The Twenty-Six-Year-Old Behind “Obsession,” a Terrifying Tale of a Crush Gone Awry

“It starts from a very innocent place with Bear. I wanted it to be relatable. We’ve all had a crush on someone who didn’t like us back—which is kind of a creepy concept, when you think about it,” Barker went on. “You imagine this whole reality that may never be.” Such obsession can be a frightening emotion both for the person experiencing it and for the target. One of Bear’s first lines, as he talks about his love for Nikki, is “I feel like I’m coming apart.” The fact that he never manages to confess this to her is part of the horror: Barker wanted to play on the very modern fear, among young men, of “not saying the right thing, or not wanting to come off like a creep.”

We made our way into the museum’s Séance Parlor. Ouija boards were enshrined in glass cases throughout the room; periodically, a small silver bell tolled without warning, moving as though on its own. In one corner, a pair of headless mannequins were prostrated before a crowned, decapitated head: a tribute to the final scene of Ari Aster’s “Hereditary.” Barker gasped in recognition and delight. “I was only seventeen when that movie came out. It left a huge impression on me,” he said. “It kind of sparked for me that movies can be artsy.” Jordan Peele’s “Get Out”—also released when Barker was in high school, and shot a few miles from his home in Alabama—similarly changed his sense of what horror could do.

A24, which produced “Hereditary,” has enlisted Barker to direct a “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” reboot. When I raised it, he became, briefly, more guarded. “Dude, I have to be so careful now with what I say in public,” he said. He was still smarting from the (modest) backlash to a comment he’d made, a few days earlier, about the original being “really good for its time.” But he grew animated again as he explained his interest in the psychology of the family at the heart of the story. “What kind of person do you have to be to kill as nonchalantly as the Sawyers do?” He invoked a scene in which two brothers encourage their decrepit patriarch to finish off their latest victim, cheering him on as he struggles to lift a hammer they’ve placed in his hands. “It tells you that this old man has been killing his whole life, and this is fun for this family. That’s so fucked up,” Barker said. “But there was only a little bit of that in the original, and the rest of the remakes were just, like, Leatherface with a chainsaw! We’re gonna have that, too. But we have to earn it.”

Barker’s first dream was to be an actor. When he was eighteen, he left home to study at New York Film Academy’s campus in Los Angeles. During his first week of classes, he met a fellow-student named Cooper Tomlinson; they started making videos together that weekend, which they posted on YouTube. “It became our film school outside of film school,” Tomlinson told me. Barker, who’d spent his senior year of high school teaching himself about the properties of various camera lenses and microphones to make his sketches feel “cinematic,” insisted on shooting horizontally, rather than tailoring their material to Instagram or TikTok. (Eventually, he allowed vertical video.) The skits, which Barker writes with and acts in opposite Tomlinson, tend to involve an abrupt turn from observational comedy into darker or more surreal territory. In a video about an erratic Uber driver, a recognizable dynamic—awkward small talk, impatience to set off—escalates into a life-threatening one. Another sketch revolves around a guy failing to text his friend when he gets home safely; after a sleepless night waiting for word, the spurned bro descends into madness.

The high production values and frequent genre-hopping were inspired by the sketch-comedy duo Key and Peele, whom Barker grew up watching religiously. Emulating them required a genre-savvy shorthand: the ability to conjure up the feel of a cop show or a sci-fi comedy in minutes. (Barker deploys this ability to great effect in “Obsession,” interspersing moments of genuine fear with, say, an idyllic falling-in-love montage.) Barker and Tomlinson had been at it for a year when the pandemic started, and their classes migrated to Zoom. They dropped out, moved in together, and committed to making films. Barker worked at Starbucks and spent every free moment writing and shooting. “He’s a simple man,” Tomlinson told me. “There was no Plan B.” Their YouTube channel, That’s a Bad Idea, gradually gained traction, amassing upward of a million subscribers. One of Barker’s horror shorts, “The Chair,” attracted interest from Hollywood producers.