Hey, Neighbor,
Curry Barker’s horror film Obsession grossed $17 million over its opening weekend—made even more impressive when considering the director, who cut his teeth in sketch comedy on YouTube, created the movie with just $750,000.
With Hollywood’s doors now fully beckoning, Curry’s story (intertwined with his comedy partner, Cooper Tomlinson) is just getting started. But for anyone itching to produce creative work they find meaningful—to captivate audiences and build worlds they believe in—the first chapter of Coop and Curry’s journey is one worth learning from.
Therefore, I wanted to reshare my full interview with the duo (recorded shortly after they dropped their short film Milk & Serial in 2024) for three reasons:
Many of you reacted positively to Friday’s letter, so I felt it was worth trimming down the full transcript (which you can read below).
I believe the inspiration derived from this conversation acts as a solid companion piece to last week’s essay, which offered a not-so-rosy analysis on the state of longform storytelling.
I just learned how the video podcast tool works on Substack and realized it’s much easier to navigate as a listener.1
Hope you enjoy watching the interview. And scroll down to read the full transcript.
— NGL
P.S. Last week, we wrote about the current state of “longform,” both as as a unit of creative work and a way of life. You can read it here.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Nate Graber-Lipperman: What was the timeline where you guys meet and decide to work together?
Curry Barker: We both moved out here [to Los Angeles]. We were 18, and we met at a film school. I think we both quickly realized that we had a common interest—that we actually wanted to go make things. And so we migrated towards each other pretty quickly.
After eleven months of school, we were just kind of, like, let’s drop out. And then we’re just on our own. That was during COVID, which was a tough time to navigate.
Everyone was saying that the industry was shut down. We were like, hey, let’s just make as much stuff as we possibly can. You know? So we started our channel that’s a bad idea from our living room.
It became a sketch a day, or a sketch a week. From there, it was two videos, and then three, and then it snowballed.
NGL: Was the mindset from the jump, like, let’s make a sustainable business on YouTube? Or did that come along the way?
CB: We started with short films. We’d put them in festivals, and then we’d write another one. We were doing that for a while.
All of a sudden, we had a couple short skits that were getting attention online, and we were like, we should really start leaning into this.
We quickly learned that it’s not about how many people see it, it’s about who sees it. We wanted to get the attention of casting directors, producers or whatever. But we didn’t think it would be our day job.
Cooper Tomlinson: The thing that people need to understand is to just do something you love and put it out there. Things will happen.
If you’re not looking to blow up…a lot of people are trying to blow up. You won’t blow up. But we weren’t. We were just like, we’ll have this in our artillery. Here’s something to show.
NGL: How are you sustaining yourself along the way? Obviously, like, being a couple of kids out here in LA.
CT: Well, Curry was on the production team for This Is Us. So he was learning the ropes—lighting and stuff. A lot of our great lighting comes from Curry’s time on the show.
CB: Yeah, I mean, we had day jobs. Cooper worked at a coffee shop. I worked at Starbucks for a while.
I was on This Is Us for the last two seasons as a COVID monitor. It was, like, the lowest of the low, as far as the totem pole goes. But I would actually go up to Michael, who was the gaffer, or Yasu, who was the DP, and I would actually start conversations with them.
I still have their numbers to this day…even though I was a nobody and probably shouldn’t have talked to them, I did, and I would ask them questions. And they really would teach me.
CT: Curry’s doing twelve-hour days. I’m working on a food truck. In between, we’re literally writing sketches while we’re at our jobs. And then we’d come home, pitch each other our sketches, and we would just be shooting in the little time we had.
One of our first big hits at the time—I think it got six hundred thousand views, which was huge for us. We shot it on the food truck I worked on right after my shift. We did everything with the resources we had.
NGL: So at this point, you guys are making these weekly comedy videos that it sounds like you love doing. But you’re also saving space for bigger projects—particularly in the horror genre—that do take a year or two to really develop.
