$800 found footage phenom ‘Milk & Serial’ proves YouTube is still the hub for budding horror talent

Over the past couple years, Hollywood has realized something the internet’s known for years: YouTube is the home for indie horror. There is a veritable smorgasbord of short horror films posted across the platform, with some nabbing hundreds of thousands and even millions of views. And those films are helping YouTube creators like RackaRacka and Chris Stuckmann pave a path to the big screen.

The latest creator to join them is Curry Barker, whose 2023 horror short The Chair (5.5 million views) put him on the map, and whose latest project, a full-length, 62-minute found footage film called Milk & Serial, is turning him into a serious contender for top up-and-coming horror writer/director/actor/you-name-it-he’s-got-it.

Barker and his crew made Milk & Serial for $800. They all worked pro bono as the film’s cast of influencer-and-friends characters, so the production budget was used to compensate the one outside actor they hired. (That same actor also featured in The Chair.) They then earned $100 of that budget back by selling the camera they used to make the movie, Barker told Variety. Exactly the sort of thing we’d expect from a scrappy content creator.

Since being posted Aug. 8, Milk & Serial has brought in just over 456,000 views, and has gotten rave reviews from established horror publications like Bloody Disgusting. Barker told Variety the film’s reception “feels different” to that of The Chair, and that he’s experienced whiplash seeing his film mentioned in the same breath as Alien: Romulus.

Barker’s film follows familiar ground for us: it’s about influencers. The two main characters are a pair of prank bros who run their own channel and spend their time uploading mildly cringey videos where they torment one another For The Views. We won’t give any spoilers, but suffice it to say that, in good old horror fashion, things go very wrong, and our intrepid antiheroes are left to deal with the consequences of their actions.

Something else that’s in good old horror fashion is Milk & Serial‘s genre itself. Found footage gained fervor in Hollywood with the 1999 classic The Blair Witch Project, but YouTube horror lovers have pushed the boundaries of the genre with productions like Marble Hornets (aka Slenderman’s origin), Local 58, The Greylock Tapes, and more–not to mention all the DIY ghost content and abandoned location exploring that feels found footage-y.

Barker (whose channel that’s a bad idea has 642,000 subscribers) told Variety he had a distributor on the line for Milk & Serial, but that ultimately he decided he wanted fans to see it directly, for free.

“[A]fter getting all the right paperwork and everything settled, we thought, ‘Man, this distribution company is probably just going to put it behind a paywall, and someone’s gonna have to pay $2.99 to watch it on Shudder or whatever it ends up being on,'” he said. “I feel like our fans deserve to have the opportunity to watch this. They’ve seen the poster on my IMDb for a year and wondered, ‘What is this?’ So even though we worked really hard for a year trying to get distribution for this thing, we said screw it and threw it on YouTube. Before, I always felt to be respected as a real movie it has to be on Netflix or Shudder or Hulu or whatever. But people do respect it and respect that it’s for free, too.”

Barker’s next project won’t be for free, though, and that’s because he’s working on another feature film called Obsession, this one with Fall and 47 Meters Down producer James Harris and his company Tea Shop Productions. Barker’s path to Obsession came after The Chair‘s virality–and now, instead of working with an $800 budget, he’s got a real chunk of change. (We don’t know how much.)

“I’ve never had a budget in my life,” he said. “I worked on this script for over eight months back and forth with this production company and it’s been absolutely amazing.”

No details on Obsession‘s plot yet, but whatever it turns out to be, we’re pretty stoked that another YouTuber has been picked up for a feature film. And until that movie hits theaters, we’ll be keeping an eye on Barker’s channel.