The Curious Parallels Between Sam Raimi And Curry Barker's Early Filmmaker Beginnings

Sam Raimi broke out with The Evil Dead in his early 20s. Curry Barker broke out with Obsession in his mid-20s. The steps they took to get there share a few commonalities.

Sam Raimi and Curry Barker were born 40 years apart, and yet, their early forays into filmmaking show a strangely similar pattern into how they broke out.

Survivorship bias aside— hundreds of people could repeat what Raimi and Barker did without achieving the same results— the story isn’t a simple If-you-do-this-then-this-will-happen case study. There’s a lot of luck involved in helping both careers take off.

But there is also a valuable lesson in both cases about practicing early, fine-tuning your process, and finding the right collaborator to practice early with.

Oh, and the power of starting with comedy. That might be the biggest parallel between Raimi and Barker.

Let’s start with Sam Raimi.

Sam Raimi (b. 1959) grew up in Michigan during the sixties where he was fascinated by the home movies that his father would shoot on a Super 8mm movie camera. In 1975, Raimi met two important collaborators in his life: Bruce Campbell and Scott Spiegel.

All three of them made 8mm movies; Raimi and Spiegel in particular bonded over The Three Stooges. It soon became clear that Campbell was the star of the group—or at least the best-looking, so he became the actor in all their shorts.

And they made quite a lot. All of them comedies.

Spiegel had an ingenious tactic: He would take the soundtracks to Three Stooges shorts and match them against his own visuals to create Stooges-inspired comedies titled Three Pests in a Mess and Half-Wits Holiday.

Campbell also liked to make comedies and directed flicks such as Supa Bad and Son of Hitler, the latter being a comedy about Hitler’s progeny who is too young to drive and is driven around everywhere by his mother in a station wagon.

This trio continued making 8mm films all the way to college. Things got a little more ambitious there.

In 1977, they made a $700-budget short called The Happy Valley Kid. Raimi directed, and all three appeared in it. By this time, they also met the fourth important person of their future collaboration: Robert Tappert. They screened the short film on their college campus, charging $1.50 for admission. Making $250 per night, they ultimately grossed about $5,000 over forty-four screenings until the print was shelved before it could completely fall apart.

Their next short was also a comedy— and a disaster. It’s Murder! had twice the budget of The Happy Valley Kid— $2,000— but none of its success. The first night, only the cast and crew were present. The next night, only one person turned up, and he walked out halfway, telling Raimi and company to keep his money, the film was so bad he didn’t want it back. It was a blow and an eye-opener for Raimi. As he sat in the balcony and rewound the film, he thought to himself: “I gotta somehow figure out a way not to be in this position again.”

This meant pivoting to a more commercial genre. Despite his love of comedy, Raimi decided that horror was “the entry level that most people use”. Moreover, they realized that a failed comedy made less money than a failed horror movie.

In other words: horror made better business sense.

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Bob Clark, the director of both the horror Black Christmas and the comedy Porky’s, once said:

It was smart to go into horror films to get yourself started if you wanted to build a career. You could get together with your college buddies, make a movie, and have a market for that genre, whereas anything else is a tough sell.

It was a screening of Halloween (1978) that sparked the idea in Raimi’s head to make a horror movie. He’d gone to watch with his girlfriend, and noticed the women in the audience screamed their heads off the entire film. He wondered: could they make something that good?

Now this part is a little important. Unlike today, they didn’t have the internet to easily watch and study horror films. For that matter, there weren’t so many good horror films out there, either.

Instead, they went to the drive-in movie theaters. Basically, an outdoor movie theater set up in a parking area where you watched the film from your car. At the time, Raimi and his collaborators could catch two movies for two bucks each night. A good bargain, as a lot of those movies left much to be desired.

They noticed that whenever the audience didn’t like the movie, they’d “honk their horns, or white out the screen with their headlights.”

Raimi also noticed that these movies always had:

• Thirty minutes of “slow stuff”

• A good scare

• Another fifteen minutes of “slow stuff”

• A good suspense sequence

• More “slow stuff”!

• And a good ending

Finally, after enduring about twenty such movies, Raimi brainstormed with Tapert and Campbell and said:

Why don’t we just make one that has all the good stuff and skip the slow stuff?

Campbell noted that this became their creed:

Keep the pace fast and furious, and once the horror starts, never let up. We determined, whether our movie was good or bad, to go all-out, nonstop. If we were going to make a horror film, we were terribly concerned to make a horror film with a capital H.

