Curry Barker

Curry Barker (born 1999, Mobile, Alabama) came up on YouTube, co-creating the sketch channel “that’s a bad idea” with Cooper Tomlinson. In 2024 he made Milk & Serial, a found-footage horror short shot for around $800 and released free online, which went viral. The follow-up feature Obsession — a Monkey’s Paw fable about a young man who wishes a co-worker into loving him — premiered at Toronto in 2025, was made for under $1m, and became one of the highest-grossing independent films ever. By 2026 he had directed Aaron Paul and Bryce Dallas Howard in Anything but Ghosts and been handed a new take on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

A generational test case

Barker arrived at the exact moment Hollywood started arguing about whether AI would replace the people who make films — and, awkwardly for him, he arrived as the proof text. Christopher Nolan cited Obsession and Kane Parsons’s Backrooms in July 2026 as evidence that young audiences are “utterly rejecting” AI slop, and critics wrote essays reading Obsession as an accidental allegory for the AI era. Barker himself has been more measured than his boosters.

Asked by The Guardian in May 2026 where he stood between directors like Guillermo del Toro, who would “rather die” than use AI, and Steven Soderbergh, who has openly experimented with it, Barker put himself with the sceptics — but his objection is a market prediction rather than a moral one. His bet is that audiences will keep choosing the human-made thing, not that the machine-made thing should be stopped.

His practice backs the bet. Obsession’s most-discussed effect — the possessed Nikki’s face — was practical makeup, duct tape, and a TikTok trend, not post-production. And Barker’s optimism runs to the theatre itself: he credits Gen Z moviegoing to exhaustion with phones rather than to any grand rejection of technology, calling a dark room for an hour and 45 minutes a “zero effort” escape.