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YouTube comedian-turned horror filmmaker Curry Barker is in the midst of one of the most consequential weeks of his career. His feature Obsession is among the more anticipated titles at the Toronto Film Festival, where it premieres Friday as part of the genre-focused Midnight Madness section and hopes to find a buyer.

Now, just days before Obsession’s debut, a group of horror power producers have teamed to acquire Barker’s follow-up project, Anything But Ghosts. Barker will direct and star, and co-wrote the script with creative partner Cooper Tomlinson, who will also star.

Blumhouse’s Jason Blum and Spooky Pictures’ Roy Lee and Steven Schneider will produce the feature, along with Adam Hendricks and Greg Gilreath for Divide/Conquer.

Barker has been on the rise for the past year since arriving on the horror scene with Milk & Serial, an $800 feature he posted to YouTube and which has amassed more than 2 million views.

Producer and showrunner Bryan Fuller, known for creating Hannibal and American Gods, is bringing his directorial debut, Dust Bunny, to the Toronto Film Festival for a world premiere as part of the Midnight Madness section.

The horror thriller stars Mads Mikkelsen and Sigourney Weaver, and portrays a young girl asking her neighbor for help killing the monster under her bed that she thinks ate her family. Fuller is headed to Toronto amid the backdrop a 2023 lawsuit brought by fellow Queer for Fear producer Sam Wineman that alleged a hostile workplace environment on set. The next arbitration hearing in the case is scheduled for Feb. 2026.

The 2025 edition of the nocturnal Midnight Madness sidebar, with seven world premieres, will open with Matt Johnson’s Toronto-set Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, which bowed at SXSW, and will close with Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover, a horror comedy about a lonely gravedigger...

Kane Parsons is already one of the foremost tellers of spooky stories on the internet. Now, the creator also known as Kane Pixels is set to become one of the youngest directors in Hollywood history.

The 19-year-old Parsons is going full speed ahead on a feature film adaptation of The Backrooms, a found footage horror series Parsons initially premiered on his YouTube channel. A24, which picked up the project in 2023, has now attached some big names to it. The film’s cast includes Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor as well as Renate Reinsve, who played the lead role in the international hit The Worst Person in the World.

With a venerated indie distributor steering the ship and several notable actors on board, The Backrooms is set to be the next big horror project led by a digital content creator. As influencers make inroads in Hollywood, the horror genre is becoming one...

Horror has consistently proven itself as one of the most flexible genres with its blending of tones, aesthetics, and voices. It's often a training ground for blossoming filmmakers on the rise, as they're frequently challenged to get their movie made with limited resources. Low-budget horror tends to breed creativity and, in certain cases, box office revenue. Just look at the careers of Sam Raimi, John Carpenter, and George Romero, all of whom have gone on to become some of our greatest filmmakers. You never really know when the next batch of talent is going to come out of the woodwork, and it looks like we have some new blood to keep an eye on.

A24 has given the go-ahead for Kane Parsons to make his feature directorial debut under their banner with "The Backrooms," a science-fiction horror film produced by James Wan's Atomic Monster (via Variety). The project is...

Rising filmmaker and sketch comedian Curry Barker has signed with UTA.

Barker is known for his viral horror movie Milk & Serial, a found footage project made for $800 that amassed 1.6 million views on YouTube and landed him meetings with practically every horror house and producer in town. He is in post-production on his next feature, Obsession, a horror film he wrote and directed, with financing from Capstone.

The native of Mobile, Alabama is also one half of the sketch comedy channel That’s a Bad Idea, which he runs with creative partner Cooper Tomlinson. Their sketches take inspiration from shows such as I Think You Should Leave and Key & Peele and blend comedy with horror. That’s a Bad Idea has amassed more than 700 million views across platforms, and boast 1.7 million TikTok followers, 827,000 YouTube subscribers and 681,000 Instagram followers.

As a horror filmmaker, Barker is also developing a feature length version of The Chair,...

This article uses the current names of the filmmakers and actors, which may not be the names that appear in the credits of the films.

Jane Schoenbrun is one of the most exciting voices in the new queer cinema scene. Their films I Saw the TV Glow and We're All Going to the World's Fair depict the search for identity through the lens of horror — but for viewers still scratching their heads over these works of art, a third film may be illuminating: the experimental documentary A Self-Induced Hallucination, which explores the Slender Man phenomenon.

I Saw the TV Glow and We're All Going to the World's Fair both feature young, alienated protagonists whose immersion in their favorite media may lead to self-discovery, or sever them from reality. These powerful fictions take on a new dimension alongside Jane Schoenbrun's documentary A Self-Induced Hallucination, a montage of YouTube videos related to...

