Curry Barker, the YouTube-born filmmaker whose festival horror hit Obsession ignited a $14 million bidding war at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, has revealed his creative blueprint for A24’s reimagining of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre — and his focus lands squarely on the deranged family behind the chainsaw, not just the killer wielding it.
“There’s some really messed up stuff happening at that farm,” Barker told Total Film, articulating a vision centered on the psychological rot of Leatherface’s household. “I want to lean into the uncomfortability of the family. I want to lean into the rawness of what’s going on there.” He confirmed he intends to honor Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel’s 1974 original while pushing the material into territory previous entries never fully explored. “I genuinely feel there’s so much potential for that concept that has not been realized,” he said.
A24 secured the franchise rights after a heated auction last year, fending off competing bids from Blumhouse and other studios, a move that signaled the indie powerhouse’s ambition to give the property the prestige treatment it has arguably never received. Producers on the film include Roy Lee and Steven Schneider of Spooky Pictures, alongside Stuart Manashil, Exurbia Films’ Pat Cassidy, Ian Henkel, and original co-creator Kim Henkel herself — a detail that lends the project a rare sense of lineage and legitimacy.
Barker cut his teeth making microbudget online horror work, most notably the $800 short Milk & Serial, which accumulated millions of views and led directly to Obsession — a film that opens in theaters May 15. His career ascent has been steep enough that A24 handed him the assignment before Obsession even reached audiences.
The filmmaker singled out the 2003 Marcus Nispel-directed remake as a personal touchstone — his first horror film as a child — while making clear that his version will chart its own course. The franchise’s nine-film history includes some of horror’s most critically dismissed entries. The 2022 Netflix reboot landed to relatively little fanfare and generally poor reviews, and the original 1974 film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2024 — a cultural designation that underscores just how much the sequels have failed to measure up.
Running parallel to the film, a Texas Chainsaw TV series developed by director JT Mollner and producers Glen Powell and Dan Cohen at Barnstorm is also in the works at A24 — a dual-front expansion of the IP that suggests the studio views the franchise as a universe worth building, not just a title worth recycling.
No casting or release date has been announced.
