The 10 Best Horror Movies of the Year … So Far. Plus: The New Scary Movie Royalty, and ‘Obsession,’ With Curry Barker!

I'm Sean Fennessey and this is the Big Picture A Conversation Show about the horror. Today on the show, Chris Ryan joins me to talk about the huge wave of horror movies that have hit already in 2026. Here in this episode, I will be joined by Curry Barker, the writer-director of Session, a delightful new horror film about a boy cursed by his own infatuation with a girl to say more would spoil too much about this incredibly fun and intense parable about what is and is not love. Curry got his start like so many recent horror directors on YouTube and he has been tabbed for some big things, so stick around for that chat. But first, we're talking horror with CR, right after this. Okay bud, we do this like twice a year. How do you feel right now? It's halfway to Halloween, man. This is where we have to start training. This is where we start getting into shape for the spooky season. What are you more into? Jiu-Jitsu, Taekwondo, Tai-Bo? Extreme fasting and searching for demons. Just for fear of not wanting to vomit all over everything. There's been a lot of vomiting in your films recently. For sure. There's some intense vomiting in Lee Cronin's The Mummy, not yet discussed on this show. A lot of puking and obsession. Lots of vomitus behaviors. You ever been to a vomitorium? No. I've seen an ancient one in the city of Split in Croatia where the rich and powerful would gorge themselves and then stick a peacock feather down their throat. Is that a fact? And did you participate in that ancient ritual? That's gross. And Croatians, God love them, they eat heavy stuff. It's like bready pastas, like really, really, really, like a lot of gnocchi. These episodes, they often lead to you and I pitching horror movies. I think the vomitorium shot and set in Split, Croatia. There's something there. A couple on their honeymoon. That's really nice. Puking on each other. You make Croatia sound so exotic. Croatia was amazing in 2014. Don't know what it's up to now. I can't say. Has it descended into fascism? I just don't know whether it's become more well-trodden with American tourists. When we were there, the funny thing was you were starting to see this. I'm sure you've experienced this in your international travels with your lovely wife, but you realize that there are several couples having the exact same trip as you. And so it's like, ah, you also are going to the blue pool or whatever it is. They made a film about that. It's called Speak No Evil. And then things would terribly arise. Speaking of which? Speaking of which? Speaking of which? Speaking of which, let's talk about how horror is going, how things are feeling. We were talking last week and I kicked an idea to you that it feels like for the young and exciting new voices in this space, there are two tracks that people can go down now. Right now it feels like you can either start making stuff and putting it on YouTube and start putting it on social media and hoping that you build a following and then hoping you can get the attention of the movie making world. Horror, you can use a slightly more traditional though, not that traditional approach of making independently financed horror features and eventually hoping to kind of build your way up to getting distribution on a platform like Shutter and then using that experience on Shutter to then vault into the major studio. Yes. Does that sound right roughly? I would imagine that's, I can't think of a third way right now. And you have your small horror focused labels like XYZ or RLJE or Breaking Glass, you'll see them at the front of a lot of horror movies. But the YouTube thing is pretty interesting because I wouldn't go as far as to say you skipped the line, but it does feel like some of these YouTube creators who become horror filmmakers go from nothing to a tour very quickly. 100%. They kind of arrive like, if you want me, it's my vision rather than, hey, I finally got this big break, but I'm going to have to play the game with Blumhouse or whoever, whatever studio I'm working with. There's something exciting about that. I had the Philippo brothers on for Talk To Me and then they had Bring Her Back last year. I think Curry Barker's in his mid-20s. I mean, some of these folks are incredibly young that are getting an opportunity. I think a big benefit to this genre is just that these films are just not that expensive to make. I mentioned Lee Cronin's The Mummy. It's Cronin's third film. It's his biggest film. It's still reportedly only costs like 22 to $25 million. And he gets a tremendous amount of scale out of that modest budget and the movie's made a bunch of money. And so it just seems like you can go to the front of the line, to the top of the heap in a really short period of time. I'm sure for somebody like Lee, it doesn't feel like a short period of time because he's been working hard for a long time. Curry having this movie distributed by Focus that was bought out of Tiff where he got a huge reception for the film in his mid-20s after five years on YouTube is extraordinary. It's just fascinating that it's been able to happen that quickly. And he was making Sketch Comedy and also we talked, I think in 24 when we did this, we might have talked about Milk and Cereal. We definitely mentioned it, yeah. I think the YouTube short, but even though it's an hour that popped for him, it's 800 And if you watch Obsession, you'll see some familiar faces or one familiar face in Milk and Cereal. Cooper Tomlinson, who's a sketch comedy partner and appears in a lot of his stuff and works with him a lot, is in Obsession. Yeah. I think there's something genuinely really exciting about it. And you know what it reminds me of? This is probably overstating things a little bit, but that wave of crime movie directors coming out of Sundance in the 90s where it was like fast, cheap and out of control was the energy that a lot of those movies had. And some people went on to become Tarantino and some people went on to become not that, but it does feel like we're in the middle of a little bit of a wave. Do you do much scouting? Do you send your guys out there to watch some young lefties? Only one of us has an army. That's what I'll say. If only I had more people who were doing some advanced scouting for me. I do the kind of cheat of googling best horror YouTube every once in a while. What surprises me about it, I think this is a pretty common experience on YouTube, is you'll come across something and it will have like a million and a half views in two days. It's a very, very, very passionate audience. And I think with Iron Lung and Shelby Oaks, like two YouTube creators who ported over to features, you can see that in some ways, having that kind of fandom and having that kind of highly connected and activated fandom is almost like having IP. So most people are like, hey, go make a mummy movie because enough people out there are like mummies. I know what those are. I'll go see the movie. But if you're like, hey, from the guy who you've been subscribed to for nine years, it's kind of $11 in their pocket already or 15 bucks in their pocket. I couldn't agree more. I more broadly think this is where all culture is going. I talked about it a little bit on plain English with Derek Thompson a couple of weeks ago. And Markey Plyer's success with Iron Lung is proof positive of this. I mean, my sister introduced me to him 15 years ago and was like, this is my favorite YouTuber and she has been more or less along for the ride with him over that time. And so she is not even if she's not as interested in his content as she was when she was a teenager, she was just in on Iron Lung. She was just going to go see it. She felt like she had to because of the commitment that she had made. And that is also kind of the business that we're in. That's the business that most people, I think, that are just kind of making things for entertainment and enjoyment and insight are doing. And so it's this unusual situation where crowdfunding never felt like it was a sustainable model for unknown people because it was all about this kind of shark tank-esque proof of concept. But if you have a little bit of a foothold on social media or a streaming platform, you can make your thing, get it out in the world, and a lot of people can go see it. There's an interesting thing also I wanted to mention about the aesthetic of YouTube horror that I've seen. And Curry Barker is a little bit different because I feel like he is doing almost social commentary in a lot of his videos and especially in Obsession, but Milk and Cereal. But I was watching one this morning called Avaloop from a director named or a creator named Nick Crowley. And it's basically formatted like a rabbit hole exploration. Like a guy finds a website and keeps going deeper and deeper and deeper into like, what was this website selling? It's like from the 90s. And the further you go, there's a really great twist later on in it. And, you know, I think there is like a degree to which the comment section seems to be almost like treating it like it's a documentary. But there is like this utilization of true crime podcasting, of Internet deep dives, of you won't believe what happens next. Mechanics that I think a lot of YouTubers use like to basically tantalize you to keep coming, like to stay, keep watching. And it's slightly changing the genre a little bit. And I think the Phillipoo Brothers are a really good example of this. And they come out of YouTube and, you know, one of my my favorite part of Bring Her Back is the opening where you're like, you guys, what is this Russian resurrection angel video that you found? I wish the movie had that energy a little bit more. That's that kind of shit. It's the digital ephemera that has been like, quote unquote, found and discovered that I think is like pretty breathtaking when it's done right. We're going to see an incredible test of this later this month with Backrooms, which is Kane Parsons adaptation of his own kind of expanded YouTube series, short film, Creepypasta, and that he compelled, you know, Chew-a-tell Ezgy for and Renata Rines about to come and be involved in it. And I think James Wan and Sean Levy and all these big names are all really interested in this 20 year old kid. Yeah. And it feels like this amazing transitional moment in the genre's history, but also the stuff is pretty good. I mean, I was watching any of his YouTube stuff. I've seen Backrooms now, which I wish I had not now, because I'm, you know, now I feel like I really know the contours of the story, but also felt like to be a part of the experience of being excited about it and to do that thing that you were, you're sort of like along for the ride over time. And if that thing opens to $35 million, like I think it's going to be important to say this wasn't just a good trailer. Like it was also like a region of people who are interested in it. Totally, which I think is quite interesting. He's another person who I think like he flirts with kind of like this maybe more art school side of the YouTube like video art kind of side of it. Like at least some of the stuff I've seen. It's a really exciting space, you know. I too was pretty skeptical of like the idea of like, we just need to raise $2 million to make our like slasher in the woods because it was either like, well, if it doesn't, that's money down the toilet. And if it does, what are the chances that I'm going to be a co-executive producer on your. Yeah, yeah, no, but I think like. Like we talked about it in a violent nature a couple of years ago and like how that was, there was something very standard and also something very form breaking about that movie at the same time. So it's just, it's really about the novelty of the idea, the commitment of the artist and getting like either 5,000 people or two really successful people to really get behind it. And you can't really compare any other movie genre to this. There's not really any other genre because some, you know, bigger movies need more scale and more funding. Smaller movies are harder to market and harder to draw young people into just like a classical chamber piece drama, which you can make at this scale, but it's just harder enticement. So yeah, it does feel like we're at this amazing moment this year. And you've got all of these people, some of whom are at the intersection of comedy. And I find that really interesting this year too. Well, you know, it's interesting that you mention. The basically the farm system of YouTube to the majors, because that was the same thing for comedy, you know, in and around the Comedy Central boom. That's right. Workaholics, you know, like all these people who are making post college humor sketch comedy shows in their apartments. I mean, that's that's sunny in Philadelphia. Like, I mean, like the whitest kids you know, is that Craig? Yeah. So I think that the infrastructure was there. Yeah. You know, mad TV and and Keen peel for Jordan Peele. You know, those are two people that are obviously the biggest crossover figures in that space right now. There's always been a very obvious relationship between comedy and horror because they both are kind of drawing on human behavior and high emotion. Yeah. That's like really convulsive reactive experience that you have when something is really scary or really funny. The idea of gut busting kind of working as a double entendre. Yeah. If people are just interested in and maybe the best example of comedic horror or horror comedy that I've seen in a really long time, it's Widow's Bay. It's the Apple show that I watched the first episode. Yeah. On your on your strong recommendation. It was good. Yeah. I think Matthew Reese is amazing. So that's hero Mariah and Andrew DeYoung and Ty West also directed on it. So it's like it's like I it's really, really good. It's one of my favorite shows of the year. Um, I enjoyed it. Eileen and I are going to stick with it. Um, on the movie tip. I'm curious who you think is really like at the top of the heap. Who are the, who are the 10 or 20 people that are at the, at the vanguard of this? I was, you know, looking at upcoming Blu-ray is in four case, something I do from time to time. And I noticed that, uh, John Carpenter's Vampires is getting a four case steel book as it should, which is of course is deserved because it's a phenomenal movie. Yes. Some fine work from James Woods in the film. Um, but 10 years ago, the idea of we look like we need a $48 edition. Yeah. I need to have Daniel Baldwin in crystal clear bit rate. Yeah. It just seems ridiculous. Um, but there is something the past, the recent past, which felt fun to kind of excavate has shifted from cult to canon. And now I think we're starting to look at this recent era of filmmakers and saying like, okay, well who's going to be the next Carpenter Craven, Toby Hooper, George Romero, you know, the people that we can really claim as like generationally the loudest and strongest voices. I just mentioned Craig and Peel. You know, I think those are the two number one seeds in each conference. And you know, Peel, I think that there was, there used to be an idea that you could start with horror because it was a way to get your movie made. And then you could move into the things you really wanted to do. And now I think Craig is the example of somebody who obviously just really loves this genre and has Resident Evil coming this year, but a space horror movie called the flood apparently shooting already or it sounds like it's, it's in progress. And when you see the Resident Evil trailer, while I wouldn't put it past him for that to only be like the first 10 minutes of the movie that we're seeing, it's that's hard horror. Like that is like, that is like, follow this