From an $800 horror short to A24

Hey, Neighbor,

Shortly after Cooper and Curry released Milk & Serial, I called them up to chat about building a career in modern Hollywood. At the time, Curry was just beginning production for Obsession. I instantly left the conversation knowing that their story was chockful of insights and inspiration for anyone trying to create…well, anything, really.

“I don’t think we’ll ever stop fighting…and I think what’s great is that if we just get no’s for the rest of our lives, we’re going to make it anyway.”

I never put the interview out publicly, but with Obsession finally opening this weekend—and Coop & Curry getting their proper flowers—it felt like the right time. You can watch and/or listen to my conversation with the duo above, and scroll down for three quotes that stood out.

— NGL

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In 2018, Coop and Curry met as wide-eyed, eighteen-year-old freshmen at a film school in Los Angeles. Neither was from the city—Coop from Seattle, Curry from Mobile—or carried any industry connections.

But “we had a common interest that we actually wanted to go and make things,” Curry told me. “And so we kind of migrated towards each other pretty quickly.”

Eleven months in, they both dropped out, and got to work on a web series called Roommates. Not long after, the pandemic hit.

“Everyone was saying that the industry was shut down,” Curry said. “We were like, ‘hey, let’s just make as much stuff as we possibly can,’ ya know?”

With that’s a bad idea, the duo pulled inspiration from sketch comics like Tim Robinson and Key & Peele, starting with vertical skits for the TikTok era. In between their day jobs, they’d constantly be writing new material, stockpiling “hundreds of ideas” and pulling inspiration from everyday things as simple as fast food drive-throughs. Slowly but surely, they scaled up to creating a new sketch every week, and reached a point where they brought in enough revenue to quit their day jobs.

“I think a lot of people are trying to blow up, but if you do that, you won’t blow up,” Cooper said. “We weren’t. We were just like, we’ll have this in our artillery. It’s something to show.”

One of Curry’s day jobs was as a COVID monitor on the last two seasons of This Is Us, a production role he described as “the lowest of the low, as far as the totem pole goes.”

But he made the most of appearing on set for one of television’s most popular shows. “I would actually go up to Michael, who was the gaffer, and Yasu, who was the DP, and start conversations with them,” Curry said. “I still have their numbers to this day…even though I was a nobody and probably shouldn’t have talked to them, I did, and I would ask them questions. And they really would teach me.”

Cooper credits Curry for elevating the look and production of their videos. After all, the dream was still to level up and make films. The only thing left was a metric ton of elbow grease.

Before they quit their day jobs, they would follow “twelve-hour work days” by editing their comedy sketches…then save any time they had left to write and shoot horror shorts, starting with 2022’s five-minute HEAVY EYES. The next year, they followed up with The Chair, a twenty-four minute film that took off among the genre’s fans (it currently sits at nearly ten million views on YouTube).

By the time Coop and Curry dropped Milk & Serial in 2024, the duo had built their horror bona fides, expanding their channel from quick-hitting skits to a genuine destination for horror fans.

“There’s two different ways you could do this,” Curry told me. “You could be content with having the skits, and you could use all the other time to just play around and enjoy your twenties. And I think a lot of people in our position would do that.”

“There’s no shame in that, because a lot of people are content with just being on the Internet,” he continued. “But, you know, we just use our time wisely. If we have extra time, we write a script, or we write a screenplay.”

It’s safe to say that Coop and Curry are well on their way to making their Hollywood dreams a reality. Last September, Obsession set a genre record at the Toronto International Film Festival, selling to Focus Features for fifteen million dollars.

In hindsight, it may have been a discount. Obsession has already grossed nearly three million dollars in early previews—tracking ahead of previous horror hits like Smile (2022) and Talk to Me (also 2022).

It’s a far cry from when Coop and Curry were living paycheck-to-paycheck just three years ago, picking up a camcorder and shooting Milk & Serial for eight hundred dollars.

Along with the eventual Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot at A24, Curry is currently in production on his next film, Anything But Ghosts, which stars Cooper alongside Aaron Paul (of Breaking Bad fame) and Bryce Dallas Howard. Cosigns include genuine auteurs like Ari Aster and the legendary horror producer Jason Blum. In other words, the sky’s the limit.

But when I talked to the duo, they acknowledged that—like everyone working in entertainment—no one truly knows where the industry is going. What they do know is that the channel they’ve already built isn’t just solely a backup option.

“I don’t think we’ll ever settle,” Curry told me. “Me and Cooper have a lot of aspirations to tell stories that take a little bit longer than a minute and twenty seconds, so we’re waiting for the Internet to catch up with us and be ready.”

“We’re never gonna stop fighting,” Cooper said. “If we keep getting no’s for the rest of our lives, we’re gonna make it anyway…we’re gonna throw it up on YouTube, or wherever the next platform is.”

“We have a greenlit show,” Curry concluded. “It’s called YouTube.”

Obsession (2026) is playing in theaters now.

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