The $750K Horror Film ‘Obsession’ Just Did Something No Movie Has Done Since ‘Paranormal Activity’
The idea that the next great wave of horror filmmakers might emerge from YouTube sketch comedy was once a hard case to make. Jordan Peele changed that narrative, the Philippou brothers pushed it further, and now Curry Barker is adding his name to that lineage in a way the industry did not fully anticipate. His supernatural horror film ‘Obsession’ has become the most unexpected genre success story of the year.
Barker built his following as part of a YouTube comedy duo called “That’s a Bad Idea”, a channel that accumulated around 700 million views across platforms before making the leap to narrative filmmaking. ‘Obsession’ follows Bear, a music store employee played by Michael Johnston, who uses an antique novelty toy called the One Wish Willow to wish that his childhood crush Nikki, played by Inde Navarrette, will fall in love with him. The wish is granted, and what follows is a slow, sinister unraveling of everything Bear thought he wanted.
The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness block, earning a rapturous audience response that led to a swift acquisition by Focus Features for around fifteen million dollars. Blumhouse Productions later joined as a co-producer, and tracking had the opening weekend sitting between eight and nine million dollars before the film reached theaters. The expectation was that ‘Obsession’ would be a modest but respectable theatrical debut for a first-time studio director.
What actually happened was something else. The film opened with seventeen million dollars domestically across more than two thousand six hundred theaters, landing in third place for the weekend and smashing through all expectations. The audience response was equally extraordinary, with the film earning an A minus CinemaScore, a remarkably rare grade for horror releases, which typically average far lower on that scale. Critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes were equally enthusiastic, with the film collecting a Certified Fresh score of ninety five percent alongside a matching verified audience score.
The story grew stranger in the days that followed. Rather than suffering the steep drop horror titles almost always experience after opening weekend, ‘Obsession’ climbed, holding the top position at the domestic box office each day from Monday through Wednesday of its first week. Made for under a million dollars, that run made it the cheapest film to lead the national charts since ‘Paranormal Activity’ achieved the same milestone back in 2009.
A significant part of why audiences cannot stop talking about the film comes down to the central performance, with Inde Navarrette’s portrayal of Nikki drawing attention across nearly every critical response to the film. Speaking to USA Today, Navarrette said she wanted to try something completely new and that the role was nothing but that, describing Nikki as six different characters in one person, and drawing on Toni Collette’s performance in ‘Hereditary’ and Mia Goth’s turn in ‘Pearl’ as reference points throughout her preparation.
For Barker, the film’s momentum has already opened doors at the highest levels of the genre. He has completed production on ‘Anything But Ghosts’, a Blumhouse horror comedy starring Aaron Paul and Bryce Dallas Howard, and he also closed a deal to write and direct a reimagining of ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ for A24, with a remarkable degree of creative control attached.
With a second weekend projected to actually grow over the opening frame, something that almost never happens in horror, the conversation around ‘Obsession’ is only getting louder, and the real question now is whether you have seen it yet or are still sleeping on the wish that started it all.
Whether Bear should have just told Nikki how he felt from the beginning, or whether the One Wish Willow was always going to find someone desperate enough to snap it, share what you made of ‘Obsession’ in the comments.