guy as he descends into hell, aka Raccoon City. And that's, there's no like, there's no pulling punches there. So I really, I love the fact that he is tripling down on like his credibility in the genre right now. I will say for both of those guys too, though, there is something slightly Spielbergian about their approach and the way that they write characters that I think has somehow made them seem both really, really grounded in the genre and also really elevated to the point where a performance in the film king went in Academy Award. Yes. Or you can win the original screenplay Oscar. Like these two guys are now Oscar nominated Oscar winning filmmakers. And we didn't, we don't, we didn't have that really for the previous generation, you know, give or take like De Palma doing Carrie. Like there's some examples over the exorcist with freed kids, some, but those guys were not purely horror filmmakers. So the idea of somebody who's like, my stake is in the ground. This is my home genre. Whenever I'm making a movie, nine times that attendance is going to be one of these kinds of movies. And also I'm critically acclaimed. And also it's one of the 10 biggest movies of the year. Yeah. This is really, really rare air for the genre beyond those two guys. Who else do you think is belongs in the discussion? I think we have to talk about Mike Flanagan because he's probably been the most consistent and prolific horror director working, but is an interesting case where seems to have turned himself entirely over to the Stephen King universe or grand IP excavation. So his slate upcoming is Dark Tower, which I think is going to be a mini series. If I remember correctly, how they hope so. It's hard to do it as one movie as we learn. But more, more notably, he's currently shooting exorcist. I saw Sasha Kaye on set for that. She looks like she's a police detective and there are rumors that it's going to have a little bit more of a like police procedural bent to it. He's doing a mini limited series of Carrie. Not sure that Carrie needed a limited series treatment, but we'll see. And he signed up to do The Mist, which is of amazing Frank Darabont movie from adaptation of a Stephen King novel from years ago. But I'll be very curious to see what he's going to do with that. Then he got the ball rolling with Clayface, which it's worth noting that DC is like what we need is a hard horror title in our portfolio. Very exciting. Did you watch that trailer? Yeah. Yeah. You were into it. Yeah. OK. What'd you think? Yeah, I'm I'm all in and I just wish more, not just superhero stories, but all kinds of IP pivoting into that like pretty dramatic and not just horror. There are other other ways of approaching those stories, but that one in particular felt very natural. And I've said it before, one thing I love about that trailer is no one says Bruce Wayne in the trailer. No one. There's no image of Batman. No, you know, like it's in that world. It's going to be in. It has to be in that world. It's got them, right? It's got them. But I don't really I appreciated that it didn't. It had there was no jangling keys. Few other people that we should probably talk about Oz Perkins has another new film this year, the young people. Now, the success of his neon films has descended since the long legs explosion. But and I found the last film to be a little bit had some moments. So it's monkey pause and then what was the monkey? It was the it was first those long legs. Then it was the monkey. Then it was keeper. Yeah. And keeper had a couple of images that I thought were incredible, but the movie didn't really hang together for me. But those three films were all kind of made in a tight succession over a short period of time, the young people, which I saw just a little bit of a peek at at CinemaCon looked really cool. And I'm hopeful that that's not really good. Do you know, I don't know. OK. But that's from neon later this year. I think it's going to end up becoming like the whole the Halloween movie this year. There are not a lot of Halloween movies coming this year in October. I don't know if you noticed that. I didn't. That's play face is one of the big Halloween movies. This would be the second year in a row where we were really over indexed on April and May and March. When is like, are you think that there's going to be like a violent nature? Because I know violent nature too is coming. But that is happening. I wonder if Shutter is saving like two or three big indie releases for that time. Presumably. I mean, we didn't even talk about, you know, Terrifier and Damien Leone and that whole era and the way that he kind of use that crowdsourcing slash fandom to grow his stuff. And I think Terrifier 4 is probably not at the end of this year, but maybe. Finn Parker. Smile. Those are two of the biggest horror movies of the last 25 years. I'm a little bit more mixed on them. He is remaking possession, which feels like a big risk. Who is the who's playing the female lead in that? Is that it's not Jenna Ortega. Is it no the male lead is Margaret Quali? That's right. Well, yeah, and Callum Turner is the other lead. We'll see. Yeah. We'll see. I I hope it works out. I'm trying to think of the best. Why did you need to remake this? Or a movie that I've seen because, you know, like we I thought Speak No Evil was fine, the James Watkins English doesn't improve on the original. It doesn't improve. And it is also like gives away the entire movie and the trailers. We talked about that a lot. I know that Noah Hawley is talking about directing a remake of the Damien Runa movie. Oh, terrified. Terrified. Yes. Don't think we need to remake that movie. Right. Happens often. Yeah. But I'm trying to think of the best version of it. It's not it's not coming to me right now. I mean, there's like that isn't good. No, the one that's like, wow, you really did it. Nice job. I'm so glad you guys went back to this. No, there's far more examples of remakes that we didn't need. You know, some people like the Platinum Dunes era of the 80s slash or remakes, but some people are sitting across. Yeah, yeah, I'm not as into those movies personally. We mentioned the Philip O's. I mean, Scott Derrickson still a very successful filmmaker. He got to talk about him just because of how commercially viable he is. And and yeah, I the Gorge at least has some fans in Aubrey Plaza. And Black Phone 2 did very well. You know, it wasn't it wasn't my favorite film, but like I thought it was inventive in places. And I'd be curious to see if he continues to go down the horror road or whether or not he wants to go back into blockbuster filmmaking because he was you did the Doctor Strange thing. I respect to him wanting to use horror as like a prism through which he can tell bigger stories like the Gorge and Doctor Strange. I just wish that those movies were just a little bit better. James Wan, I had him lower on this list. If this was actually a power ranking, you could argue he would be up there with Craig or Impial just because of the he's the water diviner. You know, like, I mean, he's had more success than anybody. And the atomic monster merger or whatever or joint partnership with Blumhouse. I think changes Blumhouse and Wan has obviously got his eye out for people like King Parsons and probably could turn around and make the most. Hotly anticipated horror movie of the year anytime he wants. Yeah, I mean, he was the EP and, you know, I'm sure had a plenty to say about the Conjuring Last Rights, which was like a $500 million movie last year. So in terms of just like pure industry, cloud and power, he's incredible. But when he deans to direct a horror movie, they're usually really good. That's what I'm saying. So I, yeah, I look, I don't know. I guess there's been a long term time rumor that he's making a creature from the Black Lagoon movie. I don't know if that's actually going to happen. I hope it does be interested to see. But yeah, he's got his name on a bunch of movies. There's a new and Sidious movie this year. Other Mommy comes from an atomic monster in Blumhouse. The Revenge of La Llorona, like there's a whole bunch of movies. I don't know. We did you ever hear anything about what happened to Soulmate, which was supposed to be the spin-off of Megan, but after Megan 2.0 flailed at the box office, they basically like shut it down. Were they shooting it? Like, they were like, I think it's done. Oh, wow. We saw a preview of it at CinemaCon in 2025 and it was supposed to come out in January of this year. So I saw like two minutes of footage. Was it like, how did it iterate on Megan? Well, it was very similar to the film Companion, where it was about a robot companion girl, but it had an even more, I would say, violent bent and it seemed less comic than companion was. But that movie is now off the schedule. I'm waiting for the announcement that like it's just been sold to Netflix or something, but I'm quite curious. Yeah, I had a couple of other people here at Watkins. We mentioned James Watkins, who did some really decent like B movies leading up to the Speak No Evil remake, but Eden Lake and Blackout's daughter and then is directing Clayface and it seems like they let him make a horror movie. So I'm excited about that. I think he's a really good, not Blackout's daughter, the woman in black. Blackout's daughter was Oz. I think he's a really good craftsperson. You've got Julia Ducarno here. She'd also mentioned Coralie Farja, the twin French queen. Yeah, body horror baddies. Yeah, I was not as high on Alpha. I don't know if you saw Julia Ducarno's new film, which is not so much horror as it is. It's kind of a body psychosis drama that is also a parable about AIDS, which you know, you don't see a lot of stories about AIDS in the 2020s. And there was something interesting about trying to explore that, but the movie was not nearly as successful. It has a very dour tone and didn't have the mania that I think was so exciting about raw into tan. But I really look forward to seeing what she does next. Brandon Cronenberg. He's got a space horror movie that he's apparently working on called Dragons. No kidding. Which is about alien DNA becoming a recreational drug for people. And so people are out hunting aliens in space to like keep snorting that stuff, which is a good idea for a movie. Honestly, just like horror movies are going to live forever. Yeah, there's so much stuff out there. What if you smoked space dragons? That'd be fucking good, right? Why has anybody done that yet? I do think it's notable that Brandon and Craig are doing space horror. And my event horizon homies are sticking their head up above the parapet with no eyes. Conversation is not about Mortal Kombat, but James Wan is a producer on the Mortal Kombat movies. And Paul W. Sanderson directed the original Mortal Kombat film. And Mortal Kombat is kind of loosely related to horror. I bring up Paul W. Sanderson because of Event Horizon. Well, this is the funny thing. So like, you know, when we were talking about Star Wars the other day, I was very conscious of the fact that we're obviously speaking from a certain like generational like spot. Like we're like, OK, that's the first three. Then the prequels like I had a harder time with than you did because you're a little bit younger. And I think that those were like a big deal. And now you're introducing all these these movies to your to your child. But like, I wonder whether we're going to feel a similar generational shift in what is quote unquote cool and what is being influenced or referenced in horror. So when we were doing alien predator stuff when Badlands came out, if you go online, there's a lot of alien versus predator defenders. I mean, they may be an insane asylum, but they are out there. They have access to the Internet logged into a public library console. But it's funny how like different. So that actually explains the existence of CR heads. You just you just figured it out. You say. We're an insane. Insight. Yeah. They've logged on in Internet cafe. You only say they have access to his Reddit. They have an interpoll red alert on them. No. I wonder what horror movies and what like micro genres of horror like space horror will become a little bit more invoked as as Curry Barker and Cain Parsons become like the kind of alphas of the genre. You know what I mean? What was the wave in the 2000s? I mean, it's notable to me. Bro, it's Marcus Nisbell core. It's like. Yeah. Well, I mean, one thing that I think is helpful here is we'll talk about undertone shortly, but in Tuison who directed undertone was hired to direct the reboot of the paranormal activity franchise. And that is an era of movies, not just found footage, but that kind of running gun low budget style that, you know, Jason Blum, I think really kind of built his business on that all the people who saw those movies are all 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, thinking about their first horror features. And I'm sure they're feeling the influence of those movies the same way that we felt the influence of Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street. And those are guys. Yeah. What other names you want to mention? I would just mention for people who are looking further down the like the rung, like there's a family of people in the Catskills, the Adams family, I guess. Not put too fine a point on it, who make a bunch of like indie, like kind of almost duplass style. Like it's just us making it like me and my family members and our friends making these movies. And there's a couple of really cool titles, Hellbender and Where the Devil Roams. So you can look around for those and. Did you watch The Mother of Flies yet? That's their new film. No, is it good? Very disgusting. Disgusting. Yes. Very effective. Okay. It's amazing how extreme this family, mother, daughter and father are willing to go in their movies. We'd recommend it. It's on shutter right now. And another person who I think is up and coming that it's worth mentioning, Brandon Christensen, has two movies that technically came out in 2025, although I consider Bodycam more of a 26 movie. And the other one was Night of the Reaper. He's really good. He's made, he's pretty prolific. His super host came out in like 2021, but I could see him, I could see him graduating to an even bigger budget project soon. Yeah. Bodycam was interesting. It was only 75 minutes and it felt like it was stretched a little bit longer. It was basically like a really good episode of Tales from the Crypt or something. You know what? Yes. I wanted to say Tales from the Crypt, which is also extremely formative, I assume for you, and definitely for me, is now available on shutter. The first season of that show, which aired on HBO when we were growing up, which I watched religiously and lied to my parents and said I wasn't watching it. It's basically our Twilight Zone. Yes, exactly. It was the closest we got and it was kind of a horror spin on Twilight Zone, inspired by EC Comics and spooky stuff produced by Robert Smeckis. And it's just a blast. The show was a really fun time. You can feel the, one thing I'll say about a lot of the YouTube creators is you can sometimes feel the uncertainty about runtime and about how much story do I have here and where do I want to take it. I wouldn't necessarily say that about obsession, but I could see a 50-minute version of obsession. Yeah. If there's a lot of obsession, and to me, there are not many. I really, really liked it. It is a touch long and there is something really interesting about these young filmmakers who are used to working in brief expanding. Yeah. And you mentioned Milk and Cereal was an hour and a minute. Yeah, it's like 101. And this movie is more of a movie, right? It's like, I feel like it's like 100 minutes, 105 minutes. Yeah, but there is, we'll talk about