it.

“There’s so much that concept hasn’t really leaned into or hasn’t dived into,” he added. “So I actually feel like there’s a lot to explore, and I’m really excited about it.”

Why His Favorite TCM Entry Says a Lot

Here’s a detail that adds useful color to Barker’s thinking: when asked about his history with the franchise, he didn’t name the 1974 Tobe Hooper original as his favorite. He named the 2003 Marcus Nispel remake — the one starring Jessica Biel — as the entry closest to his heart.

“The 2003 reboot was my favorite,” Barker said. “It was like my first horror movie I’d ever seen when I was a kid, and I actually think it’s a decent remake.”

That film — produced by Michael Bay and co-written from the original screenplay by Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel — was a significant financial success that helped trigger a wave of horror franchise reboots in the mid-2000s. Critical reaction was mixed at the time, but it’s held up for a certain generation of horror fans as a genuinely effective, visceral piece of work. Knowing that’s where Barker’s love of the franchise was born makes his instinct to dig deeper into the family dynamic feel even more grounded — the 2003 film did spend real time with the Hewitts, and it clearly left a mark on him.

Who Is Curry Barker?

If you haven’t heard the name yet, you will soon. Barker broke through with Milk & Serial, an acclaimed found-footage horror film that’s available to watch for free on YouTube and has earned serious praise from genre fans. His follow-up, Obsession, hits theaters on May 15 — and it’s already sitting at a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes based on early reviews. That kind of momentum is exactly why A24 came calling.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise has had a rough stretch. The 2022 Netflix sequel was widely dismissed, and before that, the series had been lurching through reboots and sequels with diminishing returns for years. Handing it to a filmmaker with genuine horror credibility and a specific, considered vision feels like the right move — and Barker sounds like someone who’s thought hard about what this story still has to offer rather than just what it can recycle.

No release date has been set yet, but Obsession opens May 15 — and if Barker delivers there, the anticipation for what he does with Leatherface’s family is only going to grow.

The post TCM Reboot Director Wants to Make It a Family Affair appeared first on Cream.