Obsessed: How the Low-Budget Horror Film Changed the Game in Hollywood | Horror movies

TThis week, the independently produced horror film “Obsession,” which cost between $750,000 or $15 million depending on whether you count its actual budget or the cost of its studio acquisition, officially surpassed the most recent Star Wars film at the box office (the film has so far grossed more than $165 million in the U.S. alone).

It is no coincidence that this happened on a weekday. Obsession’s box office strength lies not only in its incredible weekend-to-weekend strength (including a virtually unheard-of path to increased revenue in the second and third weekends) but in its strong weekday grosses. Last week, as it approached the one-month mark in theaters, it averaged more than $4 million on weekdays. At the same time, Avengers: Endgame – the biggest summer blockbuster of the modern era – was making half that amount.

All said and done, Obsession will (probably) not achieve as much as Avengers: Endgame, despite its return on investment being much higher. But this intimate and sometimes harrowing horror film about a mild-mannered twenty-something named Bear (Michael Johnston) who desires the devotion of his gorgeous girl Nikki (up-and-coming actress Indie Navarrete) and then accidentally curses her with a kind of unnerving possession, has the kind of cultural cachet necessary to penetrate our post-pandemic, post-superhero moviegoing landscape.

I saw this adventure for myself to watch the movie for the second time with a crowd on Thursday. Normally at Manhattan’s Times Square complex, Thursday night’s big draw would be a blockbuster preview that officially opens on Friday, like Steven Spielberg’s new movie Disclosure Day; For a film that has already been out for a week or more, Thursday is usually the lowest-grossing day of the week. But the 300-seat auditorium used for the 7:30 p.m. screening of “Obsession” was nearly full, as were similar performances across the city all week.

As a critic, I first saw Obsession in a small screening room, and although its horror, shocks, and cackles were fine for an audience of a dozen or so journalists — I gave it positive notice before release — the entire audience experience felt different. Waves of laughter and murmurs of annoyance reached a crescendo among the audience, and although the film’s particularly murky lighting made it difficult to see, I caught many viewers watching with their hands on their faces, aghast at Bear’s desire (and negativity) causing Nikki (or, more accurately, her doll-like body) to become unsettled. Multiple pairs, apparently married couples, covered each other’s eyes in a semi of mutual affectionate agony. As the film reached its somber but fair end and the credits rolled, chatter rose rapidly, overtaking the usual quiet movement toward the director.

Outside the auditorium, I spoke with some groups about their decision to go out on a Thursday night, tentatively aligning them more with all-time nerds like myself rather than the typical moviegoer who might attend one every few months, if that. Some of them were already movie fans, including a young woman who had already seen the film and had organized a group of uninitiated friends to come see the film. As such, the group framed the specific weekend outing as more relaxed, an offshoot of trying to find a time that worked for everyone. This in itself seems telling of the power of the movie’s hype: This was enough of an event to coordinate the schedules of six supposedly busy twenty-somethings. Clearly this was not a normal occurrence. One of these friends hasn’t seen a movie in theaters since the A24 comedy Friendship last year.

So, what prompted everyone to take this particular trip, to standardize AMC’s rosters with once-a-year types of trips? Almost everyone cited the hype around the film, whether from real-life friends or online discourse. One person specifically pointed out the news of the film delaying its streaming premiere indefinitely created an incentive to not just wait for home viewing. Meanwhile, other forms of home viewing also seemed to be generating interest, with others mentioning TikTok clips, specifically of the scene in which Nikki reacts to Bear as he lightly pressures her to answer a personal question during a date with escalating “no, no, no, no, no, no, no” panic (in a scene that reportedly prompted fans to swarm the real location to recreate it).

Another group of young women described the range of their reactions to Nikki’s coercive behavior: “At least I’ll never be that crazy,” followed by “Am I that crazy?” Then “I feel like I was that crazy.” Obviously part of the film’s appeal is the social lens of watching this woman fly off the handle, though reactions like these, which frame her as a degree of insanity, raise the question of whether viewers are really thinking of Nikki as a prisoner within her own body, possessed by a force trying to enter into a loyal human relationship, or simply performing a grand version of the typical possessive relationship. Perhaps this strange mixture of relatability and potential caricature will help the film transcend its horror roots and become more of a social conversation. One woman had heard certain details about the film beforehand — not necessarily spoilers, she explained, but discussion points, particularly about Bear and how sympathetic he was aiming for in the film. While watching the film, I noticed laughter that I thought flirted with an inappropriate feeling, as if some moments were more like a black comedy than they should be.

I don’t disagree. The goal of Obsession is clearly to have very funny moments, but a second viewing highlighted how some of the film’s scenes seem to walk that line between abject horror and cruel humour, with Bear reacting with the same frozen physicality, and the stuttering language’s inability to control what it conjures up. However, while watching and talking with audience members, it became clear how the relatively straightforward story of The Monkey’s Paw, even one that flirts with repetition, contains enough engaging mystery to make the film worth watching. Writer-director Carrie Parker even talked about mixing different takes in an early scene, to intentionally muddy the question of whether Nikki returned Bear’s feelings before she lost control of her abilities.

Perhaps the success of Obsession also points to the lack of films trying to replicate some form of the 1920s experience — this was a young audience even by Times Square standards — even in an extensive way. Keep in mind that fellow Obsession’s surprise film Backrooms, which followed a more typical opening-and-dropping path, was directed by a 20-year-old, fueled largely by an internet phenomenon, yet still revolved around characters closer to middle age. Hollywood is always chasing demographic experiences that please audiences, and films like Project Hail Mary prove that this is still a lucrative market. But a film like Obsession creates a rare impulse: to go and watch even if it makes you want to look away.