Curry Barker turns his new horror short into stress test for Microsoft

Microsoft didn’t make Curry Barker shoot a laptop commercial. It gave him a laptop and told him to make a movie.

Following the breakout success of Obsession, the horror filmmaker teamed with Microsoft Windows and Droga5 for Mama Bear, a new short designed to function as both entertainment and a real-world stress test for the Surface Laptop Ultra.

The challenge was simple:

Edit and finish the entire film unplugged.

Barker completed the project on Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop Ultra, which the company bills as its most powerful Surface Laptop yet and says loses less than 1% of performance when disconnected from an outlet.

Instead of building a traditional product demo around benchmarks, windows and processor speeds, Microsoft put the machine inside an actual creative workflow.

The result is Mama Bear, Barker’s latest horror short, which debuted around Halloween on his social channels. The film follows Floyd, a house cleaner who receives a…