obsession in a second, but there is a very clear point where I'm like, there needs to be like a third thing happening in this movie. Yes. Instead of just like this three-hander or four-hander that it basically is. Other than that, I think that's pretty much it for my power rankings. I want to see a Lee Janiac movie. She hasn't done something since the Fear Street trilogy, and then she executive produced Fear Street Prom Night. But I'm sure we're missing people. Maybe one of these days we should do a horror mail bag, or maybe we could do that with Halloween. And if people have recommendations or people that they love. Sierra, that's a great idea. A horror mail bag in October. I love it. Especially if we don't get a lot of big releases in October. Yeah, you know, I'm just going to look at my October really quickly. Just consult my board here. Well, digger. Yeah, I mean, could have elements of horror. Well, if it turns out to be bad, it will be horrifying. Other Mommy is a big one, obviously, and Clayface. And I think those are the only two wide release horror movies that are on the calendar for October, which is quite strange. Resident Evil, of course, comes out in late September. Okay, let's talk about some movies. A bunch of stuff has come out. We've talked about some of it here on the show over the last few months, but not everything. Obsession is the headliner. I'm so interested to see if this movie takes off, because it seems like anybody who's gotten a chance to see it has really clicked with it. As I said, it's from Curry Barker, written and directed at stars Michael Johnston, Indy Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, little cameo from Andy Richter. Yeah, fun cameo. The story is as follows after breaking the mysterious quote, one wish willow to win his crush's heart. A hopeless romantic finds himself getting exactly what he asked for, but soon discovers that some desires come at a dark and sinister price. What do you think? Really, really effective. How much spoilery stuff do you want to do here? Let's try to give some, but not too much. There's a lot in the trailer. If you haven't seen the trailer for this film, but it is, it goes to much deeper extremes in terms of its style than I expected. And I was impressed with its willingness to be very, very dark. I think I was expecting a little bit more comedy in this movie, and it's not very funny. It creates like a real sense of discomfort. It has a little bit of that barbarian feeling of not just in terms of how the story wrongfuts you a little bit, but more specifically like this is so nuts that I'm laughing very hard. But I might have been the only person in the theater doing that. I think that there were a couple of chuckles. First and foremost, I'll just say Indy Navarrette kind of like, I don't think she makes the movie, but she is clearly the person who jumps out. Not as a final girl, although kind of she's just responsible for essentially the terror of the movie and the heart of the movie, which is rare in a horror movie that the sort of villain, quote unquote, is also the tragic hero. So her performance, we've had a couple of really great performances by actresses over the last couple of years. I was thinking about Naomi Scott in Smile 2, but she's incredibly physical, like the face acting, the terror in her eyes as she is doing a lot of these scenes, while she is also all of her body is compliant, her eyes are like, this is terrible. It's just like a really fantastic performance, I thought. She's really amazing. I think Barker does a couple of really smart things with the performance. First of all, in the first 20 minutes of the movie, she's kind of your classic manic pixie dream girl, where she's like, young guy has a best friend who's a hot girl, and they've got great chemistry, but she probably views him as in the friend zone. And she's like, she can hang and she can drink and she's a good time and they work together and there's something very common, relatable cliche about the way that the movie sets up. And Navarate's performance through that stuff just feels very in line with what you've come to expect. You know who she reminded me of? It's Mia Sarah and Ferris Bealer's Day Off. Great. And then as soon as the one wish willow snaps and the movie goes into high gear, the way that Barker shoots her is fascinating. This is going to seem like a bit of a stretch, but I just watched this morning Tony Zhu and Taylor Ramos who do every frame of painting, put up a new video analyzing Yasujirou Ozu's use of color in movies. Hang with me for a second here. And go. And Tony in the video talks about how as Ozu moved from black and white to color, how it took him a little while to figure out how to choose the tone of the colors that he was using, and he shifts to using a different cinematographer after a couple of color features, and the use of shadow becomes really, really important to him, even more so than when he's making black and white films. And in several of those films, those Ozu films, you can see the characters' faces covered in shadow. So you can see maybe their eyes, but barely even that. And Barker does this over and over again with Navarate, who is a very pretty young girl who has like a real brightness to her. And as soon as you cloud that, and the movie keeps clouding it, it keeps hiding her. And when it hides her, it makes her very, very scary. There's a couple of moments in the movie where you feel like anything can happen, that she could do anything violent and intense and crazy, because there's a couple of times where she does something either in the frame or out of the frame, and we don't see it, and we return to a home where she's done something. And there's something very gross about a lot of the things that she's doing, like she has no control over her orifices, over her bodily function. And she's trapped. Yeah, she is trapped inside of her own body and is not in control of her own movements and yeah. And she and the actress is really, really game for doing all of this disgusting behavior in a way that you just don't often see a figure like that in a movie like this. And so I was really, really impressed by her and impressed by the energy that the movie has because she's willing to put herself in those situations. And then the other thing is just like, it's just a smart movie about a certain kind of incelly guy, you know, a certain kind of guy who's like, I deserve to have love with a hot girl and I'll do what I have to do to make it so. And then as soon as you do that, you realize like at what cost. I liked the fact that this movie was relatively free of explanation and or origin story and or original wound for any of the characters. So these are essentially like four 20-somethings working at a music store. It seems like maybe not, you know, like far a little further away from like Portland, but like somewhere like they're they're just like banging around this town where the highlight of their week is going to a trivia night at a bar and going to karaoke afterwards when they're wasted. And they all have designs on getting out of town. But that's really it as far as their like character biographies. And I thought even in the places where I was, I think what that allows you to do is watch this movie and read it from a bunch of different angles. So you could see it as a rebuke of the incels kind of film. You could see it as a guy who makes an impulsive decision and now has to deal with the consequences. And you could also see it as a little bit of a there is a thread in there that if you wanted to pull at it is like the creepy pasta deep dive. Like what is this trinket that he breaks and what are the rules of it and who made it and who else has experienced like disaster from breaking from breaking the same thing. The other thing that it does that is really smart that I think modernizes it as a monkey's paw story is everything in the world is very Gen Z laconic when he calls the helpline to figure out what is going on with the one which will have a great moment. The guy who picks up the phone and has the conversation with him is different than you would have found in a super intense James Wan movie. And to me it felt like that was a shift. Like there was something kind of changing about the genre, watching someone tell one of these stories. And even, you know, I haven't even talked to Curry yet, but just knowing that he got inspired by watching an episode of The Simpsons where their monkey's paw was featured and not reading the 1902 short story is the way that the culture like leaves where I was like what is the next level of what's the next wave of influence that's going to hit people. And it's not going to be I was watching black and white Bella Lagosso movies or I was watching like, you know, Argento movies. It's going to be I watched an episode of The Simpsons that referenced this thing. That moment that you're talking about where he calls the customer service line for the for the Willow trinket is both the funniest and the scariest moment in the movie because it actually gives you a little bit of a peek into what happens to the Indian Avarat character. And it's terrifying, but you're like, it's just enough. And I wonder whether or not the previous budgetary restrictions that Barker's worked under like the $800 milk and cereal kind of world where he's like, I can't now go to a call center in hell wherever this guy is working from. I can't do like a road movie for this guy is trying to find the answers. And so you kind of come up with these creative solutions to your point earlier about like the Sundance crime wave from the 90s when we were growing up. Like man, this is real invention to do that stuff. Laws of gravity. It's amongst friends. It's reservoir dogs. It's like we got five locations. We got five actors make the absolute most out of it. And it can help movies like this a lot. It really can because it pulls you down to make it feel more grounded even though the premise is so fantastical and magical. I think this movie is really cool. And I'm really, I don't know what I was expecting when I was seeing it and expectations play such a big part for me personally with horror movies. And if I hear something is going to be hot, I tend to get disappointed. And if I hear something is not that great, I tend to to overrate it a little bit in my mind. But this was one where it was just right. I felt like I heard just enough about it. I saw one trailer and I went in being blown away by performance and really excited about where a director is going next. And yeah, Barker, you know, it's taken on Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Like this is pretty crazy. It's also like, I want to talk about that, but he's really good at durational horror. So like basically scenes will go on for a bit longer than you would expect them to. A lot of the script or the dialogue is people repeating phrases back and forth to one another with increasing levels of desperation or terror. And that's so that's so YouTube social media. That's so like TikTok gag, like a lot of that stuff. If you look at, is it that's a bad idea? Is the name of his kind of comedy viral video YouTube channel with Cooper. A lot of the gags are oriented around that kind of repeating style, but that repeating style is David Mammet. That repeating style is Preston Sturges. Like it's a skill. It's a tool to use. But it's like, what's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? But then you get into like the third minute of the conversation and you're like, this is now just becoming these two people chanting at each other's or losing their minds. I actually like, I really enjoyed it. I have no idea what he is going to do with Leatherface. And it's interesting because one person we didn't mention as a real person to watch is JT Molnar who did Strange Darling and then wrote The Long Walk. And he's also got a, I don't know if it's competing or complimentary TV project on Texas Chainsaw with Glenn Powell. So I don't know if both things will come to fruition or if we're going to get two Texas Chainsaw IP things soon. But Curry doing it is interesting because there's a couple of set pieces in Obsession. Maybe like three, you know, like action-y scenes. I associate Leatherface with a lot of running and a lot of chasing. So it'll be a little bit of a different flavor from him. Before he does Texas Chainsaw Massacre though, he has another movie coming out next year from Focus called Anything But Ghosts. And the thing that distinguishes that movie, which is about two paranormal investigators who find actual ghosts, is he's starring in it. And he's the star of all of his YouTube films, including Milk and Cereal. And he's not the star of Obsession, which is interesting. And you noted this after you saw it. It was one of the first things that popped in my head when I saw Obsession. I think it would give the movie a different flavor. And I don't know if it would have been better or worse. It would have been just different. And Curry has like a kind of desperation and perhaps, I forgive me for saying, like there is almost levelence to his performances sometimes. He can be a little unnerving. And I think it would be different to watch him interacting with the woman rather than this guy who's like kind of like this basically like garden state type dude who's just like, yeah, Michael Johnson, real beta named Bear. I'm wearing like a sweater and like, yeah, right. Yeah, I agree. The new movie, Anything But Ghosts also features Aaron Paul and Bryce Dallas Howard. So it'll be interesting. Okay, let's talk about Hulkem because I feel like it's actually on the other end of the spectrum, which feels like it is completely informed and influenced by the classics. It's not as influenced by the sense of YouTube change. And so when I was thinking about this episode specifically, and this, you know, the diaspora and the ways in which they part to shutter into YouTube, Damian McCarthy is like the classical shutter filmmaker, Irish director, a real formalist, squeezing everything he can out of atmosphere, like really, really, really dialed in on set design, production design, eerie feelings, back of the frame thing moving in the shadows kind of stuff, but very, very precise and patient. And sometimes too patient with his scares. I agree. I have liked his movies and not loved them. And that is also how I feel about Hulkem. His two previous movies, Cavillad and Oddity are definitely worth checking out. Oddity has one of the great scares of whatever year that was 2024. Always very accomplished, also visually very precise, symmetrical, really has an incredible sense of the frame. Creating it like putting an image in front of you that you can't get out of your mind. That is a skill. Like I really acknowledge it. I often feel like his stories are just a little bit samey and a little bit that there's like an ancient power that may or may not be spooking someone, but actually it's human fallacy. The finality of the characters is actually scarier than the whatever is waiting in the basement. Worth noting that Hulkem, Adam Scott is the star. He plays a dickhead author. I thought of like George R. Martin type thing. A fantasy style writer. Yeah. And it's a cool performance from him because he has not played an asshole in a really. He's a great asshole actor. Yeah. I mean, shout out to Eastbound and Down. The gold card versus black card. Yeah, it's me, your dad. Yeah. I'm your fucking dad. This gets you Jonah's brother's tickets. Yeah, it was a refreshing turn from him. I felt like perhaps what I didn't need from Hulkem is the thing that Obsession wonderfully lacks, which is a original wound trauma story of what this guy is trying to correct in his life. Yes. And then an additional framing device, which I thought was like cool and like, oh, I see like how like the this thing from earlier in the movie is now wound up in this is his writing the end of his trilogy that he's writing. And it's like a fantasy. Like it's basically a fantasy adventure sequence that opens and closes the film. Yeah. So it's about this writer who goes to this Irish hotel, which is a very clearly a haunted hotel because it's a place of great importance to his family and he's spreading the ashes of his parents. So he is kind of haunted by his past and what happened when he was a young boy with his parents, but also seems to have found himself entrenched in some sort of scary plot inside of this hotel. The design of the hotel, as you said, the production design is really, really cool. He gets these really good performances out of an array of Irish actors, including Peter Coonan and David Wilmot. And you know, it's one of those things where like I kept waiting. You mentioned the third missing piece in Obsession, the sort of like the third act elevation. Yeah, this movie has like the right structure, but it never feels like it goes to the next level. