The Scene That Nearly Gave ‘Obsession’ an NC-17 Rating Was Even More Brutal Than You Realized

Curry Barker did not arrive in Hollywood through traditional channels. The writer and director built his following on YouTube, where his micro-budget short ‘Milk and Serial’ earned him a cult audience before he had ever made a feature film. His debut, ‘Obsession’, a supernatural horror romance produced with Blumhouse Productions, has since become one of the most remarkable industry stories of the year.

The film carries a near-perfect score of 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and has proven to be a phenomenon at the box office. Released by Blumhouse and Focus Features on May 15, the horror film made roughly 79 million dollars worldwide after just its second weekend in theaters, a staggering return for a production made on a budget of approximately one million dollars.

The road from festival favourite to mainstream hit came with complications. The film premiered during the Midnight Madness block at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 5, 2025, where it screened in a significantly more extreme form than what eventually opened in theaters. A scene depicting a brutal death had to be substantially trimmed before the MPA would grant it an R rating rather than an NC-17, with the edit requiring the removal of what was described as six or seven head smashes from the kill.

Megan Lawless, who plays Sarah in the film, recently opened up about that sequence and the chaos behind the camera that produced it. In a TikTok addressed to fans, Lawless described the shoot as unexpectedly funny, revealing that co-star Inde Navarrette performed the scene wearing a protective helmet concealed beneath a wig. “She had to commit to running into the glass as fast as she could and charging at me,” Lawless explained. She also disclosed that the TIFF version of the scene originally included gurgling sounds she recorded in ADR, layered in to suggest her character was still faintly alive in those moments, a detail scrubbed from the final edit to satisfy the ratings board.

@themeganlawless WARNING MAJOR @Obsession SPOILERS! Before we locked tf in #obsession #bts ♬ original sound – themeganlawless

What Lawless did not anticipate was how audiences would respond to it. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, she recalled the TIFF screening with genuine surprise, saying “The whole theater at TIFF erupted into cheering at that moment,” adding that she had expected people to be moved to tears rather than applause. That audience energy has only grown since the film’s wide release, where word of mouth drove a second weekend increase of approximately 30 percent, a figure described as historic for a wide-release horror movie.

There may be more to come for fans of the uncut version. In an exclusive interview with /Film, director Barker revealed that an unrated director’s cut is potentially in the cards for the film down the line, which would restore the full ferocity of the scene as it was originally intended for festival audiences.

Lawless also reflected on the film’s closing sequences involving her character, describing them as a deliberate creative extension of the film’s central theme around toxic obsession and the loss of individual identity, a layer she believes adds genuine emotional weight to what could have been a straightforward horror conclusion.

With a potential unrated cut looming over the conversation, the debate feels genuinely open: does the theatrical version of Sarah’s death hit harder precisely because of what was trimmed, or does the thought of the full NC-17 cut make you want Curry Barker to release it immediately?