Be Careful What You Wish For: “Obsession” Grants Its Wish on Fandango at Home

The tagline for Obsession is “be careful what you wish for,” which reads as either a warning to the protagonist or a note-to-self from every studio executive who passed on it. Curry Barker’s supernatural horror phenomenon is now available on Fandango at Home, and if you somehow missed the loudest low-budget success story of the year, allow me to catch you up on the movie that turned $750,000 into a number with nine digits.

From an $800 Slasher to a Genuine Phenomenon

Here is the part that should be taught in film schools and probably soon will be. Curry Barker is a YouTube sketch comedian. His previous feature, Milk & Serial, was a slasher he reportedly made for around eight hundred dollars and released for free on YouTube, where it quietly became a word-of-mouth must-watch for horror fans. He wrote the script for Obsession while working at a coffee shop. This is not a rags-to-riches flourish I am adding for color. This is the actual resume of the man who just directed one of 2026’s biggest horror hits.

Barker shot Obsession in Los Angeles in the fall of 2024 for $750,000, which in modern studio terms is roughly the catering line on a Marvel reshoot. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness in September 2025, the slot reserved for horror that plays best with a screaming crowd, and it promptly set off exactly the kind of feeding frenzy microbudget filmmakers dream about.

The Bidding War Nobody Wished For

A24 wanted it. NEON wanted it. Focus Features won it, reportedly for north of fifteen million dollars, which is to say Focus paid roughly twenty times the film’s entire budget just for the right to release it, then brought Blumhouse aboard for good measure. Focus put Obsession in theaters in May 2026, and the thing has since crossed more than $330 million worldwide, a return on investment that makes venture capitalists weep softly into their term sheets. Certified Fresh and, per the release, Verified Hot on Rotten Tomatoes, it is the increasingly rare horror movie that critics and paying audiences agreed on at full volume.

The Monkey’s Paw, Zoomer Edition

So what is it actually about? Bear (Michael Johnston) is a music store employee nursing a lifelong crush on Nikki (Inde Navarrette). When he gets his hands on a piece of supernatural folklore called the One Wish Willow, he wishes for the thing every hopeless romantic thinks they want: for Nikki to love him more than anything in the world. She does. That is the problem. Loving someone that completely turns out to require erasing everything that made her a person to begin with, and what is left is not a girlfriend so much as a possession, in both senses of the word.

Barker has cited, of all things, the monkey’s-paw segment from The Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” as an inspiration, and the DNA shows. This is a wish-gone-wrong story with a nasty, pointed subtext about male entitlement, the kind that stares at the “nice guy who only wants to be loved” fantasy and asks what that dream would actually cost the woman on the other end of it. Inde Navarrette, handed the job of playing both the real Nikki and the horror the wish makes of her, walks off with the whole film. Every review singles her out, and having read the reactions, I would put money on her being the breakout this movie mints. Andy Richter turns up too, because 2026 is a year where Conan’s old sidekick materializes in your nightmare fuel and you simply learn to accept it.

Rent, Buy, or Break a Branch

The particulars: Obsession is available to own for $24.99 or rent for $19.99. I will gently observe that a five-dollar gap between renting and owning is its own little monkey’s paw. You come in to save a few bucks on a rental, do the arithmetic, and walk out having bought the thing outright, which may be the most on-theme purchasing experience of the year. Fandango at Home is also hosting an exclusive featurette for anyone who wants a peek behind the curtain, and given how Barker built this movie, the making-of story is nearly as wild as what ended up on screen. The full cast and crew rundown lives over at IMDb if you want to see who else got pulled into the One Wish Willow’s orbit.

Careful What You Wish For

There is a reason this one broke out while a hundred slicker, safer, more expensive horror movies vanished without a trace. Obsession is specific and uncompromising, the sort of genre swing I keep insisting streaming’s algorithm was supposed to have optimized out of existence. It is the same lesson I took from Bight earlier this year: make something particular and a little dangerous, find the audience that has been starving for exactly that, and watch it outrun everything built by committee to offend no one.

Barker, for his part, is not wasting the moment. He is already expanding Obsession into a shared universe, with his next feature, Anything But Ghosts, set in the same world. He wished for a horror career. Unlike poor Bear, he appears to be getting the version he actually wanted.

Watch Obsession on Fandango at Home today, and maybe leave the wishing to the professionals.