CURRY BARKER ON CRAFTING HIS HORROR HIT ‘OBSESSION’
Obsession might just be this year’s most hyped horror. The debut theatrical feature from 27 year-old YouTuber and sketch comedian Curry Barker, the film follows meek music shop worker Bear (Michael Johnston) who has a longterm crush on his best friend Nikki (Inde Navarette). Unable to tell her how he feels, in a moment of frustration Bear uses a ‘One Wish Willow’ (a novelty ‘toy’ that he acquires at a magic shop) to wish that ‘Nikki Freeman loved him more than anything else in the world’. Chaos ensues.
Curry photographed by us in London.
The Obsession buzz began last September at TIFF, where the film played to rave reviews that hailed Barker as an exciting new voice in horror. Made for a more than modest $750k budget, Focus Features acquired the film out of the festival for $15 million, with legendary horror producers Blumhouse coming onboard a few months later.
Since then, the hype has continued to grow through a plethora of positive reviews, clever marketing stunts, merch collabs (yes, you can buy your very own One Wish Willow) and viral clips.
Before the world got obsessed with Obsession, MASSIVE’s social and editorial lead Hannah Stokes sat down with Barker during his short visit to London last month. The pair chatted about the inception of the project, Barker’s YouTube beginnings, and how he and his lead Inde Navarette worked together to craft what will likely be the most memorable horror performance to grace our screens this year.
The idea for Obsession was sparked by an episode of The Simpsons, in which Homer buys a cursed Monkey Paw that grants wishes, subsequently wreaking havoc on his family and the residents of Springfield. “The Simpsons episode really just kind of unlocked something for me” Barker notes, “the idea was already there, it's something I'd been toying with for a while, but the The Simpsons episode had a monkey paw in it, and it kind of was like Oh my God, my Obsession idea, it's perfect! Like it should be a wish movie”.
As well as exploring ideas around autonomy and consent, at its core Obsession is a film that interrogates the entire concept of love, and the differences between love, romance and ultimately - obsession. “I wanted to tell a story about how far someone’s fixation on another person can go.” Barker states. “At what point does something we call love stop being love? And beyond that, what does the word ‘love’ even mean?”.
Courtesy of Universal Pictures UK
For Barker, it was the writing of his lead Nikki - played in a star-making turn by Inde Navarette - that really helped unlock to Barker what Obsession was all about. “The theme of romance versus love came because I wanted Nikki to be a writer - she [originally] had a monologue in the car at the start of the film where she goes on and on about how romance isn’t real, but love is, and it got really trimmed down, but I’m sure it will be released someday”. Despite not making the final cut, Barker revealed how the process of writing this monologue (which he actually wrote after the first draft of Obsession was finished) was what realised this core theme in his mind: “as I wrote her monologue, I was like oh my gosh, that's such a big theme in this movie, the difference between real true love and just the romanticised version of it, like this fake kind of honeymoon phase”.
When developing the character of Nikki with Navarette, the pair watched films like Get Out and Pearl as jumping off points for the character’s increasingly demented physicality and vocal intensity. “We even watched references of stuff I didn't want” Barker remarks. “I'm not gonna sit here and slander movies” he says, laughing, “but we would watch references of like, ‘This is what the movie is not’, ‘this is what not to do’”.
On set, Barker’s direction for Navarette was just as specific, and beyond just providing audience scares (which this film has in abundance) he wanted Nikki’s motivations to seem as ‘logical’ as possible: “The whole idea for me is that I that never wanted Nikki to feel like a possessed demon. I wanted her to feel like a crazy jealous girlfriend. And so it was always playing, like, don't play possessed here, just go into like the whiny and the kind of desperation of really wanting this. Because as a director when you remember why you're doing something, not for the sake of being scary, but why is this character watching Bear sleep? Because she's that obsessed with him, that she wants to”.