But since none of them had made a proper horror before, they decided to make a demo film to show potential investors.

The group raised $1,600— with much difficulty— to film Within the Woods, a thirty-two-minute short film. It was shot on Super 8 in eight days on Tapert’s family farm in the spring of 1979.

Before they shopped it around to raise money for a feature version of Within the Woods (then titled as Book of the Dead), they decided to test it out on actual moviegoing audiences— their customer.

So they arranged a screening and tested it at their old high school. The feedback was, according to Campbell, “good… and loud”.

Encouraged by the response, they managed to convince the manager of a local theater called the Punch and Judy to screen Within the Woods. That’s how on August 1979, they got the short film in front of audiences. In Campbell’s words:

There was our crappy little Super 8 projector taking up about a quarter of the screen, with the sound system hissing and humming, but it worked, and audience members actually reacted.

In the days long before YouTube was born, the group used a live audience at a local theater to test out Within the Woods, also got a positive review from Michael McWilliams in The Detroit News on August 24, 1979, who wrote:

“[Sam Raimi] has looked at Night of the Living Dead and knows the terror of the grave. He has looked at Carrie and knows the effect of the bloody arm out of the blue. He has looked at Psycho and knows our fear of knives and cellars. He has looked at Texas Chain Saw Massacre and knows our primal fascination with blood.… Raimi displays a wealth of learning in Within the Woods. Perhaps he will be able to make a more extended work, a feature film, in which he can clean up some of his technical deficiencies and prove that he has the personal depth to provide a context—a thematic meaning—for all his gore.”

And this prototype eventually led to the making of The Evil Dead launched Sam Raimi’s career, though that’s a whole other story. For now, these are the events that led up to the film that helped Raimi get started.

Curry Barker (b. 1999) grew up in Mobile, Alabama. He moved to Los Angeles to study at the New York Film Academy and there, he met fellow student Cooper Tomlinson. Together, the two formed a YouTube channel called that’s a bad idea (all in lowercase) and started making YouTube videos together, what Tomlinson called their “film school outside of film school”.

Barker would write, direct, and also co-star with Tomlinson, making skits that featured a blend of “observational comedy” that soon turned into “darker or more surreal territory”. It wasn’t Barker’s first YouTube channel; he’d started a smaller one much earlier when in school. His first video was uploaded about 9 years ago, so we’re looking at 2017. Over the following years, including when he and Tomlinson moved in together, Barker would shoot and upload a lot of videos.

In an excellent detailed breakdown, How That Movie Got Made observes that before Obsession, Barker spent close to a decade honing and polishing his craft¹:

Just in terms of long-form videos (not counting YouTube shorts), between the video above and this video below, Curry released an additional 14 videos in the intervening 3 years.

More crucially, he notes something that most people might miss about Barker’s early days while daydreaming about replicating Barker’s success.

The first video uploaded on the channel got 39,000 views.

Three years later and 14 more long-form videos later, while the polish and craft has improved, the video gets lesser views.

That’s the brutal reality. Despite getting better, the video doesn’t boost views.

But that’s the name of the game. As How That Move Got Made notes:

You can’t be in this for instant gratification. A lot of the stuff you’re going to try isn’t going to work, or is only going to work for a finite audience. This is true for filmmakers, for writers, for anyone pursuing anything creative.

The channel’s 17th video is the first horror short film uploaded, called HEAVY EYES. It came out three years ago (circa 2023). The 18th video, a prank video, nets the channel their first 1 million views.

It took them 6 years and 18 videos to hit their first 1 million views.

From there on, the videos start averaging higher views and that same year, he uploads the video that really gets him a lot of attention: a horror short film called The Chair. How That Movie Got Made makes two points:

1. The filmmaking craft has grown significantly since that first video uploaded in 2017.

2. When you zoom out to look at the body of work on the YouTube channel, the “ incremental improvements” were “clearly present”.

The Chair would become the most popular video on the channel, but most importantly, it would catch the attention of producer James Harris of Tea Shop Productions, who’d go on to fund and produce Obsession.

But even before Obsession, Curry Barker went out and made his first feature film for $800² called Milk & Serial, an hour-long found footage/slasher film shot largely in his and Tomlinson’s shared bedroom, about YouTube prankers who take things too far. He spent a year trying to sell the film through traditional sales agents, festival submission networks, and buyers.