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good way of putting it. I mean, in some ways, I feel almost like tortured by this because in Obsession, there was a part of me that wanted there to be more lore. And then Hockham is exactly that where it's like there's a lady in the basement and I don't know why did Robert Shaw from Jaws there. And everything is explained to you in Hockham. The only ambiguity comes with the idea that basically all of it could have been a Silas Ivan trip, but obviously not. I think if it had, you know, you mentioned here that there is a psychedelic quality to it, that it is a folk horror riff in a way and that there's some wicker man going on in here. I think it probably, for me, it might have been more appealing. I don't know if general audiences would have found it as appealing if we had kind of like upended our, created more doubt about what it transpired. I felt like it was a little too tidy by the conclusion of it. But I did really enjoy Adam Scott and I do want folks like Damian McCarthy to get to make movies, come on, movie theater. When I was watching it, I was like, this is a pretty good story. Like I like the who done it aspects of it as much as I liked the horror aspects of it. And in fact, I thought that who done it was maybe even better realized than the horror stuff, you know? I think I agree with you. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Shout out to the friends with the same niche taste as you. You know, ones that will join you in watching a three hour silent film about the cats of Europe, followed by a cheesy superhero blockbuster. State Farm brings that same supportive energy to insurance. There are 19,000 local agents are there to help you choose the coverage you need. So you can spend less time thinking about coverage and more time in front of the big screen. Go online at State Farm.com. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. All right, Sierra, let me tell you about a few that I've seen in the last few months or so. I already mentioned Lee Cronin's The Mummy, which I wrote about in the newsletter a couple weeks ago, which I think is... Lee Cronin's Projections. And Lee Cronin's Projections, yeah. He's taking it over, thankfully. It's been only three weeks and I need some help. And I think it was not a bad horror film, but not a good Mummy movie. He did the previous Evil Dead. He did, which I really liked. That's Rise. Evil Dead Rise, which was that sort of all-in-one apartment kind of zombified family movie. And it's the same energy. It's incredibly gross. It feels very high stakes, high tension. He gets a lot out of a little. It felt a little bit like it was made in the 80s in terms of the way that it portrayed sort of like the Egyptian culture and its relationship to Western culture. I was kind of surprised and I hadn't really seen that too much in the criticism. And that can be a little bit of a hackney criticism, I get it. But I was like, how many times can we just do like Egyptian family puts the zap on a Western family and then they go home and they got to deal with this curse? All right. It's a girl who disappeared and then they're like, we found your daughter. She's a mummy and they're like, great. Bring her back. That's it. That's the movie. Okay. And they bring her back and guess what? She's a mummy. She's a mummy. Bad shit. Bad shit is going to happen. And in that way, it really is ultimately more of an exorcist movie because she is a demonically possessed little girl who is saying disgusting things and creating a vomitorium in her grandmother's home and a lot of nasty stuff happens. I wanted to like it more. The biggest sin is it's two hours and 17 minutes long, which is just completely unnecessary. Okay. It's just unforgettable. But Cronin is talented. You can tell like he's got a real knack for super disgusting stuff happening in movies like that, which I enjoy. And he is not doing Evil Dead Rise. Evil Dead Rise is Sebastian Vanacheck who did the French Spider horror movie. Infested. Infested, which is pretty sick. Not a fan of the experience, but I thought the movie was pretty good. He has some juice is what I'll say. And what I saw at CinemaCon of Evil Dead Burn was exciting. The trailer is awesome. When does that come out? Like this summer? July 24th. And I'll see you there. That's the birthday movie. That will celebrate you and I sharing old fashions, watching demons kill people. Fucking bash brothers almost. But let me tell you a little bit about Exit 8, which I think is yet another film from Neon. Neon released Hocom. They're releasing the Oz Perkins movie later this year. Exit 8 is, I think a pickup for them. It's a Japanese movie by Genki Kawamura. And it is an adaptation of a video game. And it is evidently an adaptation of a video game when you watch the movie. It's about a man who has just gotten off the subway and he's gotten some personal news. His wife is pregnant and he receives this news and he starts walking through the subway. And he finds that he's not able to escape. And he also keeps experiencing these recurring images. He's walking past the same business, man, over and over again. This happened to me on mushrooms in 1995 in Philadelphia. Well, it is a feeling in the first act of the movie of just being lost somewhere. Somewhere anonymous, an anonymous public place that feels labyrinthine and you can't get out. We were just at the opening of the Geffen Galleries at LACMA on Sunday. I don't know if you're aware of this new extension of LACMA, which is really a beautiful new museum space. I am aware, yeah. But it is extremely large and confusing inside. Very easy to lose a five-year-old. It's a brutalist design, right? It is very brutalist design and is very kind of shadowed and darkened. And so the way that you're observing the art is maybe the more the way that it was created when in the 1500s or the 1800s. Really cool museum, but it kind of reminded me of the experience of watching it. Or having a young child also brings getting lost into a new light field. Museums are complicated. Don't touch that. It's something that comes up a lot. You don't want to touch the fourth century sculpture. But this movie creates that similar vibe of just kind of being trapped somewhere that is cavernous and large and repeating. And the movie is mostly successful, but it does have me thinking about the other strain of the future of these kinds of movies because like, Craig is making a video game horror movie. This is a video game horror movie. It was interesting to see people's response to the Resident Evil trailer. Did you get into that with Amanda? Did you just talk about that at all? I haven't spoken about it, no. Because I saw plenty of people responding to, you're not paying enough deference to the mythology and lore of Resident Evil. Which is something I actually am pretty a fan of in the game. It's kind of an interesting running storyline. But I thought Craig's maybe not response to the response, but statement about the movie is supposed to feel like how I feel when I play the video game, not like what the video game is. And obviously taking liberties with people's beloved video games is a complicated thing. The 21st century, but I wonder whether or not directors will start to indulge in that. I think they already have in a lot of ways, indulge in that first person. What does it feel like to play these iconic games rather than like, I'm very deferential towards how like the cut scenes in, God, I'm just forgetting the name of the zombie show that's on HBO. The Last of Us. And I know Noah Hawley is doing Far Cry, I think. There's a bunch of these coming out. It's a really, really good question. I think it's all about whether or not the filmmaker who's in charge of the movie has a vision or not. And a lot of the time a vision can work in opposition to what fans of a game want from a movie. Resident Evil, there have already been eight movies. To me, that should be open terrain. Reinvent it, try something new. The Legend of Zelda, there have been zero movies. If the Legend of Zelda film that is coming out next year doesn't feel like playing the Legend of Zelda in some way. Link isn't in this, by the way. That's going to be a huge disappointment to a lot of people and probably is a mistake. And I don't think they're going to make that mistake. But I think in the case of Mortal Kombat was interesting. The first Mortal Kombat movie, one of my gripes with it is I was like, this doesn't feel like playing Mortal Kombat at all. Mortal Kombat is not a movie with a fascinating external and internal world. It's a movie about a fighting tournament. Yeah, isn't it? It should be all fighting. The first one is like all about getting to the tournament. And it's like Scorpion's origin story. I'm like, ah, that's not, no. Like I want Scorpion and Sub-Zero to be ripping each other's heads off. And the new film is more what the game is. The trailer for the Street Fighter movie is the same thing. And the Street Fighter trailer, I'm like, fucking yeah, 50 Cent is Bellrog. That's what I'm talking about. Is Centinio in the Street Fighter movie? He is. Yeah, he's playing Ken. It was great. I'm very excited about that. So much stunt casting in that movie, but I'm into it. Cody Rhodes is playing Gile. Yeah. So I think the same is true for horror stuff where if you're able to reinvent, I haven't played the game Exodate, so I can't pretend to be an expert on what it's like to play it. But experiencing the movie feels like getting stuck in an RPG where you're like, oh, shit. I thought I was already here. Like I already saw this. I already experienced this. I already inquired with this wizened old man who's holding a staff that's supposed to tell me where to go. Even that experience of playing Zelda in the 1980s. That's the thing is I remember playing Perfect Dark. It wasn't that Perfect Dark is such a cool story. This is basically a espionage action first person shooter that you could play in N64. It was the fact that you would black out and it would be like seven hours later. You know what I mean? Right. And when I was in my early 20s and me and my boys would just stay up until like three in the morning. Who were among those boys? It was Greenwald. Sean Howe. Sean had a triangular apartment on Flatbush Avenue before Barclays was there above a taco place. And we would listen to Wu Tang Clan and play Perfect Dark. It sounds like a wonderful night. Honestly, I wish I could go there right now. Being 24. I'm excited I would recommend. I think you would enjoy it. I think it runs into a similar problem that so much modern horror does, which is like, let's explain the emotional arc of this character with trauma. But for the first 75 minutes, I felt like I was in somebody's extremely brutal nightmare that got increasingly worse over time, blood dripping from the ceilings. There's one moment where there's a giant wall of lockers. And he hears the sound of a screaming baby. And it turns out that there are many, many babies in those lockers. Oh no. That one got me. That one got me really good. Do you find that you're scared of different stuff now? Yeah. I don't mean child endangerment stuff. It's such a cliche with the kid stuff. The kid stuff is bad. But you know what? In The Mummy, I wasn't like, oh my god, don't take that eight-year-old girl. Because I was like, we're in a movie called The Mummy. So with Exit 8, it's different because you don't, this just seems like an ordinary man riding the subway on his way to work. And then terrible things start happening in him. I think it's about the presentation. What about you? I don't know. I haven't been fucked up scared in a while since Speak No Evil. But I found that Speak No Evil spoke to a kind of middle-aged malaise and anxiety about money and travel and friendship. And the way that it exploited a lot of the stuff that I think is probably the way our lives are now is a little bit more on the nose than camp counselors. Yeah. I didn't think that weapons had many scares, classical scares. I think it had about three real scares. And I really liked those scares. But its idea of parents being way too preoccupied with their own bullshit and letting something like this happen in a community, which is really outsized. And if you took a very little approach to understanding the movie, you might be like, this is unrealistic. But this does happen where people, growing people, especially people I find that are in my position, where you waited a long time to have kids and you got really used to your own freedom. And then you're in your late 30s and you're like, yeah, let's have kids. But I only know how to be myself at 38 instead of myself at 28 when you're confronted by new responsibility and you have to change your life. But when you get really ingrained in your behaviors, that terrible things can happen if you don't keep your eye on the ball. I thought that was such a novel idea, but it didn't haunt me the way that watching the Exorcist at 14 haunted me, where I was like, is this really happening? Is the devil real? Because the movie made you feel like that. Yeah. I mean, it's the question of like, what's scarier or what's the scary thing about the first Texas Chainsaw Masker? Is it leather face? It is. Or is it being with your friends somewhere where you're not supposed to be, where you've never been before, and watching the friendships dissolve and break down and get destroyed in that moment? And like, I think it's the, when you have two things working, that's when the movie works. It's like, that's why like, in some ways the weapons gimmick with Alton Aaron Wright getting stabbed by Austin Abrams' needle is like the scariest thing that happens in the movie. Because it's like, it's a very real, real piece of horror. I'm excited for Resident Evil though. I am, I'm pretty pumped. I am as well. What are we going to do? How are we going to celebrate? When does that come out? September 18th. I don't know. I mean, like we're probably pod about back rooms, right? I sure hope so. Yeah. And then we'll, I mean, I definitely want to pod about Resident Evil. Should we do any Resident Evil like, like Twitch stream stuff? Should we play? No, I've been promising. I have two on my PS4. I like downloaded it. You still have your PS4? Yeah. I mean, I, I was- You want to get a 4K camera in your, in your house? Do I want to get a 4K camera in my house? We'll shoot an episode of me and you playing. Just shoot, shoot the breeze. Jack, what can I do? We should do this in the movie theater. No, we should do it in somebody's fucking living room. You want to do it in your living room while like the Queen, the Kool-Aid, the Burritos, the Mountain Dew. No, you should