One thing I liked about Obsession is the way it manages to put a fresh, modern spin on the old idea of ‘be careful what you wish for.’ What was it that drew you to this premise?
I was really intrigued by this idea. I have so many different ideas in my phone, I’m constantly trying to come up with cool film ideas, but I was really intrigued by the idea of obsession. I had this idea about a man and a woman who were so infatuated with each other that they became violent, but it didn't work. There was no story, because if they're both obsessed, then what is the movie? I was watching this Simpsons episode one day and Bart had a monkey paw. He made a wish and all this crazy stuff happened, and I thought, 'Oh my gosh, this is perfect for my obsession idea.' It kind of becomes a wish-gone-wrong scenario. It’s pretty simple idea that we probably have seen before, but I just had to make it as different and unique as possible.
Was this an idea that always felt like a feature to you rather than a short?
I thought of it as a short at first because at that moment in my career I was doing a lot of short films. I don't know if you could even call it a career at that point, it was just a hobby and trying to build my resume and portfolio. I thought of it as a short film but I always think about a feature, you know, just to hope and pray that it could ever be a possibility.
When you were writing the film, did it feel like a very different challenge to sustain a narrative at feature length?
Definitely, yeah. I mean, the one thing you don't want is for it to just feel like a short film that's been stretched into an hour and 30 minutes. You have to keep it engaging. The main challenge for me with this movie is making sure it's not repetitive, because there's only so many things you can do with this idea, there's only so many ways she can go crazy. I didn't want to make it a rampage killing movie where she becomes possessed and starts killing people for no reason. If she's gonna kill somebody, it has to be because she sees that as a huge obstacle between her and Bear, so I was just reminding myself constantly when writing, what is the goal of each character? What's the goal of Nikki? The goal of Nikki is just to be with Bear, that's all she wants. What are the obstacles in her way? When you remember that, it becomes a little easier to write a film like this.
While there are elements of violence and horror in the film, I appreciated the amount of time you take to build up to those aspects. For much of the movie, we’re just sitting in these awkward situations with the characters and observing that shifting dynamic.
Yeah, I wanted the movie to have a build up to it, I feel like it wouldn't have been as powerful if some of the crazy stuff happened earlier and it wouldn't have been as effective. One of my favourite movies in the last ten years is Joker, the Todd Phillips film, and I'm always thinking about ‘What's my Joker moment?’ Because that movie is great at showing us, okay, he's definitely not a good person, he's got mental health issues, there's something weird going on here. Yeah, he kills those people on the subway, but it all feels like it's building up to something…and then boom! He shoots the guy on live television. That was such a crazy moment for me in the theatre. So to recreate that was my goal. Like a Joker moment. What's the moment where you're like, ‘Wow! Holy crap!”
A large part of why the film works is Inde Navarrette’s performance. She's great at immediately showing us who Nikki is and then she does some amazing work as the character gradually gets more unhinged. What is your process for working with actors and drawing a performance out of them like that?
As a horror director, it's your job to wrap everybody's head around what you're trying to do, because everyone's first instincts are going to be to do the thing we've seen before. I always told Inde I want her to play a crazy jealous girlfriend, not to play a demon-possessed woman, so leaning into crazy jealous girlfriend, you get a lot of whininess and pleading, and that was what we worked on a lot. Sometimes I would make a fool of myself on set because I would be doing this weird whining and trying to show her what I want, and I like to keep it really light on set. I think just because we're making something with really dark subject matter, it doesn't mean everybody can't laugh and have a good time on set, so we would laugh and I'd show her my whine, and it kind of worked like that. We watched some movies together too. We watched Pearl, that's a movie about being obsessed with wanting to be a movie star. We watched Hereditary, which is a movie that's got very raw and very real emotion, so we wanted her to see that, and just going scene by scene with her.
I think the real horror in the movie is when you consider the situation from her perspective, and when you give us these flashes that remind us the real Nikki is still in there somewhere.
Yeah, and you don't know where she is, you don't know what she's going through. You just know that whatever it is, it's bad. There's something really creepy about the unknown, that dark void that your mind goes to when you don't really know, and I wanted to keep it like that. That mystery is so much scarier than flashing to her in Hell and seeing her being burnt by fire or whatever you want to say. It wouldn’t be as effective, for sure.
It’s also an interesting film about the nature of relationships between young men and women today, especially when the young woman can have no power in that situation.
I mean, I was more looking to make a really fun horror film. I think the movies that I look up to push the boundaries, and the movies that excite me have characters that are grey and don't always do the right thing. This movie is a fictional film, so there's elements in it that couldn't possibly happen in real life, when you're dealing with magic and stuff like that. Bear comes from a very innocent place at first. I think we can all relate to having a crush on a girl and that crush not being reciprocated and really feeling upset about that. It's what he chooses to do afterwards, that's very, very questionable. I wanted to write a character that was grey in that way because it's so much more intriguing to me to see him trying to make this work and trying to keep her as his girlfriend, rather than doing the right thing and making the whole movie about him trying to fix his mistake. It felt like a more intriguing story for me, and we don't often see the possessed person becoming the victim.