When Curry Barker moved to Los Angeles a few years ago, he thought getting his short films on the festival circuit would be his path to making it as a director. But soon he discovered just uploading his films directly to YouTube was getting him attention. His 2023 horror short The Chair landed him Hollywood representation and a deal to direct a $1 million movie, Obsession. Then in August, he posted the $800 feature Milk & Serial, which he wrote, directed and starred in. It exploded online, attracting 1 million views.

“It just catapulted the amount of meetings I was taking,” says Barker, who notes he met with practically every studio and major horror producer in town.

Barker, also known for his comedy sketches on YouTube, is part of a new class of filmmakers who honed their chops on YouTube before breaking into Hollywood. The platform allows them to flex their creative muscles without...

2024 has been an outstanding year for fresh and experimental horror. March saw the release of the possession tale of Late Night With The Devil, starring David Dastmalchian as a 70s late-night TV show host desperate to up his ratings by whatever means possible. Longlegs was one of the most highly anticipated horror films of the year and delivered on its promise to be a deliciously terrifying and original story. Ti Wests iconic X trilogy wrapped up with the release of Maxxxine in early July, with scream queen Mia Goth commanding the screen as ruthless movie star Maxine Minx.

Among these notably successful releases, an independently produced found footage film managed to make a name for itself despite a tiny budget and amateur production. Milk & Serial, a 62-minute-long film uploaded to YouTube in August of this year, has quickly become a standout in the lineup of 2024 horror releases. Its marketing...

With the viral success of Milk & Serial, the found footage hit about a prank-based web series, and the recent social media-related thriller Skincare, it is clear that the internet is still a source of fear for film fans. This trend is not new, but it is still ramping up as screen life continues to consume real life especially since the dawn of the pandemic. Recent years have served up horror hits about bloggers, vloggers, influencers, and other attention-seekers trying to connect in all the wrong ways.

There isn't enough room on the internet to list every web-based horror movie, but these titles belong at the top of the leaderboard. Their stories give new meaning to the term "doomscrolling" as their chronically online characters do anything and everything for likes and subscribers. What follows are fourteen movies that prove that social media is a very unsafe space.

Followed Connects Internet...

Good horror films don't necessarily have to grace the silver screen or be backed with big names and a hefty budget. One particular horror gem can be found on the free streaming platform, YouTube, and only has an $800 budget, yet manages to create a truly grisly and gripping watch that will haunt your waking moments as well as sleep. Borne from the mind of Curry Barker, Milk & Serial is a 62-minute found footage film that gives us one of the creepiest insights into the mind of a killer. Short, jarring and wickedly fanatical, the movie boasts riveting performances, a twisty story and delightfully gruesome execution it deserves to be a must-watch on any horror buff's list.

I’ve always found it curious how the Found Footage genre’s greatest weakness is also its greatest strength, with the same realistic formatting that allows for deeply immersive thrills also being responsible for the massive sea of low-effort cash-grabs that gives Pov filmmaking a bad name. That’s why it’s so hard for Found Footage flicks to stand out these days, as it can be hard for viewers to justify paying for what will likely be just another Paranormal Activity rip-off.

However, there are some clever filmmakers who have managed to circumvent this issue by making their movies available online for free, trusting that the quality of their work will eventually lead to more lucrative endeavors. And with Curry Barker’s surprisingly effective Milk & Serial going viral on YouTube, we’ve decided to make a list celebrating six other Found Footage flicks that you can check out on YouTube for free!

Over the past couple years, Hollywood has realized something the internet’s known for years: YouTube is the home for indie horror. There is a veritable smorgasbord of short horror films posted across the platform, with some nabbing hundreds of thousands and even millions of views. And those films are helping YouTube creators like RackaRacka and Chris Stuckmann pave a path to the big screen.

The latest creator to join them is Curry Barker, whose 2023 horror short The Chair (5.5 million views) put him on the map, and whose latest project, a full-length, 62-minute found footage film called Milk & Serial, is turning him into a serious contender for top up-and-coming horror writer/director/actor/you-name-it-he’s-got-it.

Barker and his crew made Milk & Serial for $800. They all worked pro bono as the film’s cast of influencer-and-friends characters, so the production budget was used to compensate the one outside actor they hired.

Curry Barker’s horror Milk & Serial is the latest internet sensation, and a pretty darn good film too. We take a closer look.

While doomscrolling on your phone before bedtime in the last couple of weeks, you might have come across something called Milk & Serial. The film is currently enjoying some viral fame after being released on YouTube a few weeks ago. Directed by Curry Barker, the low-budget, 62-minute horror is frighteningly authentic and guaranteed to make you panic every time your friends pull a prank on you.

Barker is one half of the team behind the YouTube channel that’s a bad idea. Together with Cooper Tomlinson, the pair post sketch videos to both YouTube and TikTok. The pair also star in Milk & Serial, and Tomlinson is a producer on the project.

