Spoiler alert: This article contains minor spoilers for “Milk & Serial,” available on YouTube.
Cully Barker was the most unexpected hit of the year.
Barker, a filmmaker and comedian, is the mastermind behind Milk and Cereal, a 62-minute horror film in which a group of YouTube pranksters get caught up in a rapidly escalating crisis that, ideally, isn’t spoiled beforehand. Made for just $800, the film co-stars Barker and his comedic partner, Cooper Tomlinson, who also serves as producer.
The two primarily post sketch videos on their TikTok and YouTube channels, but occasionally tease other projects, despite calling it a “bad idea.” For example, Barker’s 2023 topical horror short “The Chair” has been viewed more than 5.5 million times on YouTube. After considering working with a distributor for “Milk & Serial,” Barker decided to release the full-length film on YouTube on August 8. Since then, the film has been viewed more than 323,000 times (as of August 26) and has generated a lot of discussion on horror fan hubs such as Reddit, YouTube, and #HorrorTok.
“There were a lot of comments about ‘The Chair’ like, ‘Hollywood should give him the budget,'” Barker says, “but then you put out a feature film and it feels like it was never expected. There are people reviewing this film who make their living reviewing features, but they don’t do that for short films. And then all of a sudden you see videos discussing both ‘Alien: Romulus’ and ‘Milk and Cereal.'”
Courtesy of Underground Films
Barker, who directed and starred in the film as well as serving as writer, producer, editor, co-cinematographer and composer, came up with the idea while working on his own acting project.
“I wrote comedy scenes, I wrote cowboy scenes,” he says. “I wrote a bunch of different scenes, but I also wrote a serial killer scene because I thought it would give off a creepy serial killer vibe. A guy tells a girl, ‘This isn’t a prank,’ and then he’s going to kill her at the end of the night. It was for my reel, but I thought I could make this into a found footage film. Cooper was shooting a movie in Tennessee, and I was like, ‘Dude, I’m gonna make this when I get back.'”
From there, the pair embarked on a four-month shoot, enlisting friends to play other roles and working on weekends when everyone was available. Most of the $800 budget went to paying one actor outside of their social group (Jonathan Cripple, who also appeared in “The Chair”) and to buying the Sony video camera they used for filming. Luckily, Barker made a $100 profit by selling the camera after filming, and quickly recouped the rest of the money through YouTube ads, so the production quickly went into the black.
As for the decision to make the film available for free on YouTube, Barker says he found a distributor who was willing to take it on, but after working with them to find the right format and release, something he hadn’t planned on arranging as an indie production, Barker decided he wanted fans to see the project in person.
“We just wanted to release it in the best place,” he says. “What’s funny is, after we got all the paperwork in place and everything was settled, we thought, ‘This distributor is probably going to make it a pay-per-view, so I’m going to have to pay $2.99 to see it on Shudder or wherever it ends up.’ I think our fans deserve the opportunity to see this film. They’ve been looking at my IMDb poster for a year and wondering, ‘What is this?’ So, even though we worked really hard for a year to get distribution for this film, we just said, damn it, we just dumped it on YouTube. Before, I felt like to be respected as a real film, it had to be on Netflix or Shudder or Hulu or somewhere. But people respect this film, and they respect that it’s free.”
The freedom of self-distribution allowed Barker to revise the project on his own terms, and he particularly took this to heart in the editing process, allowing him to pinpoint exactly which scenes to cut for maximum laughs or scares in his comedy sketches and short films.
“There’s an hour and 25 minutes cut from the film,” he says, “right before I put it on YouTube, I cut 20 minutes to make it feel faster. I’ve been an editor my whole life, so I was looking at the film and I was like, ‘I want to make this faster.’ I think people will like the fast pace of the film. I can’t pinpoint which scenes were cut because they’re all still in the film. I just cut out the excess. Because it’s a found footage film, we were able to make it feel a little choppy to tweak the pacing.”
Courtesy of Underground Films
Despite the positive reviews for Milk & Cereal, Barker isn’t sitting back and popping the champagne. He’s currently casting a feature film called Obsession. James Harris, who produced horror hits like The Fall and 47 Meters Down, is on board through his Tea Shop Productions.
“I’ve never had a budget in my life,” says Barker, “and I developed this script over eight months, going back and forth with the production company, and it was an incredible experience.”
No plot details have been revealed, but Barker said filming is scheduled to begin in late October.
“It’s horror. Total horror,” he says. “It’s terrifying. It’s going to be insane. The movie is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. It’s nothing like Milk and Cereal. I’m not in it. It’s not a found-footage movie. It’s going to be shot like The Chair.”
What about the future of Milk and Cereal? Barker is content to continue production online, and although the film’s bloody conclusion hints at a sequel by pointing the camera at an unseen character, he prefers leaving the mystery to the imagination rather than explaining it in separate chapters.
“If the movie becomes a hit and becomes a cult classic like Blair Witch or Creep, maybe we could do a sequel,” Barker says. “That would be crazy, but there are no plans for it right now. I think what’s interesting is that picking up the camera was a form of gaslighting of the audience, and the audience has been gaslighting this guy throughout the movie. As a writer, I have no idea who picked up the camera, but it’s a lot of fun watching people speculate in the comments section about who it was.”
Barker is represented by Aaron Forbe of Underground & Gersh and legal counsel from Yohn, Levin, Burns, Klintzman, Rubenstein, Koerner, Endlich, Goodell & Gelman LLP.
Check out the film below: