In a story likely to have been excitedly retold and forwarded many thousands of times among budding filmmakers over the last few weeks, before he made “Obsession,” Curry Barker was doing his thing on YouTube, where in 2023 his 22-minute horror short “The Chair” was spotted by LA-based Brit producer James Harris.
Impressed by what he saw, Harris showed “The Chair” to his fellow Brits running Tea Shop Productions, co-founder Mark Lane (based in the U.K) and Leonara Darby, another expat in LA who first joined the company as an assistant but was soon elevated to producer.
“It’s such an incredible short in terms of its cinematic appeal,” says Harris, noting that Barker was able to make something for a small amount of money that, unlike many other YouTube filmmakers, didn’t “feel like it was shot on an iPhone in someone’s house” and had a distinct Hollywood aesthetic. “And it just felt to us, that, okay, here is a person who, if you can translate whatever he did for a few $1,000 and give him more money, which isn’t a lot of money for a film but is a lot of money for him, you can scale him up.”
That scale-up has now become the stuff of almost Hollywood legend.
From a budget of $750,000, Barker made his debut horror feature “Obsession,” one of the biggest phenomenons of 2026 that continues to smash records. After three weeks of successive box office hikes (the first non-festive wide release since “E.T.” to do so and beating “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu” in the process), and a mere 7% drop in the fourth, the film now sits at an astonishing $224 million worldwide, making it the most successful release of all time for Focus Features, who bought the film for $15 million following major buzz in Toronto last year. Coupled with “Backrooms,” “Obsession” has helped turn the industry on its head in less than a month.
