"My job is to trick you": Obsession's Curry Barker on finding his own way to frighten horror fans and leaning into the "modern jumpscare"

Curry Barker isn’t a fan of conventional jumpscares. The director of upcoming horror Obsession, which is already being hailed as one of 2026’s best movies, is so against them in fact that he’s trying to invent whole new ways to send shivers up cinemagoers’ spines.

“[This is] not something that people say, I’m just making this up, but I have kind of my own modern jump scare that I try to pursue – but it’s not a jump scare at all. It’s just, like, my version of a jump scare is,” Barker tells GamesRadar+. “It’s like, if you have two or three, even four, moments in your movie where you can make the audience go, ‘Oh, I didn’t like that. That was weird. That made me feel… To me, that’s a modern jump scare.”