Watching a number of your shorts this week, one aspect of your style that certainly carries through into Obsession is the way you edit. You seem to really like an abrupt cut, and you often edit in and out of scenes in a way that’s unexpected and jarring.
Well, you’ve got to know the rules to break the rules, and I've been editing since I was 10 years old. It's something that I've been doing for a very, very long time. I know the flow of the scene and I know how it's supposed to go, and yeah, it is something that I really like to play with. These weird cuts and this way of cutting out before something finishes, or even sometimes lingering on something when the moment should be over, these are techniques that you can use to either build tension or make people feel weird. It's a thing that I'm still experimenting with, but I think that's part of my style and I'll continue to do that.
The other consistent aspect of your style is that you favour a dark image, you use a lot of shadows to obscure what we can see. How did you work with cinematographer Taylor Clemons to create that look?
Yeah, oh my gosh, Taylor is so amazing. He's a fantastic cinematographer and I think that he will go down in history as one of the greats one day. This was his first feature as well but he is doing my next film and he is just so good. But you know, I had to get him on board for what I wanted to do, and I was very nervous about that, having never worked with a cinematographer before. I had to explain to him what I wanted to do with the aspect ratio and the framing, keeping it very still and not cutting a lot and being very intentional with it. But he was so on board that and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is gonna work great!” The aspect ratio really lends itself to picture frames, if you notice the ratio of the film is actually the same as a picture you would take on your phone, but not the same aspect ratio of a cinematic movie. We wanted to create frames and keep the camera very still, almost as if you're just watching pictures of someone's life in a weird way. He's a master at lighting as well and we were having conversations about keeping her in the shadows but also being very intentional with it, you know, it's not every time, it's certain moments.
When you’re making films on YouTube you only have to please yourself, essentially. Here you have a number of producers who are all invested in the film and all have their own opinions. What was it like negotiating that?
Everyone has ideas and a lot of times they're good ideas, so you can listen to those, but people are also really good about letting me do my thing. In a different scenario, maybe I would have been working with people that weren't letting me do my thing and maybe the film wouldn't have been as good, but I'm lucky because they let me do my thing on this one, and now they're letting me do my thing on my next one. I got really lucky that I'm looked at and respected in that way. Even on this next one, all the suggestions that the producers had were actually really great, and I usually ended up taking their advice. I've been allowed to play, which I don't think is always the case, so it's been very good.
I know you made Milk & Serial for $800 so it’s a big leap to the budget for Obsession, but I think you made this for under a million dollars, which is still a very tight budget for this kind of movie.
Yeah, it was very low budget, under a million for sure. You could feel it on set, I mean, we were scraping pennies every single day. It was a very difficult project. It's so funny because we have the premiere in Los Angeles coming up and Focus is showing me what they're doing for the premiere and everything, and there are crazy things that we could not afford to do in the movie, you know what I mean? The premiere is going to have a more detailed XYZ than we even had in the film, because we just didn't have the money to do it. It's really funny and interesting.
Do you feel like your YouTuber background and mindset helps you work within the confines of a very tight budget?
Definitely, yeah. I mean, the only thing that is tough is that it doesn't really matter anymore what I'm used to, because everything takes so much longer. Even just getting an insert of a lamp or an insert of your phone or whatever can take 45 minutes. I'm used to just, ‘Put the camera there, get the shot, move on’. I try as much as I can to stick to my roots and I think, 'There's a scene where we're driving, let's just hop in the car and drive,' but no, we need police escorts, we need to be on a trailer. Like, Jesus Christ, you know? Everything becomes so difficult. I do try to cling on to my old ways as much as possible, but it mostly just becomes an annoyance for people that are used to doing things the traditional Hollywood way, and their way becomes an annoyance to me. Time is money and that can become stressful, because when that stuff takes really long time, I know I could have just knocked out this shot.
When you started making videos on YouTube, was working towards being a feature filmmaker always the goal?
I've been acting since I was four and then I was like making little videos with my friends and stuff when I was 11 years old. I come from a very small town in Alabama where if you want to act in film, that opportunity doesn't really exist, so I realised I had to make my own films if I wanted to act in them, and I very quickly fell in love with the process of creating films. I mean, I was always looking towards the stars, always was striving to be a filmmaker, so everything was means to an end for me. I wasn’t anticipating how it was going to work out, not knowing that YouTube was the answer to everything. I tried everything, I tried film festivals, I tried local plays, I tried YouTube, and YouTube was the thing that took off.
Your story is not that uncommon at the moment because we're seeing a number of YouTubers transitioning to feature filmmaking. Are you conscious of a growing interest from distributors and the studios in YouTube creators, and what do you think is driving that?
