Curry Barker Returns to YouTube With New Short ‘Mama Bear’

Skip to content The “Obsession” filmmaker’s five-minute horror flick arrives just in time for Halloween October 29, 2026 @ 11:08 AM Curry Barker's "Mama Bear" (That's a Bad Idea/YouTube) Curry Barker has gone back to his roots. The filmmaker behind “Obsession” and the upcoming horror-comedy “Anything But Ghosts” returned to his YouTube channel That’s a Bad Idea on Thursday with a new five-minute short titled “Mama Bear.” The horror video, sponsored by Windows, is brief, slick and very surreal — with a certain stylistic trick that fans of “Obsession” might recognize. The plot of “Mama Bear” is somewhat hard to describe, but the film (written, directed and edited by Barker) shares “Obsession’s” tone and visual style. It also evokes some of Barker’s previous horror short films uploaded to YouTube, such as “Warnings” and “The Chair.” “The Chair” was the short that first caught the attention of James Harris, the producer who helped get “Obsession” off the ground. Before that film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, Barker took to YouTube to release his debut feature, an $800 thriller called “Milk & Serial.” After Focus Features picked “Obsession” up at TIFF (and later signed on to distribute “Anything But Ghosts”), Barker’s theatrical debut became the highest-grossing film to ever be acquired at a film festival and the highest-grossing film with a budget of less than $1 million. Its box office total currently sits at around $525 million. Barker wrote and directed “Anything But Ghosts,” working alongside his That’s a Bad Idea sketch partner Cooper Tomlinson (who co-wrote the film and also starred in “Obsession”). This feature will also see Barker in front of the camera, as he and Tomlinson play a pair of con men who pretend to be paranormal investigators until they come upon a real haunting. Bryce Dallas Howard and Aaron Paul join the duo in the cast. After “Anything But Ghosts,” Barker is tapped to develop a “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” reboot at A24. He also has a new, original horror flick lined up at Universal and Blumhouse Atomic Monster.