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Curry Barker made Obsession for $750,000 and it became the biggest movie Focus Features has ever released. His follow-up now has a date. Anything But Ghosts opens in theaters May 7, 2027, with Focus holding it worldwide and Universal Pictures International taking it overseas.
Barker writes and directs from a script he wrote with Cooper Tomlinson, and the two of them play a pair of fake ghost hunters who run into something that is not fake. Aaron Paul, Bryce Dallas Howard, Violet McGraw and Chris Reinacher are the names around them. Howard came aboard in April, Reinacher in June. Paul has one horror credit that will mean something to this audience: he played Krug’s brother Francis in the 2009 Last House on the Left remake.
The Tone Is the Gamble
Barker has said the film leans more comedic than Obsession without being a comedy, and that his own character is the more selfish half of the operation. Tomlinson has put it more bluntly: the movie is “like if Key and Peele walked into Hereditary.” That is a harder trick than the first one pulled. Obsession only had to frighten people.
$750,000 Went a Long Way
Barker’s actual first feature was Milk & Serial, a 62-minute found-footage film he shot for roughly $800 with friends on weekends and dumped on YouTube in 2024 after a year of failing to land a distributor. Obsession premiered at Toronto in 2025, and Barker has said Netflix wanted to take it straight to streaming before Focus bought it for theaters. It opened wide in May 2026 and has since passed $400 million worldwide, which made it the highest-grossing release in Focus’s history. Its lead, Inde Navarrette, has already moved on to an Apple thriller.
Violet McGraw Already Has a Horror Résumé
McGraw played the young Nell in The Haunting of Hill House in 2018, appeared in Doctor Sleep the year after, and has carried both M3GAN films as Cady. She was born in 2011, so she has worked for Mike Flanagan twice and fronted a Blumhouse franchise before she was old enough to drive.
Blumhouse and Atomic Monster Are Both In
Jason Blum, Roy Lee, Steven Schneider, Adam Hendricks and Greg Gilreath produce, with Blumhouse, Atomic Monster, Spooky Pictures, Divide/Conquer, Image Nation and That’s a Bad Idea behind the film. Barker and Tomlinson executive produce alongside Daniel Bekerman and Ben Ross.
No footage has surfaced, and a trailer is not expected until early 2027. Until then the only evidence for Anything But Ghosts is what Barker did with $800 and then with $750,000, which is a better thing to point at than most filmmakers have by their third film.