Obsession Director On How A Simpsons Episode Inspired Him To Make The Scariest Movie Of The Year
Look, I know we’re not even halfway through the 2026 movie schedule, but after seeing Curry Barker’s Obsession, I’ll be incredibly surprised if any of the other upcoming horror movies this year are more terrifying than this. Once you experience it, you’ll probably find yourself asking how the heck someone came up with this. We got the story from the ingenious writer/director, and The Simpsons is involved.
Remember that episode of The Simpsons when the family gets a hold of a monkey paw that promises to grant them four wishes, all of which backfire on them? I know I do, and a night watching reruns with friends led Obsession’s writer/director, Curry Barker, to see the 1991 episode titled “Treehouse of Horror II”. As he told us:
I had already had this idea about obsession and kind of exploring that as a theme because I think that there’s something about human behavior when you’re obsessed with something that’s to be studied and imagine a person being obsessed with another person and how crazy that could get. And so, that was actually an idea that I had had for a while.
Barker had previously told Variety about Obsession’s connection to The Simpsons, but it’s interesting to hear in CinemaBlend’s interview how the episode played a role in his creative process. As he also shared:
And then the Simpsons episode kind of just sparked that my way in to break into that story was through a wish. And then it kind of all clicked into place like, ‘Oh, I see, I could do this obsession idea by making it like a wish gone wrong type of film.’
The movie follows a group of longtime friends who all work together and regularly meet for trivia. Within the gang of four, there’s Bear, who’s had a longtime crush on his friend Nikki and is egging on his friend to let her know it. While driving her home one night, he plans to come clean and confess his feelings, but instead, he makes a wish on something called the “One Wish Willow” for her to “love him more than anyone else in the world.”
Nikki not only becomes obsessed with him, but she also becomes an unsettling and unsafe presence in his life. Truly, it’s one of the best horror movies I’ve seen in a while, and Obsession has earned a ton of praise from reviews, which have called it an “increasingly disturbing masterclass” and a “classic horror tragedy.” I’m a huge horror fan myself, and I found myself incredibly stressed and haunted by the material of the film. And here I started the year thinking I’d be disappointed with this year’s scary movie offerings.
To be clear here, Obsession is definitely nothing like a The Simpsons episode in tone. It’s graphic, intense and rather heartbreaking as well. This is the kind of horror movie that sticks with you long after you watch it, and Curry Barker told us this about the process of realizing his vision:
There was only one thing that I had to take out because it was too far, but other than that, they really let me do whatever I wanted, and I was kind of shocked. Like, this movie really felt like a bunch of kids getting together and making something and hoping that the parents don’t come home, and they never did. Nobody ever stopped us, and we just kept making the thing we wanted to make. Like, even the way we shot it, we thought someone was gonna tell us we gotta turn the lights on. I was waiting for someone to tell us we have to move the camera more, get more coverage. And, nobody did.
Well, thanks to that and some inspiration from The Simpsons, we wound up with one of 2026’s scariest flicks.
You can check out Obsession in theaters starting May 15.