play QV Limx. Here's what we'll do. We'll have Bill Bayehouse. Yeah. Bill Bayehouse, a house. You're going to smoke a menthol cigarette. Yep. I'll smoke all sorts of heaters. We'll take it back. We'll take it back to 2002. Yeah. And we'll do it the way that we used to do it. We're going to make a case of PBR. No, we'll do Edward Forty Hands first and then we'll play Resident Evil for six hours and we'll listen to the entire Wu-Tang Clan discography and we'll smoke a fat blunt right in the middle of it after the completion of the first game. No, we'll play roulette where one of the blunts are dusted. Let me tell you about a couple more movies. Have you considered centering women in horror? Have you thought about this? I tried. Yeah. And the body rejected it? I thought I advocated for several female directors and you blanked me. That's not true. You said take them straight to the vomitorium. I saw two movies this week, both of which I really liked and I really want to strongly recommend to people. One is called Mariyama, which is a very popular movie. I strongly recommend to people. One is called Mariyama, which is directed by a Toa Stafford, which is about a young Maori woman who travels to Victorian England in 1860 to go look for her sister. And she's gotten a letter from a kindly man who knows her sister and says you have to come and visit her and she travels and because it's 1859, it takes 90 days to get there and she shows up and she is not so sweet. Is this guy not so kindly? No. Well, the guy who wrote her the letter is not there and there's another fellow who owns the house. And it turns out the guy who wrote her the letter worked for the guy who owns the house. And this fellow who owns the house, no bueno. He's up to no good. And he is really interested in this young woman's culture. The actress's name is Ariana Osborne and he speaks Maori and he understands the history and some of the cultural traditions, but also has a very nefarious... It's very clear in the first 20 minutes where like, this is not... This isn't going to be okay. But Osborne's performance is amazing. The movie has extraordinary style for such a small budget. It's a real chamber piece that takes place primarily in this house, lots of shadow, most sequences taking place at night, but beautifully lit. That's sort of like dark and blue light that you get in nighttime scenarios. I think this is XYZ, the company that you mentioned earlier who is putting this out. I had not heard of Toa Stappard and was really, really impressed by this movie. Awesome. We'll check it out. The other one is sort of horror, sort of just like pure revenge exploitation thriller with a little bit of a social bent. It's called Is God, It Is. It's based on the Obi-Wanning play by a woman named Alicia Harris. Have you seen the trailer for this movie? I haven't. Okay. It comes out today, May 15th in movie theaters. It's from Amazon, which is so fascinating that they put their money behind it. They're putting it in theaters. They're putting it in theaters. I don't know how many theaters. It stars two young actresses, Carrie Young and Mallory Johnson as twin sisters from the Deep South who as young kids, along with their mother, were burned alive by their father. All three of them survived, but they are left with brutal scars. And these two sisters have this kind of psychic connection where they are finishing each other's sentences and are always referring to each other as twin and the dialogue that Harris writes and the tone and the pacing, like the speed that she writes the dialogue reminds me a lot, similarly, of some of those 90s movies that we're talking about where sort of like fast talking characters who are really in sync with each other, actors who clearly had a lot of time to figure out their tone. And then the twin sisters are summoned to see their mother who they call God. And she tells them on her deathbed, you must find your father who did this to you and track him down. And their father is played by Sterling Cape Brown. Oh, shit. The mother is played by Vivi Gay Fox. And it becomes a kind of Kill Bill revenge road movie where they go find different pieces of the puzzle. Dude, it's fucking good. Extremely violent, very much like from a very singular voice. Like even though the movie is inspired by a lot of 70s stuff and 90s stuff that you and I both really like, clearly only this writer could have written this movie this way. And for a first time feature, I was pretty darn impressed. Yeah. I can't, I can't wait to check that out. And it has like some violence and some gore that I think is very much in keeping with a lot of the movies that we're talking about here. And also this idea of like, what is beauty? You know, like what is desire, especially when, you know, one of the actresses faces, I think it's Mallory Johnson's face is really, really severely scarred for the entire film. So I encourage people to check that one out. Okay. So you watched Undertone. I watched Undertone. I watched Dolly, which is another one you got here. Let's talk about Dolly and Undertone. Okay. Two sides of the same coin, of the same coin. One movie that is extremely violent, shows everything, makes you sit in the agony and the pain. That's Dolly, which comes from Rod Blackhurst. And then Undertone, which shows nothing, gives you nothing is largely without incident, but does have atmosphere. Yeah. And also I would say Undertone comes from the sensibility that we were discussing earlier with some of the YouTube deep dive, weight, there's more podcasting style of horror where this one, oh, well, you talk about whichever one you want first. Well, I mean, they're both interesting to me in that they both don't totally work, but they both have things to recommend about them. Let's talk about Undertone. Okay. I saw Undertone, I think the right way. And it was the same way that I saw Skin and Morin years ago. Just knowing nothing. Knowing nothing at home on a laptop. Okay. And a blink got passed to me because it had been making the rounds at the horror festivals. And a film like that scene with AirPods in, in a darkened room, which is exactly how I watched Skin and Morin some years ago. And I was like, this is pretty effective. You know, it's kind of dumb. Like I wish more happened, but that sense of dread that the movie is trying to stoke, I think actually works better. Independent like like, I think there's lots of different ways to watch this stuff. I don't think that only in a movie theater with a bunch of other people. In fact, sometimes those situations can be ruined if people aren't taking the movie in the right spirit. Yeah. But even Undertone, if people, if there were a lot of people in the room, like screaming and throwing their popcorn everywhere, like when something was scary, I actually don't know that it was that exact kind. There's a different kind of scare that the movie is in pursuit of. Yeah. That is intimate and odd. And whereas Dolly is like a little bit more of a ripper, like there's just, it reminded me a little bit more of a violent nature in some ways. You know, it's like got a really, really great central malevolent villainous figure. And Fabian Trudyce is a really good like horror actress. She is very good. She was in Southbound a bunch of years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She's very good. I just felt like both movies, you know, are like 80 minutes and feel like two hours. And that's, you know, that's an issue. Yeah. I just watched another movie last night that was had an interesting premise and a really good Jessica Roth performance called affection that goes to some really wild places where a woman wakes up in the middle of the road and she's clearly been in some sort of accident and she can't remember who she is and she can't remember why she's there. And she's picked up on the side of the road by a man who says that he's her husband and that they have a daughter. They go back to the house and something is not right and she can't really, it reminded me a little bit of seconds, the John Frankenheimer movie with Rock Hudson. And she's trying to figure out why she doesn't feel like she's in the right place and she feels very angry and she's having kind of like these like physical convulsions that she can't control. And the first 40 minutes of the movie are excellent and you really, really want to know where it's going. And then at the 50 minute mark, it tells you where it's going. It tells you what it is, tells you what the story is and you're like, oh, that's it. I don't love that. And then you got to watch the movie for another 45 minutes. So it's one of those things where when you take a chance on a smaller movie like this, you got to try to get your head around it. The last one that I think Faces of Death is kind of fascinating. Yeah, Faces of Death. I mean, that's probably the best horror movie I've seen this year. So tell me what you thought of it. I just thought it was an exploration of our own fascination with this stuff in some ways. It's like very much a meta commentary on like guys like you and me chasing a feeling that we have to go to more and more extreme measures to get. But I will say I don't ever go to snuff. Like that's not something that I'm interested in. I want produced, you know. Yeah, you want production value and story. Yeah. If I'm going to see a vomitorium, I want it to be beautifully rendered. But the idea of somebody out there moderating that content that we get in some ways and Such a good idea. Urban legends and whether or not things are spoof or viral or deep fakes or whatever. And I just thought, I mean, I'm such a huge fan of that director. So it's like, I thought I thought it was awesome. And in some ways, not unlike the way that Craig has talked about Resident Evil is this is supposed to make you feel like I felt playing the game. I felt like this was almost the filmmakers talking about how they felt coming across Faces of Death as kids or teens or whatever. Yeah, I think that's right on. And I really responded to that too. Goldhabers, he's got some juice. I hope you guys get a chance to do something bigger after this. I almost wonder whether or not with the marketing of this movie, they should have Like pushed the like the movie Nobody Wants You to See, you know, like they're scared to Show you this, you know, kind of like, you know, it got a limited release. It was weird here. It will vary a lot of theaters were only playing at 10 p.m. And I don't, you know, like, I don't know. I know. It felt like it could have just played as a straight up traditional slash despite the, you know, media commentary that is a component of the movie. I think you would enjoy it just this Barbie for trying to survive in this deranged environment. But I really liked it. And I think also once it hits shutter, a lot of people are going to watch it. We already talked about 20 years later, The Bone Temple, which I think is probably my favorite of these movies. Yeah, I guess 28 years later, Bone Temple would be it might be my favorite movie of the year so far. So it kind of, I guess I consider it horror. It's terrifying. I had a ball of primate. Yeah. I had a ball of Dubu with Cent help, but I want to tell you quickly about Dubu. Do you know about this? I have heard about this. Is this kind of skin and merengue? Very. Yeah. It's like just CCTV. It's like security cam footage, right? Correct. Right. It's about a young woman who takes what appears to be a normal babysitting job. And she learns that the girl who's in her care has a lot of emotional struggles and also that she can't leave the house. And another movie that is like 75 minutes feels a little bit long, but when it's scary, it's fucking scary. Really? And then it gets really silly at times too. So it's kind of trying to strike this tonal balance that we're talking about throughout this episode of like, there's a comedy component. There's a discomfort. There's a little bit of, we didn't mention kind of life after too many cooks and the Christmas Yule Log movies, those Casper Kelly movies, those movies too, I feel like are kind of a soft influence on what's been happening in the last five years. Casper Kelly had a movie at Sundance this year called Buddy that I haven't seen yet that I'm looking forward to. But Dubu Dubu was kind of interesting. You had a few others here that you might want to talk to. Yeah. I just thought I would mention cold storage. It's like kind of a almost like an 80s feeling sci-fi, mildly horror, but more gross out creature features, joe curries and that. That's, it was really fun. I enjoyed that movie. You reminded me a little of the remake of the blob. Yeah. Yeah. And we talked about body cam and just because we mentioned Marcus Nisbel and Platinum Dunes, like I thought Do Not Enter was like. What is that? I haven't seen that. It's about a group of like social media like stunt adventurers, like people who try to break into, you know, abandoned buildings, taking on a abandoned casino in Atlantic City where there was like Bugsy Malone hit a bunch of money. So they're like looking for treasure and it's haunted and it has mole people running around it. Wow. So. Mole people. Yeah. But they're really getting a lot of mileage right now out of influencers and YouTube vloggers going into places that they shouldn't. Yeah. Like horror movies in general. But do you want to start getting into that? Like going to be invited to spaces? I think I don't, I don't think I, I don't think I should do that. No. Because one thing that I'm enjoying doing on this show is like I went to this thing and I want to tell you about it. Oh, like an event? Yeah. Yeah. But do you want to go to an abandoned casino and do battle with mole people? Think you may for a good episode. What do you think? Try, try to imagine a man to being like, we went to this casino. It was amazing. The groanies were great. Could be good. The social content would be good, right, Jack? Yeah. It would be amazing. Anything coming out this year that you want to tell me about? Maybe get the pump primed? Is anything we haven't mentioned yet? I sadly am going to miss the first screening that was made available to me of Leviticus, which was a queer conversion therapy horror movie that played at Sundance that apparently is quite good. And they showed the trailer to that at a, at CinemaCon. It might even be available widely that trailer. I'm really looking forward to that Aussie film. So yeah, Backrooms, Evil Dead Burn, Resident Evil, Other Mommy, Clayface, the young people, we've talked about all these. Teenage, Sex and Death at Camp My Asthma. Great trailer. Jane Shulman runs a new movie. Yeah, I really like the trailer and that is playing at Cannes. I'm very excited to see it at Cannes. I think it's in certain regard. I don't think it's in competition, maybe the main competition, but I'm very pumped about that. You know, I don't know if Whalefall is horror. Is that Austin Abrams is in that? He is. As if a guy gets swallowed by a whale. That's it. You got it. That's it. We saw five minutes of it in Vegas. Absolutely riveting. Is he in the whale the whole five minutes or is he thinking about other stuff? And like, here's what happens. A spoiler alert for one minute's long sequence of Whalefall. There's a guy who's deep sea scuba diving and he spots a giant squid. The squid swims by him and he's terrified. He's like, holy shit, I do not want to be zapped by that squid. And then right behind the squid is a giant whale. I eat some. And the whale eats the squid. Oh, and the guy or just the squid? Well, the guy in the moment where the squid is sucked up, there's that kind of like wave that pulls towards the whale. And he's being drawn into it. And it's this incredible moment of survival where he's inching closer and closer to the gullet of the whale. And then they cut it off. And I was like, show me this movie immediately. It's based on a novel by a guy who just won the Pulitzer Prize yesterday, but not for Whalefall. He won it for something. Daniel Krause. Okay. Just sharing that news with you. Do you think I should buy a giant house in Hancock Park with all my Austin Abrams stock money? Yeah, that's where we're going to play Resident Evil. He's going to come over and play with us. He's right next to Bill. Sony, if you're listening, buy us a house. Invite Austin Abrams to the house. We're going to play at Resident Evil with him. I will have Riser come over and play the W on an old CDR. Yes. Chris has several copies of Ghost Face's Fish Scale on CD. And he wants, he's burned several for you. And will you be offering weed? No. You would never. I don't have to. I mean, it's legal in California. You can pick it up anywhere you want. What do you could have some in the space? Have some next to Homestate, you know? Wow. I don't know how to know about that. You want to cater it with Homestate? Oh yeah. That'd be good. That'd be nice. Yeah. How do you feel about Homestate being the number one choice for toddler birthday parties for parents to eat? I'm good with it. I guess what would the alternative be? Like hot wings? Like, you know, it sounds bad. