How Curry Barker Made the Slasher for $800

Spoiler alert: This article contains minor spoilers for “Milk & Serial.”“ Now available to watch on YouTube.

Carrie Parker delivered the most surprising song of the year.

The director and comedian is the mastermind behind “Milk & Serial,” a 62-minute horror film about YouTube pranksters who get into some fast-escalating trouble that’s best left unseen. Made for just $800, the film co-stars Parker and his comedy partner, Cooper Tomlinson, who also produces.

The duo primarily posts sketch videos on their TikTok and YouTube channels, “This is a Bad Idea,” while occasionally showing off other projects, like Parker’s 2023 horror short “The Chair,” which has been viewed over 5.5 million times on the latter. After considering working with a distributor for “Milk & Serial,” Parker decided to drop the full-length film on YouTube on August 8. Since then, it has been viewed over 323,000 times (as of August 26) and has fueled a lot of discussion on horror fan hubs like Reddit, YouTube, and #HorrorTok.

“With The Chair, there were a lot of comments like, ‘Hollywood should budget this guy,’” Parker says. “But when you do a feature film, it feels different in a way I didn’t expect. People who review feature films for a living are reviewing this film, which they wouldn’t do for a short film. But suddenly you see videos discussing both ‘Alien: Romulus’ and ‘Milk & Serial.’”

Parker, who in addition to directing and starring in the film, wrote the screenplay, was the producer, editor, co-director of cinematography, and composer, came up with the idea while working on his acting reel.

“I wrote a comedy scene, a cowboy scene,” he says. “I wrote all these different scenes, and I wrote one serial killer scene because I thought I could do a scary serial killer vibe. This guy tells this girl, ‘It’s not a joke,’ and he’s going to kill her at the end of the night. It was just for my footage, but I thought, ‘Oh my God, I can turn this into a full-length movie.’ Cooper was in Tennessee shooting a movie, but I said, ‘Man, when you get back, we’re going to make this.’”

From there, the duo set out to shoot the film for four months with friends playing other roles and working weekends as everyone was available. The bulk of the $800 budget went to paying the only actor outside their social group (Jonathan Krieble, who also appeared in “The Chair”) and buying the Sony camcorder they shot the film with. Fortunately, Parker made a $100 profit on the camera when the filmmakers sold it after filming, and they quickly made back the rest of the money through YouTube advertising, so the production quickly turned a profit.

As for the decision to release the film for free on YouTube, Parker says he found a distributor willing to take it on. But after working with the company to find suitable formats and releases that they hadn’t considered for their own independent production, Parker decided he wanted their fans to see the project live.

“We just wanted the best place for it,” he says. “And the interesting thing is that after we got all the paperwork and everything was sorted out, we thought, ‘Man, maybe this distribution company is going to put this movie behind a paywall, and someone is going to have to pay $2.99 ​​to watch it on Shudder or whatever it ends up being.’ I feel like our fans deserve a chance to see this. They saw the poster on my IMDb for a year and were like, ‘What is this?’ So even though we worked really hard for a year trying to get this thing distributed, we said, ‘Fuck it’ and put it on YouTube. Before that, I always felt like a real movie should be respected on Netflix or Shudder or Hulu or whatever. But people respect it and they respect that it’s free.”

The freedom to self-distribute also allowed Parker to modify the project on his own terms. He took this especially seriously in the editing room, where he was able to decide where to cut moments in his comedy sketches and short films to increase laughter or horror.

“There’s an hour and 25-minute clip of this film,” he says. “Before we put it on YouTube, I cut out 20 minutes just to make it faster. I’ve always been an editor and I’ve just been watching it and thought, ‘Oh, that’s the rhythm, let’s make it faster.’ I think people will appreciate how fast the film moves. You can’t pinpoint a specific scene that I cut out, because every scene is still in the film. It’s just cutting out the fat, and because it’s a found footage film, it allows me to make it a little choppy to get the rhythms right.”

Despite the positive reception for “Milk & Serial,” Parker, who is portrayed by Aaron Volpe in Underground, isn’t sitting around sipping champagne. He’s currently casting for a feature film called “Obsession.” James Harris, who produced horror hits like “Fall” and “47 Meters Down,” has also joined the cast through his Tea Shop Productions company.

“I’ve never had a budget in my life,” Parker says. “I worked on this script for over eight months going back and forth with this production company and it was absolutely amazing.”

Although details, including the script, are still under wraps, Parker says filming is expected to begin in late October.

“It’s a horror movie—a total horror,” he says. “It’s a horror movie. It’s going to be crazy. This movie is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It’s completely different from Milk & Serial… I’m not going to be in it and it’s not going to be a found footage movie. It’s going to be done like The Chair.”

As for the future of “Milk & Serial”? Parker is happy to keep the production online, and although the film’s blood-soaked ending briefly hints at a sequel via a camera shot by an unseen figure, he believes the mystery is better left to the imagination than explained in another chapter.

“If this movie takes off and becomes a classic like Blair Witch or Creep, maybe we could do a sequel,” Parker says. “That would be crazy. But right now there’s no plan. I think what’s funny is that the camera grab was kind of a manipulation of the audience, who were watching this guy fool the audience throughout the movie. As a writer, I have no idea who grabbed the camera. But having everyone in the comments speculate about who did it is a lot of fun.”

Watch the movie below.