Obsession Part 1: How Corey Barker Cooked Up One of the Most Uncomfortable Horror Movies in Years

A dude uploading horror shorts to YouTube just changed the game.

And I know that sounds dramatic, but after watching Obsession, I genuinely don’t know what else to call it. Because the director of this movie, Corey Barker, has successfully embarrassed half of Hollywood in the process (with only a budget of like $500 by the way lol 😂)

This man walked in with a budget that probably wouldn’t even pay for a Kai Cenat trailer and somehow cooked up one of the most talked about horror movies in years. Meanwhile, studios have been spending $300 million on movies that somehow struggle to make you feel anything. This director has proven that horror doesn’t need a billion-dollar budget. It needs tension & silence. Most of all, it needs a director who knows how to make a normal room feel like somebody is standing behind you, even when nobody is there.

That’s what Corey Barker does here. But before we start glazing the filmmaking too much, we have to talk about the main character because what the hell was Bear doing? That brother was starving! I haven’t seen such cartoon villain behavior from a main character in a minute. For an hour and 49 minutes straight, I could not believe this man kept finding new ways to make his red flags redder and redder. He destroyed his friend group. Every single person. Bear was not just a LOSERR. He was a LAAAAME (You have to say those words with emphasis or they don’t hit right) A loser. A lame. MAJOR SPOILER ALERT AHEAD

The movie opens with Bear, this awkward dude working at a music store. Quiet, socially cooked, no game whatsoever. This bru looks like he apologizes when somebody else steps on his shoes. And immediately, the movie makes him believable. That’s one of the first things Barker gets right, Bear isn’t some cartoon incel villain from frame one. He’s just painfully awkward. He’s the type of dude who has already created 12 fake conversations in his head with a girl and somehow got blocked by the third one. He likes Nikki, bad. Not regular crush bad, I’m talking “We’ve never been on a date, but I already know what our kids’ names would be” bad. And the crazy part is this whole movie happens because he had a severe case of gwababa.

Sarah, one of his friends, is completely paying attention to him and is being genuine. Nikki is playing around with him and Bear is just standing there with that nice guy starter pack, Thinking being harmless is the same thing as being desirable. It’s not. Sometimes the nice guy act is only your main move because you have nothing else in your bag. But then life makes everything worse. Bear gets home and finds his cat (Sandy) dead.

Now, off rip, I don’t want to say bro didn’t care about his cat, but he did move on suspiciously fast. Like damn. The cat didn’t even get a full business day of mourning and you’re out here crying saying “Why can’t she just…” We know that he is not crying about Sandy, he’s crying for someone specific (Nikki) to love him. This is also where Corey Barker’s pacing starts showing. A lot of horror movies would have rushed straight into the scary stuff. Not this one. It lets us sit with Bear first. His loneliness, his awkwardness, his cringe. Because if you don’t understand Bear early, the rest of the movie doesn’t hit the same. A movie making you understand somebody does not mean it’s telling you they’re right. And that’s important because later Bear is going to do some next-level trash. So Bear ends up buying Nikki a replacement necklace after she loses hers. While he’s there, he finds the One Wish Willow, a tiny little wishing object that supposedly grants one wish.

Now listen… If somebody tells me, “Yeah, this thing grants wishes, but don’t come back complaining,” I’m putting that thing right back on the shelf. I don’t care if it grants free KFC for life. I’m walking away. No side effects? No instruction manual? No return policy? You’re just wishing on cursed merch, huh? Come on now, dawg. But Bear, being Bear, hears all this and thinks: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This thing is a great idea.”

At some point as Bear is driving Nikki home, she literally gives him the cleanest lay-up of all time and asks him straight up: “Do you like me?” What did he say?… “I think we’re good friends.”  Brother, the rim was wide open. Nobody was guarding you and you still bricked? That’s generational loser behavior. And Bear is so locked into his fantasy of Nikki that he doesn’t even notice the actual human dynamic around him. And later, after completely folding in front of Nikki, he makes the wish: “I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone else in the f****** world.” This is where the movie officially stops being an awkward romance and starts becoming one of the most uncomfortable horror movies of the past decade. Because the wish works. And it works fast.

Most movies would wait for 45 minutes before anything happens, but Nikki starts acting different almost immediately. Like, look at how she’s suddenly standing outside when I could have sworn that door just closed and she had already left. At first, it’s subtle. Nikki slowly walks back over to Bear’s car and eventually says: “Let’s go to your place.” The wish hasn’t even been active for five minutes yet. Can we at least pretend to ease into it? Bear, of course, is confused as a MF because from his perspective, none of this makes sense. Remember, we know there is magic involved. Bear doesn’t. To him, this is just a girl he’s liked for years suddenly acting completely different overnight. So when he tells her no, she immediately starts wigging out, talking about how her dad has cancer and how she doesn’t want to be alone. She went from saying “Ew” when Bear told her he got her a present to saying she just needs somebody for tonight.

This is where I think Corey Barker makes a really smart decision. He doesn’t make Nikki creepy immediately. She’s sad. She’s vulnerable. You almost feel bad for her. And because you feel bad, Bear feels bad too. So he caves in and takes her home. Nothing is instantly screaming: “POLICE! HELP!” If you didn’t know about the wish, you’d probably think: “Oh, she finally likes him back.” But Corey Barker plays it like something is wrong. That’s the sauce. Because Bear should be happy. This is literally what he asked for, right? But even he starts looking around like: “Hold on… why does this feel off?” And that’s where Barker’s directing really starts cooking up a mean plate of five-star gourmet.