Inside the Deal for Curry Barker’s Movie

It’s unremarkable for a movie to get a standing ovation at a film festival. But it is unusual for the crowd to chant a director’s name before the film even starts. That was the scene buyers encountered Sept. 5 inside the Royal Alexandra Theatre as Curry Barker unveiled his horror feature Obsession for the Toronto crowd.

Baker, 25, has spent the past few years amassing a fan base on YouTube with his sketch comedy channel That’s a Bad Idea and his $800 found-foot- age serial killer feature Milk & Serial.

Obsession, from producers James Harris and Haley Johnson, stars Michael Johnston and Inde Navarrette in a “The Monkey’s Paw”-style tale about a young man who wishes for his friend to fall in love with him — to disastrous consequences.

After the Obsession premiere, the writer-director and his team spent the next 24 hours in meetings with potential buyers, ending at about 1 a.m. Sunday by selecting Focus Features, which beat out A24 and Neon. Part of the appeal of Focus, home to Nosferatu’s Robert Eggers, was its global distribution apparatus (Neon and A24 only distribute in North America).

The deal, negotiated by CAA and financier Capstone on behalf of the film, has not yet closed, but sources estimate it will easily reach the low to mid-teens and could go higher than $15 million. That’s a head-turning sum for the project, which cost less than $1 million to make, and will easily top A24’s high-seven-figure deal for the Sundance horror sensation Talk to Me from fellow YouTubers Danny and Michael Philippou. (Though that deal did not include international rights.) It also elevates Barker to in-demand horror filmmaker.

While Barker is the big winner of Toronto, the runners- up might be Jason Blum, Weapons producer Roy Lee and Paranormal Activity producer Steven Schneider.

Just days before Toronto, the trio placed a bet on the young filmmaker and preemptively purchased his follow-up, the script for Anything but Ghosts, which he will direct and star in. They — along with partners on the movie Adam Hendricks and Greg Gilreath at Divide/Conquer — now have a hot young filmmaker in their stable.

For Barker, announcing the deal with three of Hollywood’s great horror producers surely helped drive anticipation for Obsession and drove Focus and other buyers to mark it as a must-watch out of the festival.

Blum was on hand for the Toronto screening and was likely among the happiest in the room as the credits rolled and the cheering began. As for Barker, an Alabama native who moved to Los Angeles just a few years ago, other projects in his back pocket include The Chair, a potential feature- length version of a mind-bending, 25-minute short he put on YouTube two years ago.