The Twenty-Six-Year-Old Behind “Obsession,” a Terrifying Tale of a Crush Gone Awry

Photographs by Alexis Gross for The New Yorker Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story For the first few minutes, you could be forgiven for thinking that Curry Barker’s début feature, “Obsession,” was a rom-com. The film opens with its shy, sensitive twentysomething protagonist, Bear, struggling to confess his feelings for his childhood friend, Nikki. Their relationship is full of banter and, so far, strictly platonic; he’s smitten and terrified of ruining everything. He stumbles upon an old novelty toy called the One Wish Willow, which promises its user whatever they desire, and, after failing to admit his crush, impulsively wishes for Nikki to love him “more than anyone in the fucking world.” He gets what he wants. Unfortunately for Bear, this is, in fact, a horror movie. During their first night together, just for an instant, Nikki appears to glitch, jerking back mid-kiss and looking at him with blind panic instead of undying affection. Her behavior gets stranger from there. Whether the person he’s with is really “her”—and how much that distinction matters to him—becomes a question of increasing urgency.

When “Obsession” premièred at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, Barker was twenty-five, and best known as a purveyor of comic sketches and horror shorts. (His offerings in both arenas can be equally disturbing.) “I can pinpoint the moment my life changed,” he said, of the midnight screening. “I woke up the next morning to this flood of texts and missed calls.” A twenty-four-hour bidding war culminated in the film being sold to Focus Features for fifteen million dollars—the highest price commanded by a genre movie in TIFF history. Jason Blum, the producer of such hits as “Get Out” and “Paranormal Activity,” came onboard “Obsession” after the première. “I see an enormous number of horror movies, and it’s very hard now to make something that feels unique,” he told me. “This one certainly did.”

Blum and Focus are also partnering on Barker’s next film, “Anything but Ghosts,” which just wrapped in Vancouver. It had a budget of around five million dollars—easily the most money Barker has ever had to work with. (He made “Obsession” for “seven hundred and fifty thousand, max,” and earlier projects for far, far less.) But when we met recently in Burbank at the Mystic Museum, a shrine to all things horror, he still seemed to have the mind-set of someone operating on a shoestring. He eyed what looked like a human spinal column in the museum gift shop, as appalled by the price tag as he was by the object itself. “Eight hundred and fifty dollars?” he mouthed. “This can’t be real, right?”