How do you strike that balance between making very Internet-centric sketches while also developing these larger horror projects?
CB: We’re kind of a well-oiled machine at this point. As far as skits go, we have hundreds and hundreds of ideas. Every time we go through a drive-through, every time we go out of town, we say, oh, that’s a funny skit.
I mean, we just constantly are coming up with ideas and writing them down. And honestly, if we just shoot, you know, five skits a month, we’re set up pretty well. We know how to light really quickly. We’ve got [specific] lavs that we use. It almost runs by itself. It doesn’t—we still have to edit every single skit. But it feels a little bit more like it runs by itself.
And then all the other time, we don’t have any other job. So we just use our time wisely.
There’s two different ways you could do this. You could be content with having the skits and use all the other time to just play around and enjoy your twenties. I think a lot of people in our position would do that.
And there’s no shame in that, because a lot of people are content with just being on the Internet. But if we have extra time, we write a script, or a screenplay.
My dad always said, don’t have just one ball in the air, have ten. Then you’ll catch at least five, you know?
NGL: I read that you made Milk & Serial with an $800 budget. At one point, there was a potential distribution plan in place, but you ultimately decided to self-distribute it.
When you reflect on that decision, what was the process that went into making it?
CB: When we first made Milk & Serial, we were very broke. We were basically just living paycheck to paycheck to paycheck. And we didn’t really have reps yet. We didn’t really know what we were doing. We just wanted to make a dope-ass movie.
CT: Our technique…we have a technique we like to call run-and-gun.
CB: Right. We didn’t know what we were doing. Fast-forward a year later, the movie’s done, and we’re repped up. We got managers, we got agents, we got lawyers. They’re like, yo, let’s take this movie and find a home for it. And we’re like, hell yeah.
We searched for a home for quite a while. We had a couple bites, and we went with this one streaming platform. We were very excited about that.
We had to go on a goose hunt to get all the actors’ release forms. We had to get all the rights to everything. There were a lot of things we had to do, and we did all of those things, and got the movie ready to go for distribution.
It got to the point where even though we had done it all, our YouTube channel had just grown so large. Our fans had been waiting for this movie for so long, and [the distributor] is just going to put it behind a paywall.
CT: Who knows where it’s gonna go? Who knows how long?
CB: And it’s not like our fans are used to paying for stuff from us. We have to prove ourselves first. So we threw it up on YouTube just to see what would happen. We didn’t know that people were going to react this way at all.
NGL: Did this experience with Milk & Serial change the way you both look at building a career in the industry moving forward? Between, you know, having this self-distribution model with your channel, as well as the aspiration to create some of these bigger projects in more traditional Hollywood.
CT: You get more control, you know? We get to do whatever we want.
I really think that moving forward, that will be in the conversation moving forward every time we make an indie or whatever. I mean, Curry’s movie The Chair. Our movie Warnings. They’ve really found a great audience.
If somebody wants to jump in on that, they can. But we’ve got a great fanbase, and it’s just gonna grow and grow.
CB: We’re trying really hard to greenlight a show, but at the same time, we have a greenlit show. It’s called YouTube.
If people watch it, they watch. And if they don’t, they don’t. But we’re having fun making the things that we want to make.
NGL: Tonally, do you find it difficult jumping between comedy and horror? Or do you actually relish using different parts of your brain?
CB: I think we freaking love it.
CT: A lot of our stuff, we kind of mesh the comedy and horror. I think our favorite genre is dark comedy.
CB: We really wanna make a buddy dark comedy as a feature film.
I’m working on my film Obsession right now, but that’s more like strict horror. All of my films are going to have some element of comedy in it, though. It’s just how I write.
CT: I don’t know if Curry agrees with me on this, but I think Milk & Serial is very funny. There’s a lot of aspects of the way we riff—funny beats, even in the dark moments.
CB: Yeah. I think if you’re ever bored of comedy, you just go to horror, and it’s the complete opposite. But it’s still the same thing. It’s hard to explain, but it’s still the same brain cells. The same process.
