Curry Barker and Cooper Tomlinson’s YouTube channel “That’s a Bad Idea” typically traffics in comedy sketches, like this one from December in which Curry tries out Elon Musk’s Neuralink with surprisingly effective results. The duo has occasionally dabbled in other genres on their channel, but never before on the grand scale of their latest project, the found footage horror film “Milk & Serial.”
Over the course of 60 unpredictable and action-packed minutes, “Curry and Coop” take us on a dark journey, starring as heavily fictionalized variations on themselves (“Milk and Seven”) in a meta-narrative about YouTube pranksters locked in a deadly competition. It’s violent and troubling at times. But also sure to feel relevant and familiar to audiences that consume a lot of YouTube.
The film is an impressive feat both narratively and on a technical basis. It employs the found footage conceit in a way that feels relatively grounded and realistic. A lot of found footage movies fail to answer the fundamental question “why would anyone be filming this while it happened to them?” but rooting their story in the world of YouTube creators and pranks answers a lot of these queries before they’re even raised.
It’s also a funny and carefully-observed send-up of YouTube creators who lose all sense of themselves apart from their channels, and whose lives come to revolve around the constant, grinding need to generate fresh content. Hollywood frequently tries to riff on the hottest online trends and tech platforms (check out how many recent horror films center on killer apps) but it often feels pandering or inaccurate.
The podcasters in David Gordon Green’s “Halloween” don’t seem to know what they’re doing, and though we’re told Glen Powell’s storm-chaser in “Twisters” has over a million YouTube followers, it’s more a throwaway reference designed to make the film feel hip and relevant, than anything that actually informs his character. “Milk & Serial,” on the other hand, is very clearly the work of guys who live and breathe YouTube, and who know how to depict the life of a creator with at-times stunning accuracy, right down to Milk not being able to actually define the term “gaslighting.”
But perhaps most impressively, Barker and Tomlinson were able to produce their full 60-minute feature film for a budget of just $800. In an era when studios are dropping hundreds of millions on theatrical films that then massively disappoint at the box office these guys were able to make a complete movie, that fans are watching and enjoying, for roughly the price of a new iPhone.
Sure, it’s mostly just people talking in a residence that’s clearly the filmmakers’ home, but that’s not to say there are no action set pieces or visual effects. It’s a movie.
The film has racked up over 350,000 views in around two weeks on YouTube, and has started attracting mainstream attention. Bloody Disgusting called it “one of the year’s best-kept secrets,” The Guardian called it “great” and an “unbeatable” calling card for whatever the team is cooking up next, while Variety reports that Barker is already in discussions with mainstream film producer James Harris (“Fall,” “V/H/S/Beyond”) about his next project.
To be sure, up-and-coming horror filmmakers getting their start on YouTube is nothing new. The production team Radio Silence – which made the horror films “Ready or Not,” “Scream,” “Scream VI,” and “Abigail” – started as a collective of YouTubers known as Chad, Matt & Rob. YouTube film reviewer Chris Stuckmann’s fundraised his debut feature, the horror film “Shelby Oaks,” on Kickstarter before “Haunting of Hill House” creator Mike Flanagan joined as an executive producer and brought in “Longlegs” distributor Neon. Stuckmann’s movie will get a theatrical release next year. Paramount’s “Smile” films started as a short called “Laura Hasn’t Slept” which was produced in 2019, but uploaded to YouTube in 2022 after premiering at SXSW.
What sets “Milk & Serial” apart is, in part, the clever storytelling and formatting. It’s a horror film about YouTubers that lives on YouTube, giving it a meta-creepy sense of added realism. But perhaps most compelling, it’s a horror film that’s generating a considerable fanbase on YouTube itself. While The Guardian assures readers that this will one day serve as a calling card for the talents of Curry Barker, it’s not ONLY a calling card. It’s a finished film that’s being streamed and enjoyed right now on a widely accessible media platform. (In fact, the most-watched platform on American televisions, according to Nielsen).
There’s a sort of assumed, unspoken hierarchy of film distribution, with wide theatrical releases on top, then movies hit select or arthouse theaters in major cities, then films that go direct subscription streaming platforms, then movies that go to VOD services, and on and on, until you get to maybe Tubi Originals at the very bottom. But this is increasingly an antiquated way of thinking about content distribution that’s also exceptionally costly. Making traditional Hollywood movies is wildly expensive, particularly when baking in the salaries of internationally recognized celebrities and blockbuster marketing campaigns, which can sometimes cost as much as the films themselves.
“Milk & Serial” attracted an audience the old-fashioned way, through buzzy word of mouth. The film has already massively exceeded the “That’s a Bad Idea” subscriber count, and it’s far more popular than most of their other releases, suggesting that it has already left the orbit of their original fanbase. If Curry Barker and Cooper Tomlinson can generate 300,000+ views in a few weeks for an $800 movie on YouTube, based solely on hype and backlinks from Reddit, then it’s not so much the future of filmmaking that’s in question. It’s the future of spending $200 million on a movie that will rely on people paying tickets to physically go to a movie theater that’s up for actual debate.
