Last Updated on September 3, 2024 by Angel Melanson
There’s low-budget filmmaking, then there’s what filmmaker Curry Barker has managed to do with Milk & Serial. Produced for a mere $800, the 62-minute, found footage horror film has managed to rise above the noise of the internet and find success on YouTube. Rather than go through a traditional distributor, Barker decided to just release the film in its entirety for free. So far, it seems to be working.
Barker, who previously directed a short titled The Chair that got an awful lot of attention, stars in, directs, wrote, edited and produced the buzzy feature. According to Variety, he worked with his partner in crime Cooper Tomlinson. The two regularly post videos to their TikTok and YouTube channels, titled that’s a bad idea. Now, they’ve got a feature-length horror film with 341,000 views (and counting). So, what’s the ultra-low-budget found footage endeavor about? The brief logline reads as follows:
“When a surprise birthday prank goes terribly wrong, two social media influencers must face the devastating consequences that come after…”
We’ve seen plenty of filmmakers have luck with shorts on the internet in the past. Just look at Kris J. Cummins terrifying Exposure. David F. Sandberg also got Lights Out based on a short he made. But uploading a whole feature – one that had distribution, per Variety's report – that's something else entirely. So, why upload it for free? Barker just wanted people to see it, plain and simple.
“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.”
The shoot took four months. Barker and Tomlinson mostly shot it with their friends, largely on weekends. Most of the miniscule $800 budget went to pay the one actor by the name of Jonnathon Cripple who was outside of their social group. The rest went to a Sony camcorder to actually shoot the movie. Funny enough, Barker made a $100 profit from the camera by selling it after the shoot. The rest has already been made from YouTube ad money.
Stream Milk & Serial in its entirety below, if you please. For more, check out director Fede Alvarez’s remastered breakthrough short film Panic Attack!
