Why Are So Many Sketch Comedians Making Horror Films Now?
From Jordan Peele to Zach Cregger and Ari Aster, a growing number of sketch comedians are pivoting to horror. As Curry Barker follows suit with Obsession, Alistair Ryder explores the trend. Obsession is a dark supernatural horror that charts the fallout from a young man wishing on a magical stick for his co-worker to reciprocate his romantic feelings but, due to imprecise wording, effectively forces her into a co-dependent relationship neither can escape from. It’s a bleak, nihilistic movie with subtle commentary on toxic masculinity and the misogyny inherent in the Manic Pixie Dream Girl movie trope. Barker is the latest first-time horror filmmaker to be making waves in the genre after starting out as a comedian. His comedy roots are still evident in his work, even as it’s grown darker. Alongside his friend Cooper Tomlinson, he made shorts for the YouTube sketch-comedy channel That’s A Bad Idea, culminating in their 2024 magnum opus Milk & Serial. The 62-minute found-footage tale of an escalating prank war between two Logan Paul-style vloggers became a viral sensation, and attracted mainstream critical attention. Despite the reveal that one of its two sociopathic pranksters was a secret serial killer, the film maintained the spirit of black comedy more so than the horror it was being likened to. Hilarious and horrifying, Milk & Serial blurred the line between genres, thriving at both ends of its tonal spectrum. It wasn’t Barker’s debut horror experiment – his supernatural 2022 short The Chair played a lot straighter – but it was the first where you could see him taking equal inspiration from Jordan Peele’s background as a sketch comedian and a horror director. Naturally, this is why it struck a chord as comedians have grown to dominate the horror genre. In interviews, Barker has said that obsessively rewatching Key & Peele – the Comedy Central sketch show Peele made with Keegan-Michael Key – is the ‘reason why I’m funny’, and that he had tried to replicate the network production value of their show on a shoestring for each YouTube skit. Barker closely studied Peele’s script for Get Out when writing Obsession, fascinated with how the director ‘changed the boundaries of what a horror movie could be’ as he moved further away from the genre that made him a household name without abandoning it altogether. Peele’s unexpectedly successful transition from comic actor to Oscar-winning horror filmmaker is the obvious blueprint for a new generation of budding directors cutting their teeth on silly homemade shorts, aspiring to make something that’ll be taken more seriously. Consider Aussie twins Danny and Michael Philippou. Those human golden retrievers started their directorial careers as tweens filming WWE-style wrestling matches with their mates, eventually graduating to making slightly more respectable scripted skits with titles like Ronald McDonald vs Cookie Monster. You’d be forgiven for not realising they were also responsible for directing the distressing possession films Talk to Me and Bring Her Back. Also in the early 2010s, a young American filmmaker wrote, directed and starred in a lowbrow infomercial parody for a device called ‘Tino’s Dick Fart’, which does exactly what it says on the tin. A few years later, that short’s director, Ari Aster, would be hailed by Martin Scorsese as one of the most exciting voices in modern cinema thanks to his breakout horror movies Hereditary and Midsommar. Of these filmmakers, Aster’s career trajectory is the most intriguing as it’s the only one to have gone full circle. In 2023, Aster returned to the uncomfortably surreal comedy of his earliest filmmaking experiments with his three-hour epic Beau is Afraid, which started out as one of those early shorts. Both incarnations of the story drew comparisons to the hallucinatory nightmares you’d often find on American Cartoon Network’s late-night Adult Swim programming. From the early 2000s onwards, this post-watershed segment dedicated to reruns o