He failed. Despite the numbers on that’s a bad idea, no conventional distributor made a deal.

One nearly did, though. But after chasing down the proper forms and releases they hadn’t prepared for production, Barker ultimately uploaded it on YouTube. In an interview, he says:

We just wanted the best home for it. Interestingly enough, after 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.’ 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.

Thanks to the following they’d built over seven years, the video eventually garnered 3.8 million views and fostered discussion on the internet. With YouTube advertising, Barker quickly made back the rest of his money. But more importantly, it got Barker representation which, you can bet, was crucial in the road leading up to the release of Obsession.

Again, that’s a different story.

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But have you noticed the parallels yet between Sam Raimi and Curry Barker?

Both started in comedy— Raimi with his love of The Three Stooges; Barker with sketch comedies such as Key & Peele.

Both made a lot of early comedy videos— Raimi with his 8mm short films; Barker with his skit videos on YouTube³.

Both screened their early stuff to audiences, just in different ways— Raimi on campus (where they made a little money); Barker on YouTube, with the ones hitting high numbers probably generating advertising money⁴.

Both had an actor friend and collaborator to make stuff with that allowed both actor and director to practice their craft— Raimi had Bruce Campbell; Barker had Cooper Tomlinson.

Both pivoted from comedy to horror in order to get their foot into the door.

Both did their research to determine what worked and what didn’t— Raimi did his research at drive-in movies to understand horror films; Barker probably studied the YouTube comments on their videos and other data pertaining to it.

Curious, isn’t it?

Everyone in Hollywood is now scrambling to find the next YouTuber to make a film— Hollywood does tend to take the wrong lessons, remember the rush to make movies based on toys after Barbie⁵? And I’m certain every aspiring filmmaker is probably thinking that a YouTube channel will automatically make it easier to get into Hollywood— wrong lesson again.

Holding up the early trajectories of Curry Barker alongside Sam Raimi’s, I do believe the lesson is to pay more attention to their processes than the outcome, and emulate that.

That means finding a willing performer to act in your stuff. The beauty of the Raimi-Campbell and Barker-Tomlinson partnerships is that both actors get to work on their respective crafts. Everyone benefits.

That means failing early and failing fast by making a lot of stuff for as little as possible, and being willing to endure long stretches of time without any results.

Raimi finished shooting The Evil Dead in 1979; it took another two years before it was released because they couldn’t find distribution.

Barker’s first film, Milk & Serial, didn’t find distribution for a year until he uploaded it on their YouTube channel.

There’s no such thing as overnight success. Zoom in, study the details, and you’ll discover that it took many years and failed efforts to reach that point.

That’s the other thing: show your stuff. Whether you’re a filmmaker, a writer, a musician, or an artist, you have to put your work out there— even if it is rough. Yes, it can make you feel self-conscious; yes, it can feel like you’re walking down the road naked; but it’s the only way to test out your material early to see what’s working and what isn’t.

Barker had an advantage that Raimi didn’t have: YouTube. But Raimi took advantage of screening his stuff at university— which was where he learned that failing in comedy was a bad financial prospect— and later at his old school and local theater for testing Within the Woods. For Barker, uploading The Chair plus the later release of his found footage film got him noticed by people interested in offering him a chance.

The eventual outcomes of both The Evil Dead and Obsession are aspiring for filmmakers. But instead of being dazzled by the success, look at the grueling years of work, effort, and failure it took both Sam Raimi and Curry Barker respectively to get there.

And ask: Are you willing to go through all that early hard years… or do you just want the shiny prize at the end?

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Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes

1. A must-read for aspiring filmmakers.

2. Which was possible because most of the actors were their friends and participated for free while Barker directed, produced, wrote, shot, and edited the film. So the $800 is not the real budget. Most of it went to pay actor Jonnathon Cripple— the other actor outside Barker’s social group— and to buy a Sony camcorder for the specific look that Barker wanted; which he then sold for a profit $100.

3. The New Yorker notes that Barker spent his senior year of high school learning about various camera lenses and microphones to make his sketches feel “cinematic” and was adamant on shooting horizontally than tailoring their material for Instagram or TikTok; he did eventually shoot vertical video.

4. In fact, I’m convinced that if Sam Raimi had been born in the 90s, he’d have also uploaded his early shorts on YouTube.

5. … wait, what happened to that? It’s been 3 years and NOTHING since.