The film that paved the way for Obsession was director Curry Barker’s Milk & Serial, a found footage project with an $800 production budget that Barker uploaded to YouTube in 2024.

Written & directed by Curry Barker and produced by Cooper Tomlinson, Milk & Serial follows a well-known social media comedy team (played by Barker and Tomlinson) whose lives are thrown into a tailspin following a birthday prank intended for their channel.

The hour-long movie has been viewed over 3 million times on YouTube to date, and the viral success of the self distributed horror movie – and other YouTube horror shorts like Barker’s The Chair – paved the way for Barker to direct Obsession, which was ultimately acquired by Focus Features and is well on its way to making $300 million at the worldwide box office.

As Luiz H.C. noted here on Bloody Disgusting last month, “Produced on a minuscule budget of roughly $800 dollars (most of which was spent on a camera and the hiring of a single extra actor), Milk & Serial was Barker’s second horror project, released on the comedy channel That’s a Bad Idea. The filmmaker had previously worked with his comedy partner Cooper Tomlinson, who produced and starred in Milk & Serial, on a creepy short film called The Chair, with the success of that video inspiring the duo to envision a larger horror production.”

That larger horror production of course was Obsession, which was still a relatively small production with a budget of less than $1 million. It’s safe to say that Curry Barker is now on the path to becoming a big time player in the Hollywood horror scene, but does he ever plan to return to the world of his smaller YouTube projects like Milk & Serial and The Chair?

Curry Barker tells The Hollywood Reporter this week, “The Chair could definitely be a horror film. I think eventually it would be cool to bring a feature version of the haunted chair story to life. Milk and Serial is probably going to happen [as a film].

“I wonder if there’s an opportunity to bring somebody else onto Milk and Serial and I’ll produce but not necessarily direct,” Barker continues in his chat with THR, thinking aloud.

It’s interesting to note that Barker was offered the chance to turn The Chair into a feature film by producer James Harris, but Barker chose instead to make original feature Obsession.

That turned out to be the possible decision, of course, but it sounds like Curry Barker is not done with The Chair or Milk & Serial at this time. Stay tuned for more as we learn it.

You can watch both Milk & Serial and The Chair below.