‘Obsession’ Just Crashed the All-Time Horror Box Office Top 10, and It Only Cost $750K to Make
Horror has always had a knack for delivering the unexpected, but the genre has rarely seen a story quite as unlikely as the one playing out at multiplexes right now. Curry Barker, a 26-year-old YouTube comedy creator, shot his supernatural horror feature ‘Obsession’ in just 20 days on a budget that most Hollywood productions would spend on catering alone. The film was made for a mere $750,000, and after its second weekend in theaters, it was already on track to earn more than 100 times that amount at the global box office. That kind of return does not happen by accident, and the industry is still catching its breath trying to explain it.
‘Obsession’ follows Bear, played by Michael Johnston, a music store employee who buys a supernatural toy that grants him his wish for his friend Nikki, played by Inde Navarrette, to fall in love with him, resulting in horrifying consequences. The premise taps into something genuinely unsettling about desire and control, and audiences have responded to it in a way that defies the usual rules of wide-release horror. The movie holds a tremendous 95% on Rotten Tomatoes from both critics and audiences, a dual achievement that is exceptionally rare in a genre where professional critics and general viewers frequently diverge by wide margins.
The box office trajectory of ‘Obsession’ is where the story becomes truly historic. Rather than following the typical horror playbook of a massive opening weekend followed by a steep drop, the film debuted with 17 million dollars, then grew to 23 million in its second weekend and 26.4 million in its third, before earning another 25.6 million domestically in its fourth frame. That fourth-weekend haul represented the biggest fourth weekend ever recorded for a horror movie, surpassing the Blair Witch Project’s previous benchmark of 24.3 million dollars.
Those sustained earnings have now pushed ‘Obsession’ into genuinely rarified air. As @FilmUpdates noted, the film has officially joined the top 10 highest-grossing horror films of all time at the domestic box office, landing at 175.6 million dollars and slotting just above Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’. Globally, the film has become the highest-grossing movie in Focus Features history, surpassing the studio’s previous record holder and cementing itself as the defining theatrical event of the summer for the genre.
Barker spent years building a fan base on YouTube through his sketch comedy channel and his found-footage feature ‘Milk and Serial’ before ‘Obsession’ made its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival, triggering a bidding war among studios that ended with Focus Features acquiring the film for around 15 million dollars. Barker later said in a video interview, “When we made ‘Obsession,’ we had no idea what was going to happen. As the leader of the ship, I had to tell the people: ‘This is going to be huge.'”
Ahead of the film’s release, Focus Features had already re-teamed with Barker and Blumhouse on his next feature, a horror-comedy called ‘Anything But Ghosts’, and he is also slated to write and direct A24’s new ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’. Hollywood’s hottest new horror voice went from a sub-million-dollar YouTube project to holding a spot on the all-time domestic horror chart in what feels like a single, dizzying leap, and it is hard not to wonder whether ‘Obsession’ has just rewritten what is possible for an independent genre film with the right story at the right moment. Where do you think it will land when its theatrical run is finally over, and does it deserve a shot at cracking even higher on that all-time list?