The film focuses on two YouTube creators with an affinity for pranks, but when...

A new microbudget horror movie titled Milk & Serial has gone viral on YouTube. Made by Curry Barker, Milk & Serial is a 62-minute-long horror movie whose plot centers around a group of YouTube pranksters who get wrapped up in a series of troubling events that grow in severity. The film was released for free on YouTube two weeks ago.

Now, that's a bad idea's Milk & Serial has become an unexpected viral hit. You can watch it below:

The film premiered on August 8, and was made by Barker alongside his comedy partner, Cooper Tomlinson. Tomlinson and Barker are also both producers and actors for the film. In just under three weeks on the platform, Milk & Serial has amassed over 388,000 views on YouTube. Even more remarkable is the fact that the found footage horror film was made for a microbudget of just $800. Tomlinson and Barker enlisted their friends to...

A do-it-yourself horror movie made for only $800 has seen great success online after being released for free on YouTube. The film, called “Milk & Serial,” was created by YouTube personality Curry Barker, who took on many roles such as writer, director and actor. In just two weeks, the 62-minute “found footage” style movie has been viewed over 348,000 times.

Barker spent most of the small $800 budget on hiring an actor and buying a camera. He also sold the camera later for a $100 profit. This brought the total cost close to being covered. Critics have praised how Barker was able to tell a full story and keep viewers interested with so little money.

The movie follows two YouTubers whose online pranks turn dangerous. It explores the dark side of always needing to make exciting videos. Viewers seem to connect with its realistic filming style and portrayal of questionable online content. Horror news...

Found-footage horror about YouTube pranksters turns into an online phenomenon, giving its star and creator a Hollywood inroad

2024 is already becoming something of a banner year for horror, with Longlegs making over $100m and Late Night with the Devil earning a whopping 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. And yet the breakout horror of the year might just be an $800 project currently available to watch free on YouTube.

Milk & Serial is a 62-minute, found-footage horror by YouTuber Curry Barker, and it manages to be at once ruthlessly effective and wonderfully authentic. Racking up 348,000 views in the two weeks since its release, its popularity has been supercharged by raves on Reddit that have since crossed over into traditional media. Bloody Disgusting called it “one of the year’s best-kept secrets” and this week Barker found himself being interviewed by no less than Variety.

The 60-minute found footage horror short Milk & Serial is making huge waves here in the horror community, already approaching half a million views since being uploaded just two weeks ago by the channel That’s a Bad Idea, an up-and-coming comedy duo made up of film-school-pals-turned-collaborators Curry Barker and Cooper Tomlinson.

The short film was made for just $800 and opted for a direct-to-YouTube release versus a more traditional release with a more traditional distributor, with the channel’s 600,000+ subscribers spreading it far and wide across the internet. Milk & Serial follows in the wake of the duo’s The Chair, a previous horror short that similarly went viral and passed 5 million views.

Needless to say, Barker and Tomlinson know what the hell they’re doing in the horror space. And in a chat with Variety this week, they tease that another horror movie is now in the works.

The title?...

Spoiler Alert: This article contains minor spoilers for “Milk & Serial,” now available to watch on YouTube.

Curry Barker has delivered the year’s most unlikely hit.

The filmmaker and comedian is the mastermind behind “Milk & Serial,” a 62-minute horror feature about YouTube pranksters who get caught up in some rapidly escalating crises that ideally aren’t spoiled in advance. Made for only $800, the film co-stars Barker and his comedy partner, Cooper Tomlinson, who is also a producer.

The duo mainly posts sketch videos to their TikTok and YouTube channels “that’s a bad idea,” while occasionally showcasing other projects, like Barker’s viral 2023 horror short “The Chair,” which has been watched on the latter more than 5.5 million times. After considering working with a distributor for “Milk & Serial,” Barker decided to drop the full movie on YouTube on Aug. 8. Since then, it’s been watched over 323,000 times (as of Aug.

If the commercial and critical success of horror films from Jordan Peele, Zach Cregger, and David Gordon Green in recent years illustrates anything, it’s that folks in the comedy biz can often serve up major doses of effective white-knuckle chills. With the buzz following the recently released trailer for “Saturday Night Live” alum Kyle Mooney’s upcoming Y2K, the Hollywood comedy-to-horror pipeline is clearly functioning in full force–and we’d happily welcome more from impassioned cross-genre creators like these.

Enter Milk & Serial, a found footage horror feature that premiered on YouTube this month courtesy of That’s a Bad Idea, an up-and-coming comedy duo made up of film-school-pals-turned-collaborators Curry Barker and Cooper Tomlinson.

Written/directed by Barker and produced by 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.