Until a few months ago, Curry Barker was a little-known actor and a slightly more famous youtuber. Now, at 26 years old, the American actor has become one of the youngest and most acclaimed filmmakers, after debuting as a director with Obsession. The horror film was shot in 26 days, produced with $750,000, and by early July, after two months in theaters, it had already surpassed $400 million in ticket sales worldwide, according to Variety. This film about a wish fulfilled with dramatic consequences has dethroned The Exorcist (1973) and has become the seventh highest-grossing horror movie in history. A smashing success that has allowed Barker to now focus on his next project, Anything But Ghosts, in which, besides directing, he also acts.
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Barker moved from his native Alabama to Hollywood to pursue his dream. There he enrolled in a film school and specialized in acting, began participating in castings, and had brief appearances in some series. It was also where he met his friend, partner, and actor in his film, Cooper Tomlinson. “I feel like people can stay in Alabama and achieve this. For me, moving to Los Angeles allowed me to be in a city where I felt this was possible. The industry is everywhere and it’s contagious. It motivates you to walk past Warner Bros every day and wish you could cross that fence,” he confessed to The Hollywood Reporter last June. “In Alabama, Hollywood feels so far away it seems unreal. If my parents hadn’t supported me so much, I don’t know if I would have had the courage to move here,” he admitted.
The two ambitious friends decided to leave school to start their channel, called That’s a Bad Idea, and upload comedy sketches and horror shorts to YouTube and TikTok. The audience began to grow — they now have 1.5 million subscribers on each social network — but not enough to make a living from it, so Barker kept working in a café to pay rent and finance his shorts.
His first success came in 2023 with his horror short Warning, which has 3.3 million views on YouTube. Then came The Chair, with over 11 million views, nominated for Best Film at the Los Angeles Short Film Festival and a semifinalist at the Burbank International Film Festival. Both can be watched for free on his channel. With this last short film, he became known in the film industry and caught the attention of the independent film production company Tea Shop Productions, with which he secured the budget needed to afford a 20-day shoot to film Obsession.
With a budget of $800, in 2024 he released his first feature film, Milk & Serial, on YouTube. And a year later, at 25, he presented Obsession at the Toronto International Film Festival. A few days later, the independent film producer Focus Features bought the film for $15 million. From there, everything went up. “I never considered myself a youtuber. I feel my path is not very different from big figures like Spielberg. I don’t want to compare myself to them, but they started making short films. They made movies over and over until finally someone gave them a chance,” he told the specialized film media.
The internet became obsessed with Obsession: there are more than 50,000 posts on TikTok discussing and analyzing the film frame by frame. On the IMDb platform, about 273,000 people have given it an average rating of 7.9 and, weeks after its release, it ranks third among the most popular movies, below The Odyssey and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. It also received approval from several renowned filmmakers, including Christopher Nolan. “That movie is amazing. It’s not about the technical aspect. It’s not about what technical problems you have to solve. It’s about the story,” said the director of The Odyssey (2026) in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
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The film came to Barker when he was watching a special horror episode of The Simpsons, featuring a monkey’s paw that grants wishes but with terrible consequences. Something similar happens in his project: the One Wish Willow is a small magical branch on which the plot is based. “I thought I had never seen a horror movie as crazy as this… We’ve seen the saying ‘Be careful what you wish for’ many times. But we had never seen my version. I immediately started thinking about what I could do with that,” he confessed in an interview with Variety in September 2025.
In Tarantino style, Barker also acts in his films, besides directing, writing the script, and editing them. The young filmmaker has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and, according to him, it makes him obsess over one thing at a time. This could also be the reason why he rejected a $2 million offer to change the script of Obsession. In his next film, Anything But Ghosts, which he is already editing, the audience will see him direct and act.
Now that he is a successful director, Barker has closed a deal to write, direct, and produce his version of the horror classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Also, according to The Hollywood Reporter, a company has offered him $10 million for any idea he wants to present next. Looking ahead, he is considering the possibility that Obsession becomes a series, where each episode presents a different wish.
More and more centennial directors like Barker or Kane Parsons — the also 20-year-old youtuber who directed the horror film Backrooms (2026)— are reaching movie screens. The promising director’s team, with whom he plans to continue working on upcoming projects, are all under 35 years old. And it coincides with the fact that this generation born between 1995 and 2009 now constitutes the largest demographic going to the movies, according to a study by the company Fandango. “We’re tired of trash content. We want good movies to come back. People still want to see original cinema, without the need for big franchises, as long as the story is good,” Barker said about big productions in his interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
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Although the young filmmaker is working on his next film with Jason Blum, producer of hits like Paranormal Activity or The Purge; and Roy Lee, producer of films like The Ring or It, he plans to maintain his lifestyle. “I still live in the same apartment for the last three years, in my small room. We will continue living together [his partners Cooper Tomlinson and Anthony Pavone] and we will try to move to a better place. I don’t want to exaggerate, I just need enough closet space for my clothes and shoes,” he confessed to the specialized film media. He will also need space for his large collection of sunglasses, an accessory that is starting to characterize his style. That said, he will keep going to bed every day at ten at night, just as methodical.
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