NGL: I went to a premiere of Dracula’s Ex-Girlfriend. It was a short horror film by a creator named Abigail Thorn, who runs the YouTube channel Philosophy Tube.
She told me that horror’s always had this connotation of over-punching at the box office. You can make a really frightening movie for much cheaper than a big superhero movie, and there’s a real die-hard community around horror.
But she also talked about the ability to experiment in the genre, you know? It’s a really fascinating sandbox.
Why do you think creators love making horror films?
CB: Dude, I think you’re on it. You get to experiment quite a bit.
I’m always thinking, what’s the craziest thing that could happen in this scene? And we always like to tackle that. You can really push your choices and not pull your punches.
We’ve seen it happening more and more with other genres too. But there’s a lot of taboo things that you’re not really supposed to talk about or do, that would not be appropriate in, like, a romcom or whatever. With horror, these things are more socially acceptable.
CT: And I think creators love horror because audiences love horror. Especially on YouTube.
I think part of the reason why Milk & Serial blew up in the first place was a scary thumbnail. Same with The Chair and Warnings. It makes you curious—what’s gonna happen?
People want to get scared.
NGL: Let’s say a lot of the doors in Hollywood don’t open to the degree you want, but you’re still left with this channel that you’ve built.
Is that something you would be happy with and continue to attack if you look at the course of a career? Or is that something where it’s like, no, we still have these really big aspirations and we want to fight to open those doors in Hollywood?
CB: I don’t think we’ll ever settle. But here’s the thing: Is YouTube settling?
If we decide that we’re content with YouTube, it’s because we’ve decided that that’s the way the world is going. And it very well might be.
For example: Sketch comedy shows. We’ve hit the town. Nobody’s interested in a sketch comedy show right now. And the reason is because sketch comedy works really well on your phone. You’re scrolling through, and these little shortform comedy skits work really well on your phone. Nobody wants to throw it on the TV, or their 8k display.
That’s not always true. The Tim Robinson show [I Think You Should Leave] is doing great. But it’s more rare, and a lot of people will watch those on their phone anyway—one skit at a time.
The thing is, me and Cooper have a lot of aspirations to tell stories that take a little bit longer than a minute and twenty seconds. So we’re waiting for the internet to catch up with us. And it seems like they are with Milk & Serial.
I honestly was shocked that people would sit down and watch an hourlong movie on YouTube because I didn’t think they’d take it seriously enough.
CT: I knew they’d watch. It is crazy, though, that an hourlong movie…people are really sticking with the whole thing, and I think it’s going to blow up even more.
I’m glad we went with YouTube. And like Curry said, we’re never going to stop fighting. What’s great is that if we get no’s for the rest of our lives, we’re gonna make it anyway.
If you want it, we’re going to give you a shot. If not, we’ll throw it up on YouTube, or wherever the next platform is.
CB: And YouTube might be the next platform! That’s the thing—we’re innovative.
All three of, we’re the young generation that’s coming in. We know where the world’s leading. We’re gonna be calling the shots—not necessarily us, but our generation.
NGL: You bring up the point about Milk & Serial and the longevity of it. A lot of people might still discover it and like it.
And there’s an interesting discussion there around…such a big part of the Hollywood strikes was around royalties and residuals. Figuring out how people can continue to get paid [after something comes out] on streaming platforms in particular.
Whereas Milk & Serial is a piece of IP that you guys own, that’s on your channel. In ten years, hopefully, you’re still receiving the AdSense checks for that.
Any last thoughts or comments?
CT: For me, whoever’s making a movie out there right now, throw it on YouTube.
You never know what’s going to happen. I told a friend that today, actually.
CB: You never know, man.
Thanks for reading! Shoot us a reply, comment, or DM if anything resonated with you in particular—we respond to them all.
On Friday, I published the full interview as an inline video. Oh well. You live and you learn.