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Any other thoughts about horror? You feeling good about the genre? Yeah, I am. I am. I think I think it's like a pretty exciting time. And I think that the opening conversation that we had really speaks to like some interesting places it could go. Sierra, thanks as always. Let's go now to my conversation with Curry Barker. Very happy to have Curry Barker here for the first time. You're such a young man. You make me feel very old. Are people telling you that on this tour? Yeah, kind of. Okay. Yeah. How does that make you feel? Like I am excited that I used to, I mean, even when I was like 21, I was like, oh, I'm getting older. I got to, you know, there's always that clock ticking, right? Or you just want to accomplish thing like as fast as, like, like Timothy Chalamet, like, like I was, I remember being jealous of that kid when he was a little younger and just being like, oh, he's acting. He's like, you're already getting Oscars and you have that same pursuit of greatness that he talked about. That's, that's inside you. I hope so. Tell me a little bit about where you come from. There's not a lot of filmmakers that come out of Alabama. I'm curious, like what it was like growing up for you. Uh, I mean, I grew up in a small town where if you want to act and film, you pretty much have to make it yourself. That's the only really opportunity that you have. And then there's local plays. I did a lot of local theater and stuff like that. But like, I kind of learned pretty early on that if I wanted to act and film, I had to create it. And it was actually just means to an end because I've been, I've been wanting to be an actor since I was like four years old. That's what my mom tells me. What spurred that? Do you remember, did you see something? Did you watch a movie or go to a performance? Harry Potter, probably. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Like I was so obsessed with Harry Potter growing up and it's kind of, um, like being transported to another world that couldn't possibly exist. And wanting so bad to, I became such a big pretender. I was such a big pretender as a kid, sword fights, you know, with my brother outside in the woods. We had huge imaginations and we would just let them, action figures were a big thing, right? Like, um, Lego sets, building those and like playing and, and it felt really real when you're a kid, you know, you really play the scenes out. Yeah. Did you, how did you get a camera in your hand? Was it phones? Was it a video camera? Like what happened? First camera was like this little red, like, I guess it was called a DSLR. Yeah. Sure. Where you, where it's got like the electric lens that comes out. Mm-hmm. Um, how did, how did you get that in your hands? My dad. Okay. Yeah. And did he say you should try to make something? Yes. My dad was so encouraging. Like there was a really, as a matter of fact, I give a lot of credit to my parents because I feel like if, in a world where they were discouraging, I might have listened to them. Yeah. You know, I might have been like, all right, I guess they're right. This is silly, but they were always being like, do it again, do it again. And like, wow, this is so good. And like, even if it sucked, like they really were encouraging, you know. How old were you when they put the DSLR in your hands? It was probably like 10. And so was the idea that since you'd wanted to be an actor and that you knew you'd have to make things for yourself, was it sort of like, this will vault you out of Alabama? Like, was there any kind of mentality around that? Or was it just expressing yourself in a way that you felt happy about? I mean, in a small town, there's always that we got to get out of this town, mentality that a lot of people, like people will DM you and say, you did it, you got out of here. It's like, it's some sort of jail or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, I mean, I loved Mobile, but yeah, I was, I, I inspired to be what I had seen on the big screen and what I wanted to. But I never, it wasn't until later that I realized I've been directing for a while. You know, like, you learn about what is a director? What do they even do? What does that mean? Like, are they in charge of like the camera angles? You know what I mean? These are the questions you have as a little kid. But you don't, but I didn't realize that like I was doing that and like being in charge of this production and kind of telling people what to do. Do you remember the first time you saw a movie where you could kind of feel the director making choices or that there had been like something different about one movie from other movies? That's a good question. Yeah, I'm sure like, like that bug of like, this is good versus this is bad had to start hitting me at some age. Right, right. Because I think your opinion is the most important thing as a director. What do you mean by that? Well, like, it's not about I have this strong vision for something me, me, me. Like, it's more about like, I know what I like and I know what I think is really good. I know what I want this movie to be. And then that kind of opens you up to other people, by the way, right? Like, anyone could have an idea. The sound guy could have an idea. It's not about that idea came from the sound guy. So no, it's about, is it a good idea or is it a bad idea? Some ideas are good and some ideas are bad or but what is a good idea and like learning what your taste is? When you were making things at a young age, were you making with friends? Were you doing it by yourself? Friends, yeah, yeah. And did you have that mentality back then too? Like, were you guys collaborating or did you feel like I'm in charge of this thing? I mean, I felt like I was running it, but only because I was the one who like cared the most. Like I was the one that was going to edit it. I was the one that was coming up with like most of the ideas. So it was almost like, it felt like mine in that way, but like it was still a collaboration. Sure. Yeah. How much of this was about trying to actually materialize an acting career and how much of it became what I actually want to do is be a filmmaker? I'm curious about that as you stand right now too. Yeah, yeah. Like, I mean, it's a good question. If it means anything, I moved out here to into a college that was a filmmaking school, but it was, I was in the acting program. So I was really focused on the acting, but I'd already done a couple films and like little short films that I really enjoyed. And I was already so into editing, like so it was something that I knew I enjoyed quite a bit, but it was, yeah, it was kind of all means to an end. Like I moved out here to be an actor. And then, but then I kept making films and I don't know, man, it took off like as in like in my head, like it took my passion for it took off, you know. So at the top of this episode, my colleague Chris and I talked about this undeniable YouTube transitional moment, especially for horror. But like something has been happening for the last five or six years. You are a signal example of that happening. Can you just talk to me a little bit about when you first started posting to YouTube, like what your intention was when you first started doing it? Was it for a strategy that you had? Yeah, it's interesting to be like a face of this thing, right? When I first started, I was actually in Alabama still. So we had a channel called Popcorn Culture. It was me, Cameron, Noah, Riley, my little brother Riley. And just we would make these funny videos and it got to the point where like in drama class in high school, we would like our teacher would like show the videos for the class sometimes. Like as part of the class, which was really, yeah, interesting. So I mean, the YouTube thing was kind of, I never like wanted to be a YouTuber because I just was so obsessed with film. But I wanted, I already knew the platform and the potential of like spreading the awareness. And then when I moved out here, I met Cooper and then we started, that's a bad idea. Which fun fact is popcorn culture. Like we totally just like just changed the name and subscribers from that. And changed the name. Happens in podcasting too for the record. Oh wow, I'm sure. But so we took, we made that's a bad idea and we just, it wasn't like, oh, eventually we're gonna trick everybody and we're gonna make movies. It wasn't, it was just, let's do a funny channel where we just do sketches. And eventually we'll do like a web series that has a little bit more story to it. And every now and then we'll make a horror short film or we'll make a short film that's a drama or something that will have the platform to throw on. There was no, I mean, I was still auditioning. I had an agent and I was like out here and I was trying so hard to break in. And we were doing film festivals and stuff. So I was still like, I had, it felt very separate for me. It was the YouTube world where I started to get friends that were like in this world too. And then there was like the world where I have my little agent and I'm trying to do these auditions. And so it did feel like separate worlds and they like design it that way. Well, did you, so I'm interested in how you design the actual work for YouTube because are you thinking about kind of what is successful, what tends to work historically? The length of pieces, the tone that you're pursuing versus, hey, here's like kind of a real for what a film might be if I were ever to pursue it. Because I look back at some of the, that's a bad idea stuff, which is really just good YouTube sketch comedy. And you can see a little bit of obsession in it, but it's like a pretty far leap to especially some of the most intense moments of the film. So I'm curious how you thought about making the YouTube videos. I mean, I'm not like a YouTube strategist. Like as a matter of fact, some people kind of treat me like I am. They'll be like, oh, what's your expertise? And I'm like, I don't know. Like I'm not the guy. Like I, I, um, You just made like successful stuff that people like to watch. So then they immediately think that you are that, right? Yeah, but I didn't like check out the algorithm. Like Cooper got into that a little bit more. And of course, like there's a point in the YouTube world, which really started off as TikTok, by the way, like we really took off on TikTok. And in that world, you're chasing the views. You're like, oh my God, this one got half a million views. That's so crazy. Then it becomes this one got a million and like you get that rush and you're just chasing the next like, how can we get 10 million views? Can we get, and you know, you hit those milestones. So you, in that journey, you figure out timing. You figure out the tricks of like, uh, how to get someone's attention in the first three seconds because you learn that like the first three seconds are the most important. And if, if they swipe away, you've lost them, right? So you learn a little bit of that, but we always were like, no, screw that. Like I was actually so disappointed to even ever do vertical. Cause I was like, I'll never do vertical. I'm always going to do horizontal. And the, and the goal for us was always to make key and peel quality sketches that felt like they, they could be part of a movie or felt like they could be part of a TV show. So they had that like high quality production value. We never wanted to shoot it on our phones. Like we had rules for ourselves for the very early on, we were like, we're doing something higher quality. Why? Like in an effort to eventually be doing something like in a feature film format? I guess so. I guess so. Okay. But like, um, yeah, but more, we wanted people to, to be like, oh, this is not, internet content on the internet. You know, I guess, so yeah, I guess you're onto something there. Well, it's interesting cause it is though, like I watched the YouTube videos, which are very well made and very well edited, but they are YouTube sketch comedy videos. And they're not, they're definitely in a tradition of key and peel and SNL and the long history of sketch comedy on television, but they do have like a certain kind of editing vibe. Totally. Totally. And I don't want to say that obsession like transcends it, but it evolves it a lot. So like maybe you can tell me a little bit about milk and cereal and like, cause you mentioned that you were thinking about trying a horror film on those same channels. And there is some, there's obviously some creative connective tissue between that film and the, and the sketch comedy videos, but like it is also different. