‘Why are you forgetting about me?’
Curry Barker is in the headlines right now following the huge success of his instant horror classic, Obsession. This seemed like the perfect time, then, to dive into his previous works. Having already watched and enjoyed his acclaimed short film Milk & Serial, my next port of call was The Chair – Barker’s 2023 short film that first put him on the radar of horror fans. Take a seat…
Reese (Anthony Pavone) becomes enraptured with an antique chair sitting on someone’s lawn as a free item to take away. He takes it home to the house he shares with his girlfriend, Julie (Haley Schwartz), who promptly hates it and tells him to get rid of it. When Reese abruptly finds himself back where he found the chair in the first place, having lost a week of his life to an unexplained bout of amnesia, he begins to suspect the chair is to blame.
The lineage is clear from The Chair to Milk & Serial to Obsession. There’s the mixture of black comedy and intense horror, the visceral self-harm, the knack for a well-executed jump scare… Whatever it is that makes a great horror director, this kid has it. Using some of the same techniques employed in The Father, The Chair is a terrifying and genuinely upsetting allegory for Alzheimer’s that pulls no punches. Like a nightmare from which you can’t escape, The Chair escalates in its potency before building into a crescendo of death and destruction. As with Barker’s other works, there are images here that will haunt you long after the credits have rolled, and don’t be surprised if you find yourself removing all the chairs from your bedroom.
The Chair is a short and nasty calling card for a new voice in horror who genuinely seems to have the world at his feet. His upcoming Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot promises to be a real horror event.
