Curry Barker and the Problem With Getting Exactly What You Wished For

Curry Barker

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	September 22, 1999 Mobile, Alabama, United States
Occupation	Film director, screenwriter, actor
Known for	Obsession
Awards	Sitges Film Festival Special Jury Prize (tied), Obsession, 2025 · Sitges Film Festival Audience Award, Obsession, 2025 · Sitges Film Festival Youth Card Award, Obsession, 2025 · Panic Fest Best Director, Obsession, 2026 · Panic Fest Best of Fest, Obsession, 2026

Obsession begins with a man who buys a wishing toy that grants him exactly what he wants — a woman’s love — and discovers that coercion, even dressed as magic, cannot be separated from its consequences. Barker voiced the toy himself. It is difficult to watch the film after learning what we know about its production and not notice that the director gave himself the role of the mechanism that makes wishes happen.

He grew up in Mobile, Alabama, the son of a mother who designs and a father who spent years as a psychiatric nurse practitioner before becoming a professional screenwriter. Neither parent’s career, in retrospect, looks like a coincidence: Barker absorbed both the graphical instinct and the understanding that professional pivots are possible. At Baker High School he was a C-and-D student who spent his energy in a rock band and the marching band, not on coursework. At eleven, someone let him watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. “I just wanted to chase that feeling of being shocked,” he said later. He has not stopped chasing it.

When Barker left Alabama for the New York Film Academy’s Los Angeles campus, the plan was to learn acting. During his first week, he met Cooper Tomlinson, and within months they had dropped out together to start a YouTube sketch comedy channel they called “that’s a bad idea” — their own description of choosing to film comedy over completing film school. The channel eventually reached 1.2 million subscribers and 605 million views. More importantly, writing sketches trained him in something most curricula struggle to teach: audience psychology, timing, and why certain choices make people react in ways that can be precisely engineered.

In 2023, Barker directed a horror short called The Chair and put it on YouTube, where it was watched more than ten million times. James Harris at Tea Shop Productions contacted him. The Chair became the seed for a feature, but before that materialized, Barker made a found-footage horror film called Milk & Serial for eight hundred dollars — a number he is not shy about, because the point is not the modesty of the budget but what the discipline required. Milk & Serial went to YouTube after a year of failed distribution attempts, went viral, and United Talent Agency signed him in early 2025.

Obsession was shot in Los Angeles over twenty-six days in October 2024. Michael Johnston plays Bear, the music store employee who buys the wishing toy; Inde Navarrette plays Nikki, the coworker whose free will the toy erases. The film cost $750,000. It premiered at TIFF’s Midnight Madness section on September 5, 2025, sold to Focus Features for between fourteen and fifteen million dollars — the highest acquisition price for a genre film in TIFF history — and opened in the United States on May 15, 2026. By late June, it had passed $332 million worldwide, becoming Focus Features’ highest-grossing release ever and the first wide-release film since E.T. to increase its box office in three consecutive weekends.

In June 2026, as Obsession kept running in theaters, art director Sally Choi posted on social media about working conditions on the production. She reported being paid three hundred dollars a day while serving simultaneously as production assistant, set dresser, graphic designer, and background actor on a non-union shoot. Some crew members had worked as unpaid volunteers receiving only gas and mileage compensation. The post opened a conversation the industry has been carefully avoiding: what happens when the indie-film model — which depends on goodwill, deferred pay, and the lure of a future credit — produces a blockbuster. The question the film itself keeps asking — whether someone can ethically extract desire from another person for their own benefit — turns out to apply outside the frame as well.

Critics received the film warmly. Rotten Tomatoes collected a 94 percent approval rating from 269 reviews; Metacritic settled at 77 out of 100. Several reviews identified the sound design as the film’s sharpest instrument — Barker has described Dolby Atmos as the element that made a low-budget production feel large — and Navarrette’s performance drew the most sustained attention, earning her Best Performance at the Seattle International Film Festival. Barker won Best Director at Panic Fest. “As a comedy writer my comedy brain was always on,” he said in a Hollywood Reporter interview, “and it forces you to study the human condition and psychology, the way people react to things. That’s the same kind of brain that you need to make a psychological horror movie.”

Three simultaneous studio commitments at twenty-six is not a standard position. Anything but Ghosts, set in the Obsession universe, is in development with Blumhouse Productions and Focus Features, with Barker directing, co-writing, and starring. In April 2026, A24 announced he would write and direct a Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot — the film he watched at eleven and cites as the origin of his entire interest in horror. And in June 2026, Universal Pictures and Blumhouse Atomic Monster announced a separate original horror film. What comes next involves the original source of his obsession. The wish, it turns out, keeps finding new forms.

Tags: actors, Curry Barker, Inde Navarrette, Obsession, Michael Johnston, Milk & Serial