Photo by Sela ShiloniIn a year full of exciting debuts, Obsession is one of the buzziest. It’s a huge leap for its writer-director, Curry Barker: After cofounding the sketch-comedy duo “that’s a bad idea” — currently at 1.12 million subscribers on YouTube — Barker made his first feature, the found-footage horror movie Milk & Serial, and self-released it in the summer of 2024. A little over a year later, Obsession sold for an estimated $15 million after its midnight premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Now Barker and his collaborator Cooper Tomlinson are working on another horror film for Blumhouse, and Barker is writing and directing a “reimagining” of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for A24. Not bad for a director whose first movie had a budget of $800. “It’s a fantasy. But it’s creepy when it’s out loud.”Obsession blends the high-concept punchlines of Barker’s sketch-comedy background with the shocking imagery and emotional violence of an Ari Aster movie. (Barker cites the Hereditary director as one of his key influences.) The result is a grimly funny morality tale that takes a simple, relatable premise and spins it out into nightmarish directions: Michael Johnston stars as Bear, an employee at an Atlanta music store whose secret infatuation with his friend and coworker Nikki (Inde Navarrette) takes a dark turn after his wish for her to love him back actually comes true. In classic “monkey’s paw” style, Bear’s desires have a price, and his reaction changes everything we thought we knew about this self-proclaimed “nice guy.”The gruesome horror story that follows raises provocative issues of entitlement and consent, fueled by a powerhouse performance from Navarrette. We spoke with Barker at the end of a long promotional tour for the film and found him to be as enthusiastic about his work as he was at the start. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.My experience with this movie is that it’s a sort of Rorschach test — everybody I talk to has a slightly different point of view on it. Is that something you were hoping for?Absolutely. I don’t point at things [in my writing]. I never [say to] the audience, “Hey, this is gonna be important later,” or “Check this out, audience.” The stories are always gonna be told from some sort of perspective, and when you write a movie like this, what you’re really doing is not telling people how they’re supposed to feel. It allows people to decide how they want to feel about it, and that was by design.How would you describe the perspective in this movie?Everything is from Bear’s perspective. Even when he’s in the music store, and we see Sarah getting her letter from her dad, we don’t cut to their conversation. We’re still with Bear.What was your initial “in” to the story? Were you starting from the character of Bear, or did you think, “I want to deal with these certain ideas,” or… ?My initial in was the concept of obsession. It grew out of the Stephen King movie Misery. She wants to wear his skin, she’s so obsessed with him, and there was something really intriguing to me as a horror writer about the idea of loving someone so much that you physically want to be them. There’s something kind of serial killer-ish about that. The wish element was something I discovered later as a storytelling device.Something I saw in the Rorschach test of this movie is — not endorsement, of course, but commentary on incel culture, and the male loneliness epidemic, and all of these controversial, very current issues. And I wonder if there was anything conscious about that.I would be lying to you if I told you that I was chasing some sort of [cultural commentary]. I wanted to open with a relatable premise, which is that there’s a guy who has a crush on a girl, and he doesn’t know if she has a crush on him back.And it is creepy to think that, since the dawn of time, we’ve all been creating this reality in our heads, fantasizing about what that life could be like [with someone] without actually knowing how that person feels about us. It’s a very private thing because it’s in [your] head. It’s a fantasy. But it’s creepy when it’s out loud.Curry Barker on the set of Obsession. | Focus FeaturesYou edit your films yourself, is that right?Yeah.How does that affect your work?I just have a different instinct. I found a collaborator in my DP, I found a collaborator in my composer, and I look forward to one day having someone I can call my editor that has similar sensibilities and can take some of the workload off of me while I work on my next project or whatever. But right now, it’s something that is crucial to my process. I’m definitely editing my next one, because it allows me to discover things that I may not have even discovered on set, and I don’t know what it would take away from my movies if I wasn’t there for the discovery.“I’m strict about not editing my movies like a YouTube video.”When you say you have a different instinct, is that something you can articulate?I think that it comes from YouTube. I’ve been editing since I was 11 years old, which is a long time for someone my age. If I never wanted to direct, I probably could have had a career as a professional editor. It’s really a tension-and-release thing. That comes from comedy and from studying people’s attention spans. That comes from the internet.[I allow myself] to go a little bit further when it’s a feature, though. I’m strict about not editing my movies like a YouTube video and allowing myself to not take [what works online] too much into the editing room for a feature, because it’s a different thing. You’ve bought your popcorn, you’ve sat down, you’ve committed to the movie. You’ve earned people’s attention just a little bit more with a feature film.Barker started with the “monkey’s paw” premise, and worked backwards from there. | Focus FeaturesYeah, just the fact that they left the house and paid money and sat down — it’s a different kind of contract.You’re even told over and over again, put your phones away. You’re not allowed to answer your phone… I mean, people still do, but the attitude and the culture is that “We’re gonna put our phones away for an hour and 45 minutes, and we’re gonna watch this thing that someone has prepared for us.”I wasn’t chasing comedy in this movie as much as chasing honesty, and really wanting to be honest to what I thought the characters would actually do. A lot of movies get it wrong, in my opinion. For example, if you were to discover this magical world when you opened your closet door, you would call all your friends and tell them, “Dude, you’re not gonna believe what I just found. You have to come check it out.” Whereas I find that a lot of movies would make it the [character’s] little secret. People think that the things that I choose to do are funny, but really, I’m just writing to be as honest and true to the characters as possible.It sounds like your approach is character-based in the end.Yeah, exactly. It’s funny that the guy on the phone says [to Bear], “Do you want to cancel your wish?” And he’s like, “Okay, fine, I want to cancel my wish.” And [the guy on the phone] says, “Sorry, we don’t do that,” and Bear’s like, “What? You just made it sound like you do that!” There’s this dreadfulness in that there’s nothing he can do, and [a joke] in him being desperate enough to ask again, like, “What the hell?” Nothing seems untruthful for what Bear would do in that situation.Inde Navarrette gives a star-making performance in Obsession. | Focus FeaturesI’m not the first person to say this, and I won’t be the last, but Inde Navarrette is incredible in this movie. There are times when she’s really putting herself out there. How do you build the trust that it takes to get a performance like that out of somebody?That’s something that I’m proud of, and something that I hold dear because I love to create a really playful set. I don’t believe that because it’s very deep and dark material, the set needs to be deep and dark, and we need to let Inde go into her little hole and go to a dark place so that she can go there. Maybe that’s some actors’ process, and [in that case] then they can explain that to me early on.“If she had to make a fool of herself, I had to make a fool of myself.”I like to explain my process early on to my actors, and I tell them that I like to keep it light, because I feel like we’re all just adults playing pretend. When I was a kid, I would play swords with my brother outside in the woods, and I’d use my imagination, and it felt so real to me. As an adult, if you’re in the acting business, you’ve literally found a way to make money doing the thing that you did as a kid. And it’s all kind of silly if you take it too seriously, you know what I mean?So the whole cast got together, and we played charades to break those boundaries down so we could all look silly in front of each other. Because yeah, what I’m asking her to do is to really be vulnerable in front of a bunch of people. There are a lot of people on the other side of the camera. I even offered that if she had to do it, I had to do it. If she had to make a fool of herself, I had to make a fool of myself. And so I would find myself screaming and crying [on set] — not to show her how to do it, necessarily, but just to say, “Hey, we’re all doing it.”Obsession opens in theaters on May 15.