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's true. There's, there's a certain editing that you kind of do when you're doing those, like you get, you get these instincts of like, okay, we've lost, like, which is really helpful in film because you're constantly thinking like, you've lost me, but you have to think like that all the time. And so, but, but when I made milk and cereal, that's actually a funny story of how that came about. I was, I was going through this world of trying to get my acting reel together. And so I had made a bunch of little scenes from what they, from what I was trying to trick people that I've, look at me, I've been in all these different movies, but they weren't movies. There were little scenes I had written that look like they could possibly be a part of an entire film. So I had like a cowboy scene at like me being a bully at school, high school scene. And like at the bottom, it said like the name of it, like it was a movie with a new logo and I like, I made a new logo for each film. And I did this, I wrote this one where I play a serial killer and I'm like sitting on the chair and I'm like talking to her and it's really disturbing. It's basically the scene in the movie. But I caught, for some reason I called it milk and cereal and I spelled cereal like that. And it just, that's all it was. It was just a scene that I'd written for my acting reel. And then I kept thinking like, whoa, what an interesting concept, a guy that's using YouTube to get famous for being a serial killer, like, whoa, and how messed up that could be. So I just started writing it and went down and what if it's a prank show and what if the whole movie is a prank, right? And it just became like, oh my God, how has this not been done? So I just started writing that and then Cooper was out of town. I was like, as soon as you get back, we're shooting this movie. We're going to get some friends together and we're going to shoot this. So, but yeah, I mean, that kind of allowed it to be that YouTube choppy type of editing because it's, it kind of is that style, you know? It makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense for the plot. It's so interesting though that you then, did you get the like, come and do general meetings with us? What is milk and cereal? Like, did that open up doors in the way that you, did you even think it would? The chair did. Like, I hadn't released milk and cereal yet, but the chair was a short film that I did that like really put me on the map as like, oh, this is a director. And that's how I found my manager, Aaron. Like, Aaron had been watching our internet stuff for a while and then was already interested and I was like, and then I sent him the chair and I was like, what about this? And then he was like, oh, shit, you know? And so that's when I started getting, once I had a real manager, when I, that's when my life kind of changed. Honestly, like I started getting generals with, and I was just like, oh my God, I'm meeting with platinum dude or like whatever, right? Like, I'm meeting with these companies and then you kind of, and this was like, this is kind of my whole journey, right? Like, that was when I started getting that manager was the start of something because he is the one that found James Harris, or James Harris, I guess, reached out to my manager, Aaron, and was like, hey, I have this like program where I take like new upcoming filmmakers and give them, you know, a very, very small budget to do something. And I'd love to do a feature version of the chair. And I was like, oh my gosh, like this is amazing. But can we do, I have this idea, it's called obsession. Can we do that instead? Let me pitch it to you. So I pitched him obsession and he liked it enough to let me go and he's like, all right, go write it, we'll see. And so I was just start working on the script and just working and working really like, I remember the drive back then, it's like, oh, you know, like this is my one chance. So like that all happened because I got the manager and it's just like, That's so funny that you frame it that way too, because it indicates that it's not always just about how creative you are, even the work that you've done up until that point. It's about often meeting a person who can put you in a room. Probably that allows you to break down a door, right? Yeah, probably. I mean, I know for sure that that was the moment for me that I started to feel like I was in the industry when you're meeting people in the industry. And my friends kind of knew it around me too. And then Cooper got a manager and then Cooper also started going on generals and you're like, whoa, we're kind of like, is this happening? Is really breaking in. That's so exciting. Yeah. So would you think of yourself or did you and Cooper think of yourselves as like hardcore horror fans or scholars or like, was it your favorite genre? It was mine. It was. Tell me about like your interest in it and your history with it. I watched, even as a little kid, I watched goosebumps. It's like all I was allowed to watch, right? Because my mom was super, like she's the most chill mom ever, but for some reason, she was really strict about horror. But I think it was mostly because she was nervous that I was going to get scared and have to sleep in her room or something, which did happen. Like I'd get nervous, scared and. Do you think that stoked your interest in it though, that she was keeping it from you? Yeah. Like it's like kind of that forbidden fruit. And it was like that for a while. And I would, I remember like sneaking downstairs one night and the adults were watching the ring and I like snuck behind the couch and watched a little bit of it. And I was terrified. I was like regretting it, because then I couldn't tell my mom that I snuck down. So I was scared, you know. Yeah. You couldn't tell you were scared that you saw the ring, right? Because I wasn't supposed to be seeing the ring. Which is also weirdly kind of the plot of the movie, interestingly. Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. You shouldn't watch it. But the first movie, like she allowed me to watch, it was like a certain Halloween, I think I was like 10 or 11. And I was like, Mom, come on, it's Halloween. Can I pick out one horror movie to watch? And I picked out Texas Chainsaw, the 2003. Okay. And that was like. The snisble version? Is he the one who did that one? It was, I don't know. I know it was. It's Platinum Dunes, right? Yeah. It's the one where, like have you seen them all? I don't know. You know the one where this girl just gets popped in the head in the first like 10 minutes. Which by the way, not okay for a 10 year old. Like I was. Pretty intense. It was intense. This is what makes you fall in love with this stuff though. I have the same experience with horror. I'm obsessed with horror movies. And it's because I saw them very young and they get in your bloodstream. Yeah, right. Right. Because now you're like, I need to feel that again. That like disturbance that I felt at 10. How do I go back to that feeling? Which is so rare to experience. Totally. Yeah. But like the science of it apparently is like that there's something called being like safe, scared, which is where like you're scared, but you're in the safety of your own home. And there's an adrenaline that you get from it, but you know that you're never going to be in actual danger. So it's like. I mean, I totally buy into that. I found with obsession that you did do this. And I'm like a pretty tough critic about horror movies. And there are, there's a lot of really impressive, formal stuff. A lot of it is in the way that you clearly how you directed Indy and how you filmed her. And I just, I think I want to hear a little bit about coming up with the story and then that character and then getting that performance out of her. Because the movie really lives and dies on that, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And I knew that from the start. Well, it's funny because the chair was kind of an inspiration to this movie in a way. I did this thing. I don't know if you've seen the chair. I have. Well, the girl, I don't even, Julie, I think her name is, I don't even know her name or the character's name. But the girl in that like does this thing where she like snaps into different emotions and stuff like that. And I already kind of had this idea for a while in my notes of like an obsession movie about a boy and a girl that were just both obsessed with each other. And it didn't really go anywhere because there's no conflict. Like their story is rooted in some sort of conflict. It's like, oh, they live happily after after. So, but, but like I was intrigued by this idea of like, what if there was a movie where the scary girl from the chair, that was the whole thing. Like what if there was a movie where I could really lean into that. And so once I got the wish fulfillment of it, I was like, oh my God, a girl who's like trapped in her, she's trapped in her own body and that's the movie. Like that's awesome. And I can really play with that. So I was trying to play to my strong suits of like what I had just done with the chair. Is what was your question? No, just the, and then how you're able to get a performance like that out of that character because, you know, if you overplay that, it's a little bit, it could seem silly. Yeah, exactly. How do you create this idea of like a person who is simultaneously tortured and torturing. Right. And you mentioned in the chair, like that snap of emotions, like the way that her character elevates very quickly to a very unsafe place where you feel like something really terrible could happen to bear that she doesn't even really understand is happening. I don't, it was a very unique sensation watching the movie. I felt like it was a real invention on your part. Thanks man. Yeah, I'm like really critical. And I think that I, like, I know I was kind of saying this earlier, but like, I think the most important thing you can do as filmmakers have an opinion. And when you watch a movie, you should be very critical, but not for the sake of like, that was, that was a bad movie. You needed to be able to dissect it. Like, why was this bad? What didn't work for you? What could you have done better? Constantly thinking about, and so, you know, when I see those moments in horror movies that make me like roll my eyes or make me like, like, that was cheesy or whatever, I just try not to do that stuff. Right. Like, so I have, It's easier said than done. I know. Totally. Totally. But like, and exactly, that's, I strive to do it. You can only try to do what you set out to do. But for me, like, the thing that kind of makes me roll my eyes is like, the demon aspect of, or like, there's like, not having a motive for, like, why? Like, why are you doing it? You know? So if she, you know, this movie could have easily just been like, she becomes possessed and she goes on a killing spree because everyone's a threat, get to take away my bear, right? And, and that would just be like, okay, but why? Like, really? So instead, I wanted to lean into she will do anything to keep bear. And if nothing goes wrong, she won't do anything. Right. Like, she's, she, there's a world where this worked out for bear, and he just had a super clinging girlfriend, right? But it didn't work out that way. Well, so I'm wondering if you think about the movie in this way, because it was an easy way to read it too, that it is not just like a judgment of bear, but a judgment of an entire male mentality around what you think happiness is, what you think a healthy relationship is, people's inability to communicate what they really want, which is a real challenge for, I think, a lot of guys. Was it important for you for the movie to have that kind of social weight, or is that just the natural byproduct of a cool idea you had about a girl who's becoming possessed? I mean, it's all, it's all things I get excited about after I've had the idea, like seeing the potential of how deep and, and like, how many questions you can make someone ask after you have this idea, you're like, oh my God, and then you could lean into this, and you could lean into that. But it's not like I, it wasn't important to me from the get. What was important to me is to be relatable in some sort of aspect of like, the movies I look up to, like, for example, in Midsummer, so relatable when you see Danny, I think her name is, and them in the boyfriend, like, fighting, and you're like, oh my God, this feels so like real, you know? That to me was like, I wanted that to feel real, and I wanted, but yeah, I mean, mostly for, for Indy Never Ready, it was kind of always saying, like, okay, so there's magic in this world, fine, whatever, but the magic is that it, is just that it worked. So let's forget that it's magic, and right now, I just want you to play crazy, jealous girlfriend. I don't want you to play possessed demon. So with that comes a lot of, like, whininess and like, desperation, and like, that's what we were always striving for, instead of like this, I'm a robot, I'm gonna kill you, I'm a demon, I'm angry all the time. I know that's such a, it's such a great insight because, I'm sorry to explain to you what you're probably thinking, but it's okay, you know, one of the reasons why I think a lot of men are afraid to get into relationships is because they fear having that dynamic where, all right, even if you've like, convinced a person to be with you, who you want to be with, if things don't go right, then you get this like, shrewish, difficult series of emotional conversations that you don't want to have to deal with, but then also the idea that her character is so vulnerable and trapped and stuck, because of this guy's own insecurities is this fascinating push, pull and the dynamic. The other thing too is, you know, I read that you saw the Simpsons episode and that you had the kind of Monkey's Paw idea for the movie in part inspired by that, which is so interesting to me as somebody who's a little older than you, because like, the Monkey's Paw is a 115 year old short story. Yeah. There've been a lot of movies that have explored aspects of that story before. Yeah. I couldn't think of any really that had it in this relationship dynamic. Yeah. I mean, even if there was, they never tapped into like the potential of like, how messed up and how far you could go with like, forcing someone to love you. That's such a, like that concept was untapped. Really. I know people say like, this is, this feels like something that's been done before, but like, not really. I was trying to think of a movie. I mean, the idea, I think, of someone sitting in their car and wishing someone would love them is, as you said, incredibly relatable. That's something that a lot of people experience, especially, you know, when you're like in high school or college, but the dark downside is really impressive. Also, I'm curious what it was like to just have more money and, you know, working with a bigger crew. And even though it was still an indie, I felt like you really leveled up stylistically in ways that I really appreciated. Yeah. I mean, like it hasn't been, people don't really know or realize how cheap this movie actually was. Like, under a million is, is like an understatement, really, you know? I feel like we had nothing, but at the same time, well, it was, it was so amazing. Like, let me, let me start by saying, holy shit, did I have that more tools than I've ever had like that? And it was life changing for me. And I mean, even just the, the, the aspect of having a schedule, Monday through Friday, 12 hour days, every day of the week, and then for 20 days, and just showing up and doing your job. And everyone knows that we're making a movie. I've never had that before. So I've got nothing to complain about as far as, for me, being life changing, right? But, but there were some challenges because it's almost like there's some things, like every time I make a movie, I realize that you can do things, but you just have to do them the illegal way, or you have to do them the wrong way. Like there's so many, like even just for, for this last movie I shot, even just shooting a scene in the car going down the road. Now we have police escorts, we're on this big trailer. If it was me back in the day, I would just be in the car shooting, right? So there's these hula hoops you have to jump through with more money. So sometimes more money hurts you in aspects that I'm learning. Yeah, maybe when you come back in the future, we can talk about how things have changed from when you were making movies for less than a million dollars. Cause it seems like that's not going to be the case much longer. Oh, that'll be great. A follow up of like, yeah, yeah. Now, whether it's better or not, you know, I'm sure many, I'm sure making more money will be better, but also the constraints of working inside of systems. Like this is, you know, this was a true indie and then it got acquired out of a festival. What was that experience like? I mean, dude, we, we didn't know where this movie was going to end up. We really like, we're on set, we're making this thing and there's no guarantee of anything. There's, and you're trying as, as the director and as like the person that everyone looks at, you're trying to convince everyone, this is going to be huge. And this is like, Indy, this is going to be big for you. Like just listen to me, right? Or Michael, like whatever, like you've got to, you know, and people did, like everyone showed up because of, of that kind of mentality. And Taylor Clemens, my DP really helped rally his team, right? The camera team and like this, we're onto something here, right? But there was no guarantee. I mean, we kind of thought, once, once I was in the editing bay for a while, I was like, this movie sucks. I was like, this, which I do with every one of my films, I think they suck. And then I go through phases where I, but even just getting into TIFF was a huge deal for us. Like we went to dinner, we celebrated, we're in the Toronto International Film Festival, this is huge. And the news just kept getting better. We were at the, we're in the Midnight Madness section. We've got the Friday slot, I think it was. You know, we're on the biggest screen or whatever. And it just became like, this is not only is this at TIFF, but like they're advocating for this movie. It's like they're almost advertising it. And it was like, what, you know, same slot that the substance had, which won a bunch of Oscars. So it just became no way. You know what I mean? And then that night, you know, finally made it to the night, had my, a stylist for the first time, I'm getting like a very expensive watch that is not mine that I'm wearing, you know. Yeah. And like, felt surreal and you watch it. But like, everybody's been building up that the Midnight Madness audience is the best audience in the world. And so when you told that, it's like, well, great. So then they're just a bunch of, like then what does that mean for me? They would have liked anything. Yeah, right. So, yes, I knew that like it performed well in the theater. The reactions were great. But like I just said, I was kind of like, I had no idea of like, I had no frame of reference of like, was that a good thing? Or was that just like, whatever? And so it did feel good to watch the screening, but still nothing. Then the next morning, I wake up and I have like, missed calls from my agent, my manager text messages. I'm like, what's going on? And I finally get on the phone with somebody and they're like bidding war neon, a 24 focus. I'm like, no, like, I mean, my life was changing before my eyes. It was one of those things you read about. And you're like, like the Flipper brothers and you're like, in your like, I can't believe this is happening. You know. And it just, it was, and then you go to like, the, this just happened. I know, like this is like, it's like, four or five. