Obsession fans, you need to watch the director's first film on YouTube

Milk & Serial thrives on discomfort

The film has themes and stylistic choices Barker would carry over to Obsession

According to a Variety feature from 2024, Barker and Tomlinson uploaded Milk & Serial to YouTube in 2024 after failing to find a distributor who was willing to give it a traditional theatrical release. As a film about dueling prank video creators Milk (Barker) and Seven (Tomlinson), Milk & Serial is not quite like The Blair Witch Project in its approach to found footage, but it does make a lot of sense to watch it on a laptop screen because of its subject matter. Plus, the conceit allows for a certain kind of confessional intimacy that makes the plot of the film all the more scary.

Milk & Serial follows Seven as he preps a prank for Milk’s birthday, the culmination, as the film later reveals, of growing tension between the two YouTube creators. The prank goes off with a hitch at Milk’s birthday party, but things quickly spiral out of control from there, as it becomes clear he has bigger plans than just getting Seven back. Seven’s prank involves a lot of fake blood, but you’ll see plenty of real blood before Milk & Serial is over.

The film is admittedly messier than Barker’s Obsession, and not quite as enjoyably mean. But if you were taken by the sharpness of Obsession’s themes, there are some interesting threads to trace back to this YouTube debut. There are broader things, like the fact both films feature groups of semi-connected friends navigating quasi-adulthood, and some sense that social boundaries being pushed or constantly violated is a great engine for producing tension. You might spot more specific details, too. Both Milk & Serial and Obsession share a belief that sometimes out of focus and off-camera action can be just as spooky as a jump scare. Barker also seemed to zero in on how compelling it is to watch a weird and potentially dangerous character mug to the camera, something Obsession uses to great effect.

The film obviously feels amateur in comparison to what would come later, but the fact it’s available as a record of a specific time in multiple artists lives makes it valuable. It being more than a little creepy makes it worth a watch, too.

The YouTube to Hollywood pipeline is up and running

Obsession and Backrooms could be the start of something new

If you’ve been to the movies recently, you might know that Barker isn’t the only director with a buzzy horror movie and a big YouTube back catalog. Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old director of Backrooms, has a storied history of posting short films to YouTube under the name Kane Pixels. Parsons’ short films can similarly act as a way to study his development as a filmmaker, and several seem like they’ll act as prequels and sequels, expanding on the world of his feature film.