Curry Barker is going back to the well, and by the well I mean whatever dark corner of the human brain he was poking around in with Obsession. His new horror movie Anything But Ghosts officially has a release date now, per Yahoo Entertainment, and I've had it circled on my calendar since I finished reading the headline.

If you slept on Obsession, I get it, there were roughly nine hundred horror releases that year and keeping up is a full-time job, which, lucky me, it literally is. But Barker's debut was the kind of small, mean, claustrophobic little movie that stays with you. It didn't lean on jump scares or a killer marketing gimmick. It just built a terrible situation and let it squeeze. Jess Wingo watched it with me when it hit streaming and we spent twenty minutes afterward arguing about the ending, which usually means something worked.

Details on Anything But Ghosts are still coming out in teasing little sips, which is very on brand for the horror space in 2026. The title alone does a lot of heavy lifting. "Anything but ghosts" reads like a promise, like the movie is telling you up front that the scary thing in this house is not a ghost, it's something worse, and I prefer that energy. We've had a good run of haunted-adjacent stuff lately, but the scariest horror of the past few years has been the kind where the threat is human, or worse, familiar.

What I'll be watching for is whether Barker gets a bigger sandbox this time. Debut horror hits tend to earn their filmmakers either a franchise assignment or a bigger budget to chase their own weird instincts, and I'm always rooting for the second path. The guys who take the franchise money come back eight years later with something safe. The ones who double down on their own strange vision, that's how you get a career worth following.

No trailer yet, so the verdict on tone and vibe will have to wait. But the release date is locked, the director has already earned the benefit of the doubt once, and the calendar just got one entry scarier.

Now I need a favor from you. Did you catch Obsession, and did the ending work for you or did it leave you cold? I'm still deciding, and I've been deciding for months.