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just happened. So, and I've shot a movie since then. Right. I mean, I was going to ask you about that next, actually. Before I ask you about that, you're starring in the next movie. Yeah. And I was wondering if there was a moment when you were thinking about starring in obsession or if that ever came up, because we were talking, Chris, Chris and we're talking about your acting style and the presence that you have. And if obsession might have been, what, how would have been different? Yeah, totally. If you thought about doing that, they would have let me. It was a conversation where James Harris, who was the producer, he said, if I wanted to play bear, I could. But at the time I had done milk and cereal warnings in the chair. Two movies that I was in and one movie that I wasn't. And I felt like my best work was the chair. And I was kind of like, man, it felt really good to like, relax and not try to like, put on so many hats. And this felt like a really big opportunity for me as a director for the first, and I wrote it. Like, this was my baby. Like, I wanted what was best for the project more than anybody. And so it's not like I felt like I couldn't do it. As a matter of fact, I may even admit that when I wrote bear, I kind of wrote them in my voice of like, I could totally play this character. But I didn't want to. Like at the end of the day, I was like, no, this is my opportunity to show the world that I'm a director. I think it was a smart choice. Thank you. Yeah. I think you got a good performance out of Michael, obviously. He's great. He's so good. But it kind of shifts the dynamic of like, kind of was it even just to expect from you, from somebody like me too, where I'm not sure if there's ever been a horror or tour cast himself in films. Exactly. That's why I think I was thinking about my, my heroes, like the people I look up to. And it's like all of my favorite directors and filmmakers I look up to, they don't star in their movies. But like Jordan Peele could be in one of those movies. Totally. So good. But so then when you're making this new movie, how do you think about what you've learned from making the first one, but then still being able to give a good performance and make the movie make sense? Well, the thing is like Obsession was like the Curry Barker movie, right? Like it was, it was my thing and it was my baby. Anything but Ghost is a film idea that me and Cooper had for a long time. That's a buddy comedy where we were always supposed to star in it. So it was one of those things where it was like, no, no, no, this is the movie where we, where we put on the, those, we are Cooper and Curry, like the people on YouTube, like we are those two and we were ghost hunters and everything goes horribly wrong. So it was like, I have to, I have to play this character. And there was a time where even when things started getting really real, I didn't tell anybody this because I knew that the moment I like put it out there, it might become bigger and bigger. I was scared, right? But there was a time where I was like, maybe Will Poulter could play, like play my part or someone that's like awesome could play me and then Cooper can still play Cooper's part and whatever. But like maybe we bring in someone like Will Poulter, that's funny. But no, I was like, screw that, I'm going to do this. And it's one of my favorite things I ever did. It, he's not, he's very different than like the internet that I play. I mean, milk and cereal, who got to see me play a more kind of serious role than on YouTube, I play like really silly, right? This was like a kind of in between, okay, kind of an awkward guy, but also kind of an asshole in the way of like, there's just a, there's like, it's like he doesn't compute that he's being so selfish that, and it was so fun to play that because there's an innocence to his selfishness that was really fun to like play with. Like he says these words that are so rude, but he says them in a way that he's like, right? Like everyone doesn't understand that. Dude, you realize what you just said and how like messed up that is. So it was really fun to play that. And I didn't want to give that away. And I think, I don't think it hurt the movie at all to, but it was a challenge. I'm not going to say it wasn't a challenge. Yeah. Crazy challenge. You think you'll keep acting in your films? Yeah. Yeah. But not forcefully, never forcefully, like I'm not going to force myself in the Texas Chainsaw or write myself apart and write like, but then again, me and Cooper wrote that movie together as kind of, it just, it feels different when you're like, no, I'm going to play, you know. Right. In the voice of your partnership. Yeah, exactly. I have to ask you about Texas Chainsaw. When you came in, you seemed a little concerned about how you've been communicating. It's a big burden to be taking on something like this. We were talking about how you, this is three consecutive originals that you've made. And now this is something, horror has this long tradition of remakes, reboots, re-imaginings. Yeah, totally. What can you tell me about it? I mean, I haven't, here's the thing. I guess the reason I'm kind of saying I'm going to start keeping my mouth shut is because I haven't even started writing this thing. Like I haven't even, I've got a bunch of ideas in my phone, really excited about it. It's, here's how I know I'm excited is because anytime I have a bunch of ideas all the time, like that's just what a filmmaker does. They have a bunch of ideas, but you know when an idea has kind of taken over, like, oh, I might have an idea about this haunted this or might have an idea about a killer, this, right? But then when you have that one idea that's like, oh my God, you keep going back to that note section and adding things, that's what's happening to me right now with Texas Chainsaw. So like, I know that I'm so excited about this. It's such a challenging text to reboot though. Like I've watched everyone, like you said, I'm interested in them, but very few non-Toby Hooper movies click for me in this stream. Like they're really, I love two as well. And two is actually weirdly very in your tone of like blending horror and comedy in a very like outsized way that is a lot of fun. But this is a hard world. Because the first movie is, it's not just that it's so iconic, but that it is doing something so singular. So I don't know, that doesn't psych you out at all, huh? Well, I mean, it is now because of the world of reading the comments and like putting yourself out there and then people kind of, people will just get personal with you. They'll be like, you have a punchable face. Like what the, that doesn't even have anything to do with the mood. Yeah. Like, you've been online for a while though. I know, but I'm not used to, like most of the time it's either, look, you don't, you like my stuff or you don't like my stuff. And it's kind of like whatever. But now I'm touching something that's very dear to someone, and I'm kind of like the target. Yeah. Like there's a target on me and you're going to have to put a flag jacket on and try to find a way to ignore it. Because I don't think you can really consume all that when you're doing something like this. I really can't. I feel excited about it. Yeah. Yeah. And to me, I watch those movies and see there's really only one or two of the, I can't, I can't, I'm like, I'm been scarred now. But like there's, there's, there's a lot of material out there, but only a little bit that's like worth being explored. And then the rest of it's not really canon. I mean, even the name Wyatt, like the name Sawyer is not even like a consistent. Like the 2003, they changed it to like, I think Wyatt's or the Wyatt family or something. I mean, I'm going to use Sawyer. That's, that's going to be, that's easy, right? But like, but it's just, there's not really a consistent canon with Texas Chainsaw. It's kind of like an open book. That's very true. We did an episode of this show, I think I want to say back in 2022, when there was a Netflix remake or a reimagining of the movie. And we were kind of like trying to piece together if there's any coherent lore. And one of the things that Chris and I were saying in this episode was one of the great things about obsession is you could have spent a lot of time on lore, exploring the character's trauma, gone back and kind of like, psychologize all this stuff. And you dispense with all of that and it makes the movie so much stronger to not get hung up on that. So I'll just encourage you, please keep doing that. Well, I think the key is like to live in a world where that lore feels like it exists. That's the key because it doesn't have to be explained by a person. No, no. The key is to have like the one wish will is should feel like there's so much story behind it, but never go into it. Yes. And that way you feel like a world that's lived in instead of living in a world that just is very empty and like the characters don't feel lived in. And so it's about, it's about not over explaining, oh, like this friend group clearly has been together for a while. One has an opinion about this person, this person, but never being like, I've got an opinion about you. Totally. Don't lose that. That's very insightful. And I think about that all the time when watching a movie and I hear character dig into five consecutive lines of dialogue that explains the entire premise of the movie. Do you see me just roll my eyes? I know what makes me roll my eyes and I try. I find it's that it's filmmakers or studios or whoever is working on the film that is like the audience isn't smart enough and the audience is smart enough. That's the thing. And that's what YouTube taught me. Like the comments, like the chair, all these things, like I would always throw in these little things and be like, nobody's going to notice. And they always notice. And it kind of unlocks your brain of like, people aren't just smart, they're really smart. And that allowed me to always treat my audience like, and you know what? It also allows me to like not care. Like, oh, well, what if half of the people don't get it? I don't care. You know what I mean? I almost don't care if half the people don't get it because the person next to them that does get it will might explain it to them. And then it just becomes better. Right? It's a very healthy mindset you have. Thank you. Kari, we end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing they've seen. Also, people often say when they start making movies, it's harder for them to watch movies. Have you found that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, so, well, I try really hard to allow myself to sit back and watch it for a story, but I'm always just studying the cinematography, the acting, the, like the coverage, even the music. So, of course, it's harder to accept it as a story and not as like a technical piece of what becomes art, right? So, have you seen anything recently that has taken you away and not gotten you focused on fixating on those things? Yes. I watched, well, I mean, weapons was kind of a long time ago, but I loved that movie. It's amazing. Yeah. And Aunt Gladys is great and just unsettling and kind of like everything I'm fighting for, like Aunt Gladys. I was like, dang, that's awesome. You know what I mean? I was kind of like, yeah. And me and Zach are friends, I wouldn't say. I mean, we've only ever talked on the phone. We've never met in person, but he's awesome. Like Resident Evil looks nuts. I know. We're really excited. We were talking about it in this episode too. And you guys have something in common, right? Obviously, like your backgrounds, that kind of tone, where like you think that these movies would be a little bit funnier based on your backgrounds. And yet, there's something really funny about how severe they are. Only like the real ones really understand. I really love Zach's movies and have had them on a couple times. But yeah, work in that tradition. That's a good one to go in. Yeah. I mean, there's this like fine line between the comedy I do online and the comedy that I allow myself to put in these types of movies. And the difference is like when I'm doing comedy online, it's a three minute video. So like the stakes and the danger for these characters don't matter because maybe they are going to jail, but like you're not going to see that because the video is over. Right? Right? But like when you're making a movie, the consequences should feel real and the danger should feel real. And the moment that you do something that feels like that's not true anymore, you've lost me at least as an audience member. Right? So be as funny as you want and have as many jokes as you want, but never at the expense of like losing the consequences or the danger of the world. Right? Or like if it's two ghost hunters that are conning people, don't be so silly that like that you'd have to be dumb not to see that. You know what I mean? Then you're like, oh, that's so silly. Like they would have known that that wasn't real. You know what I mean? It's a great insight. Keep credibility in mind at all times when you're watching something. Curry, congrats. Thanks for doing the show. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Thanks to Curry. Thanks to CR. Thanks to Jack Sanders for his production work on this episode. Thanks to Luke Scavanoff for his support. Next week we'll be drafting again. CR will be there. What year are we doing? 1976. 1976. We'll see you then.