“That there's a reason why Nikki’s doing the things she's doing, THAT it's not just for the sake of being scary - that's always kind of important to me”
Courtesy of Universal Pictures UK
Barker is part of a new cohort of horror filmmakers who got their starts on YouTube, alongside the likes of Mark Edward Fischbach (Markipiler), whose self-financed sci-fi horror debut Iron Lung grossed over $51 million worldwide in January against a $3 million production budget, and Kane Parsons (kanepixels) whose debut feature Backrooms - based on a viral YouTube short film he made on his home computer aged just 17 - also hits cinemas this month.
Barker has been making YouTube videos since 2016, from comedy sketches to horror shorts to his feature length debut Milk & Serial, made for $800 and released on YouTube last year. Despite Milk & Serial amassing over 2.5 million views, Barker cites his horror short The Chair as the film that really ‘put him on the map’ as a director, garnering him both a manager and the subsequent attention of prolific genre producer James Harris, who would go on to produce Obsession.
“I feel like YouTube is just the modern platform for discoverability.” Barker notes. “I think that all of us - Kane [Parsons], The Philippou Brothers, me, I feel like we all really have very similar paths to Steven Spielberg or Christopher Nolan. You can watch Christopher Nolan's short films if you want to.” Barker then goes on to talk about fellow horror director Ari Aster, whose films Midsommar and Hereditary Barker and his cast also watched in preparation for Obsession: “Ari went to a really prestigious film school (AFI), but he also made a bunch of short films and I think found connections through the industry, probably through his school. But the only difference between me and someone like Ari who went to a more traditional route is that my discovery was just on YouTube, right? But I still just made shorts and made films and kept honing my craft until someone finally said, "Hey, not too bad - let's make a feature. It’s the same thing really”.
Both before and after his foray into horror, Barker has been making sketch videos as part of comedy duo ‘that's a bad idea’ with friend Cooper Tomlinson, who stars in both Milk & Serial and now Obsession. “It's so funny 'cause I'm just now realising I'm in two groups.” Barker laughs. “I'm in the YouTube group, and then I'm in the sketch comedy group, right?”. Indeed, Barker has been repeatedly likened to sketch comedians turned directors like Zach Cregger - whose films like Barbarian and last year’s horror hit Weapons share similar tonal DNA to Obsession, and Jordan Peele, who Barker has cited as a key influence on his work.
“I just think comedy and horror go really well together.” he says. “It can’t be the case of ‘oh, this is a horror movie, so the dialogue has to be very serious, and we've got this demonic book that has all the answers and we have to take this seriously. I always approach things as just, what would it be like if this guy had no idea how this book worked, and he's never picked up a book like this in his life, and he's like, ‘What do I do with this?’ [laughs] It’s not about being funny, it's about just pursuing some sort of honesty, and that just turns out to be really funny sometimes, you know?”.
Courtesy of Universal Pictures UK
This pursuit of honesty shines through Obsession, which, whilst an obvious cautionary tale, is not a lecture. “It was important to me to kind of present and let people have conversations in the car on the way home from the theater and talk about what would you even do in that situation” Barker notes. “Even the the wish itself, the whole point of like, ‘Oh, well, I wouldn't make that wish!’- Bear didn't know that the wish was gonna happen! It was a toy, right? I think definitely Bear realises at at some point that it's from the wish, at some point he's like, he knows that it's magic. But it took a while to get there - not for the audience - but for Bear. It's not your first thought, right? Your first thought is, ‘It's gotta be drugs’, ‘It's gotta be something.’ But it's not magic”.
“It was important to me to kind of present and let people have conversations in the car on the way home from the theater and talk about what would you even do in that situation”
Indeed, whilst the story is told through the eyes of Bear, through both Barker’s script and direction, and actor Michael Johnston’s masterful balance of both the awkwardness and eventual sinisterness of Bear, the film plays in the grey areas, presenting a dark moral ambiguity that fuels conversation. Ultimately, it was of the of the upmost importance to Barker to leave the audiences to make up their own minds. “What I was trying to do was not tell the audience how they have to feel” he notes notes. “I just wanted to present, and they can decide how they feel later. And to me, that's really important, because it's the only way to spark conversation, true conversation”.
Obsession is in cinemas now.