Albert Birney of ‘Obex’ Fame Is Very Cool [Digital Feature]
By Dread Central
6 min readWe sat down with ‘Obex’ filmmaker Albert Birney to talk horror, ‘The Legend of Zelda,’ and why his nostalgic-hit is stirringly unique.
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We sat down with ‘Obex’ filmmaker Albert Birney to talk horror, ‘The Legend of Zelda,’ and why his nostalgic-hit is stirringly unique.
Obex, set in 1987, is filmed inside Birney’s actual home. Birney plays Connor Marsh, an isolated adult whose social needs are primarily met via his dog, Sandy. Connor is eager to get his hands on a new computer game, though when he does, Sandy is trapped inside, fueling a retro, uncanny dive into a digital landscape only the creator of Strawberry Mansion could imagine. “I questioned how we could kind of build a tension, or just kind of a prolonged feeling of dread, mixed with the fact that he seems pretty happy and content in his life, but also has these strange dreams every night. I was just trying to play around in his world and see if we could make an interesting story come out of that.”
Nostalgia, at least for me, was the gateway (and for Birney, maybe, given the sensational ceramic Garfield prominently displayed on his bedside table). I grew up near Baltimore, and while we discussed Obex at length, we also traded insights on The Legend of Zelda and how Hollow Knight is continuing to whoop my ass. I imagine it’s refreshing, or at least a respite, as Obex nears its physical release on March 9. “Filmmaking can be such a solitary thing that takes years. So, it’s been nice, kind of… you get out in the world a little bit, get to meet other filmmakers and possible programmers and things. Even though [Obex] premiered last year, it was almost finished almost, like, a year before that, and we finished filming a year before that.”
Obex has been going since 2021, and Birney is nearing the end of this journey, though he remains involved in other projects. “So as long as you have those things, I think it’s fun to keep one pinky toe still in the Obex world.” The end of the journey has been an interesting one. I saw Obex at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. I loved it, as did most other critics. With a wide release, Birney concedes the reception isn’t always what you expect. “Once anyone can watch [Obex], I think I started to see more of the Letterboxd reviews where they’re like, ‘Nothing happens,’ or ‘This is boring.’ They think they’re getting a certain type of horror movie, and it’s very much not your typical horror movie that gets a wide release in movie theaters or anything.”
Birney, graciously, validates my perspective on Presence, another Sundance hit I championed that floundered with general audiences. If Albert Birney suggests you give Presence another shot, you listen. He isn’t, however, an avid genre fan. He dabbles (and loved Skinamarink), though he shares he’s less often immersed in the world of horror than he once was. I won’t spoil it here, but Obex features plenty of classic horror iconography for the curious. “I’d much rather go to the movie theater and see [a horror movie] with friends in a theatrical space. But I end up seeing fewer kinds of horror movies because of that.”
We talked for a really long time, much longer than anticipated. We talked about The Legend of Zelda, UFO 50 (which he recommends), and how it’s a damn shame that Nintendo shut down the Super Mario Bros. 35 servers. Oh, and we’re both not particularly good at Tetris, especially competitively. I needed to ask, however, about what’s fascinated me most about Obex. As a Com scholar whose own academic dabbling includes computer technology and parasocial relationships, I asked Birney about Obex’s thematic focus on anthropomorphizing our devices and subsequently using them as replicas of the real thing.
“I was a child of divorced parents,” he shares. “I was kind of going back and forth between homes and both very loving parents and loving homes, but there is that thing of being like, you are a little bit adrift, or you’re a little bit in between spaces.” He later adds, “As a kid, horror movies created that thing. As a kid, I would watch him [Freddy Krueger] by myself, and it was like Freddy was a superhero for me or something. It was like, this was my guy. I think from a young age, it was a place of refuge, or of just being able to escape. Just the horror section at the video store. It was so exciting to find a new one and to see those covers for months. And then you’re finally like, ‘Okay, I’m going to get Monkey Shines or whatever. I’m going to get Puppet Master.”
One thing Birney shared really stuck with me. “I think it is fascinating, that idea of creating these digital worlds to hide in, or to not necessarily hide in, but just to have another life or to have an alternate life.” We picked up on that thread, sharing fond memories of the family desktop and the opportunity to escape, for even just an hour, with Zoo Tycoon 2 or some other old-school computer game.
Yet, for all this talk of escape, I left our conversation loving Obex even more than I did. Because, while I’d been thinking of it as an escape, a retro-tinged and practical take on something like We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and analog web-based horror movies, it was ultimately something more like an invitation. Birney invited not just me, but everyone, to experience this with him. Maybe it’s a little sad, and certainly it’s a little strange, but it’s more celebratory than dour. Albert Birney’s soul is present in Obex, and when it burns as brightly as it does, it’s no surprise that Obex will engulf your entire world.
Oh, and play UFO 50.