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Two jobs are sitting on Curry Barker’s desk, and they could not look more different from across the room. One is a fake haunted house run by two grifters with a fog machine and a bag of cheap tricks. The other is a real farmhouse in Texas where the family eats people. Barker has signed on to both.
The first is Anything But Ghosts, the supernatural horror film he directed and co-wrote with his longtime partner Cooper Tomlinson, now in post-production for Focus Features. The second is a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre feature that A24 has handed him to write and direct, currently in its earliest stage of development. Get close to either project and the same thing happens. People you were ready to laugh at stop being funny.
The con artists and the cast
Anything But Ghosts is built on a premise that is almost a joke until it isn’t. Two men run a paranormal investigation business that is entirely fraudulent. They know how to fake a haunting, how to rig the equipment, how to read a grieving client. Barker has said the pair “basically prey on old women and single dads.” Then they walk into a house with something real in it, and the scam stops working.
The cast around that setup is the part that made the industry sit up. Aaron Paul came aboard first when Focus Features acquired the picture. Bryce Dallas Howard joined next, followed by Violet McGraw, with Chris Reinacher added in June. Barker and Tomlinson play the two ghost hunters themselves. No studio has set a release date, though the film wrapped production in the spring. It is a Blumhouse Atomic Monster, Spooky Pictures and Divide/Conquer production with Image Nation Abu Dhabi and the duo’s own That’s a Bad Idea, with Jason Blum, Roy Lee, Steven Schneider, Adam Hendricks and Greg Gilreath producing.
Barker calls the project “by nature funnier” than his last one, while insisting it still lives in a “super grounded world.” That word, grounded, keeps coming up.
The partnership doing the quiet work
It would be easy to write this as the rise of one guy, and that would leave out half of it. Barker and Tomlinson have been making things together for years through That’s a Bad Idea, the channel where their comedy sketches taught them how to land a joke and how to hold a silence. Their microbudget found footage feature Milk & Serial, reportedly made for around $800 and released free on YouTube, where it has pulled in millions of views, was the duo working with almost nothing and getting away with it.
Then came Obsession, Barker’s feature debut as a director, which he wrote and shot in Los Angeles. Tomlinson is in that one too. It premiered on the festival circuit and Focus Features won it in a competitive deal reported at roughly $15 million. What happened next was not normal. Obsession has since grossed more than $280 million worldwide and passed The Blair Witch Project as the highest-grossing festival acquisition ever recorded. It opened to $17.2 million domestically, an enormous number for a film bought out of a festival.
Fast, yes. Overnight, no. The escalation came after a long apprenticeship the two of them served on their own dime.
The thread between them
The two projects rhyme more than they look like they should. Anything But Ghosts shares a universe with Obsession. Barker has confirmed it, pointing to a small connecting detail in the new film. He has not called it a sequel, and neither has the studio.
What carries over is not plot. It is a method. Barker starts with people who feel ordinary and a situation recognizable enough to be funny, then pulls the floor out. Con artists faking ghosts is a comedy engine right up until the ghost is real. It is the same trick The Texas Chain Saw Massacre ran in 1974 on a van of young people who took a wrong turn looking for cheap gas.
Fake ghost hunters who find a real ghost are getting the kind of occupational correction that horror handles better than human resources ever could.
Inside a real farmhouse
The A24 Texas Chainsaw Massacre film is a far heavier lift, and Barker knows it. He has been clear in interviews that he wants the family, not just the man with the saw. “I want to lean into the uncomfortability of the family,” he told Total Film. “There’s some really messed up stuff happening at that farm.” He has described his approach as grounded, brutal and raw, and said his real goal is to make you care about the people before anything happens to them.
Read those as statements of intention, because that is what they are. Barker is still early. As of his most recent interviews he was preparing to write the screenplay rather than working from a finished one, revisiting the franchise to find his way in. No announced story, no cast, no schedule, no date. What there is, is a stated interest in Leatherface’s relatives as much as Leatherface, in the rot inside the house rather than the chase outside it.
One distinction has to be nailed down, because the coverage keeps blurring it. Barker’s film is its own thing. A24 is separately developing a Texas Chainsaw Massacre television series with Strange Darling filmmaker JT Mollner directing, and with Glen Powell and Dan Cohen producing through Barnstorm. Powell is a producer on the series, not a star, and Mollner is not attached to Barker’s movie. Two projects, two teams, one chainsaw.
The weight of the original
The reason this assignment is harder than a normal remake has to do with what Tobe Hooper actually made. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre runs on heat, exhaustion, the scream of an engine and a sense that society has quietly collapsed off camera. Leatherface was never a polished slasher icon standing alone. He was one member of a grotesque household, the strangest face at a dinner table the film makes you sit at far too long. The movie is also less explicitly gory than its reputation insists, which is not the same as gentle. The violence and the imagery still land like a slap.
Everything that came after kept rewriting the rules. The 1986 sequel went broad and comic. Later entries reshuffled the family, the timeline and even Leatherface’s backstory until the canon stopped agreeing with itself. A filmmaker walking in today inherits two things at once: a 1974 landmark people are protective of, and decades of tangled continuity nobody can reconcile.
Spoiler warning for the ending of Obsession.
The link between the two Barker films is a quiet one. In Obsession, Bear’s death breaks the spell on Nikki, but her rage has already driven her to kill their friends Sarah and Ian. In Anything But Ghosts, a news broadcast references a woman who committed a triple homicide, a nod to where Nikki ends up. A shared world built from one line of background dialogue. Not a sequel.
Comedy is the tell
This is the part that makes Barker an interesting choice rather than a risky one. Comedy and horror are the same machine pointed in opposite directions. Both live or die on timing, on controlling what you expect and breaking it a beat early. An awkward dinner can curdle into a frightening one without a single new fact entering the room, just a shift in how long the camera stays.
A con man who fakes hauntings hands a filmmaker all three at once: the laugh, the dread and the bill coming due. The catch is that the trick is fragile. A cannibal family is one bad decision away from cute. Play the Sawyers with a wink and they become a Halloween attraction. Hooper’s cast never winked, and the grotesque stayed terrifying because of it.
So the real question over the A24 film is not whether Barker can stage a scare. It is whether he can keep that human discomfort, the squirm he is so good at, without letting the family turn ironic. He has the instinct. Nobody knows yet if it survives contact with Leatherface.
Directing up
There is also who he is now working with. Barker spent years directing friends and unknown actors, and Anything But Ghosts put him across the monitor from Aaron Paul and Bryce Dallas Howard. He has admitted he was nervous about it, texting his father, screenwriter Jeff Barker, that he felt out of his depth giving notes to performers at that level. His dad’s answer was blunt: if you fly someone across the country to be in your movie, the worst thing you can do is fail to direct them. Barker has since called Paul and Howard playful collaborators with no ego, and noted that Howard, herself a director, never once tried to take the wheel. He went in afraid of asking too much of them and came out understanding the job was to ask more.
The “good for its time” flap deserves a clear eye. Barker called Hooper’s original “really good for its time” at a Q&A, a clip that traveled without the next sentence, where he said he loves the film and called it raw. One critic took it as a kid talking out of turn. That was one writer’s reaction, not all of fandom, and the full quote is far fonder than the pull clip.
Leatherface owns the chainsaw. The family dinner has always been the part that stays under the skin, and Barker seems to know it.
His next test is scale. The instincts he built in bedrooms, on a YouTube channel and on an $800 feature have already survived one studio jump and come out enormous. Whether they survive a farmhouse this haunted, and a studio this watchful, is the only thing left to find out.