It's so interesting because of course the buzzy thing is to say ‘YouTuber Curry Barker has become a filmmaker in the traditional space’, but my path doesn't feel that different to David Fincher or Steven Spielberg or whoever. I mean, watch The Fablemans. Steven Spielberg was making shorts as a little kid and he becomes a filmmaker, like I made short films over and over again, trial and error, harnessing my craft. I just happened to have a platform called YouTube where they got attention. The discoverability is so much more vast now because of platforms like YouTube, but I don't feel like my path is very different to the traditional route.
Do you feel there's a sense of community with the other filmmakers of your generation who are coming up through YouTube? You feel like you're part of a new wave?
I think so because I talked to the Filippo brothers and I'm also super familiar with the influencer space. I've also been lucky enough to talk to Ari Aster and Zach Cregger and I have their phone numbers and they give me great advice. It does feel like a little bit of a community. Anytime we link up, we do talk about it, that we're this generation, this is our moment, you know? It does feel like a community.
One of the things that connects you with many of the filmmakers who are of your generation and some just before as well, is that you're making horror films but you kind of have a background in comedy. I'm thinking of the Filippo brothers, Zach Cregger, Jordan Peele, etc, who all have sketch comedy backgrounds. Do you see that as a natural progression?
I absolutely do. I don't think it's that comedy and horror are similar, because they're very different, but I think what's similar is the muscles and the skills that you use to create tension and fear in a scene can be very similar to the skills that you use to create comedy. I can only speak for myself, but I've spent a lot of time studying the human condition. In sketch comedy after sketch comedy, you start to realise that the way humans act is very funny and you start to find humour in the awkward moments. My brain is always turned on, whether I'm at a drive-through or a restaurant, or I'm in an elevator and there's some awkward beat or whatever; ‘Oh, it would be funny if this happened or it'd be funny if the waiter said this.’ When you're constantly studying the human condition and the psychology of why people say things or how people react to things, that really lends itself well to horror. The horror I try to make is all about dread and discomfort and those things are often very funny too.
After years of releasing your work on YouTube, it must have been a real kick to see Obsession on the big screen with a crowd.
Oh, absolutely. All that hard work and the time that you pour into a film when you're in the middle of creating it, it feels really great to finally see people react to it. ‘Oh, that moment actually worked, I didn't know if that moment was gonna work or people would picked up on that small dialogue thing there.’ It really all pays off. Sometimes moments don't pay off and you're like, ‘Ah, nobody understood it.’
Did you do test screenings with the film?
Yeah, we did. Small test screenings, very discreet. People had the note of Bear not wanting to fix it and that kind of encouraged me to go even further the opposite way. People wanted him to go on a journey to fix it and it made me go, no, I'm going to make him go on a journey to make this work. Sometimes people don't necessarily know what they want, they know that there's a problem but they don't know how to fix it. I understood what the problem was and then I kind of flipped how to fix it.
Do you see yourself continuing to produce YouTube videos going forward or do you think that stage is behind you now and you're going to focus on features?
There's a couple of short film ideas in my phone that I'm dying to make. It would be so cool to just make a short and throw it up, but oh man, it's so tough because I have no time. I mean, I'm about to hop right into Texas Chainsaw and write that as soon as I have free time, and I'm editing anything but Ghosts right now. It's just me, I'm the editor, so I have 12-hour days of editing until it's done, just refining and perfecting that film. You know, every film is my baby, so I want to nurture it as much as possible. It becomes really hard to do the YouTube thing now, but me and Cooper still want keep the sketches going for as long as we can, it just probably won't be as often as people are used to.
Jason Blum has come on board Obsession as an Executive Producer, and you’re working with him on Anything But Ghosts as well. What has his involvement brought to the project?
Well, it's brought his fan base, the Blumhouse fan base, which is very loyal. You can see the uptick in comments of people that love what Blumhouse does. He wasn't really involved in the making of the film, but he's very involved in marketing and selling the film and making sure people go and watch it, which is very, very helpful for me. He's a huge part of my next film, in this case he is involved in the making of it, and he's a great collaborator. Again, really letting me do my thing, and the notes that he's had have been very short and sweet and helpful. I’ve enjoyed my collaboration with him a lot.
You mentioned The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I'm sure you can't say a great deal about your approach to that story at this stage, but what are your thoughts on taking on such an iconic property, which will bring a whole new level of attention and pressure with it?
For my own personal wellbeing, I have to push all of that away. I know that the real pressure is that this franchise is so dear to so many people, but that’s not just with Texas Chainsaw, it’s with every film. Back when I was just doing YouTube stuff, I could fly. Whatever I wanted to do, I would do. If it was bad, then whatever, maybe I wouldn’t even post it or maybe I would post it and see what people thought, but it didn’t really matter. It was so low-stakes, so I was taking risks left and right. The thing is, the risks that I was taking were the things that made me the best. I need to hold onto that and not let the pressure get to me, focusing on what made my voice different and what people appreciated about my work in the first place.
Obsession is in UK cinemas now.