Curry Barker’s “Obsession”: The Indie Horror That Turned L.A. Into a Nightmare Playground

Shot in LA over 20 days for less than $1 million, writer-director Curry Barker‘s supernatural horror film Obsession sparked a frenzied bidding war at the Toronto International Film Festival. That story is nearly as wild as what unfolds on screen in the filmmaker’s sophomore feature.

Obsession follows a hopeless romantic music store employee, Bear (Michael Johnston), who has a long-time crush on childhood friend and co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette). While searching for a gift in a new age store, he buys a mysterious One Wish Willow that promises to grant one wish. Bear’s wish is for Nikki to fall in love with him, but what he gets is something much darker than he could have imagined.

Here, the Alabama-born Barker, who has already shot his next movie and is working on a reimagining of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, breaks down how Burbank and The Valley became the canvas for his nightmarish vision, the LA creatives he leaned on, and how the devil is in the details of Obsession.

Obsession has a very simple concept, but where it goes is dark and unpredictable. Did people initially balk at your vision?

Definitely. I was surprised at how much people were letting me do, but I also think that people maybe didn’t know how big this movie was going to be. With some of those smaller movies, you can almost get away with more. We would have been happy for this movie to stream on Shudder. That would have been a big deal for us. The people who were green-lighting this movie were thinking, “Hey, if there’s a horror audience that wants to see the craziest horror movie ever, even if it’s a niche audience, let’s do it.” I always thought people were going to tell me I had to tone it down, but nobody ever did, so I was really excited that they let me make it.

There was a bidding war, and Focus Features won. It’s incredibly difficult to get films funded and made at all these days, but people were fighting over this little movie you made for $1 million and shot in and around LA.

It’s a dream come true. Just getting into TIFF was such a huge deal for us, and then we found out that there was a bidding war. I mean, my life changed and hasn’t been the same since.

You say you would have been happy for this to debut on a streamer, but everything about Obsession, from the sound design to the visuals, seems made for the theatrical experience.

I appreciate that, and I agree. It has been so exciting to see it in a movie theater. It’s not even like I was thinking, “I’m going to make a movie that’s the best in theaters.” I wanted to make the best movie I could, but it turned out to be a crowd-pleaser.

You made this for $1 million, you shot it in and around LA. How did you manage to do so much with so little?

It was actually less than a million. I’m excited to be public about that finally. We had $650,000 when we first started, and it was really tough. That was all the money we had, and we had 20 days to shoot it. We then got a little more money for additional photography, but that’s about it. It’s been crazy to see the marketing campaign, because it feels like a big movie. Just like any director does, when I watch it, I see all the problems with it, the things I wish I could have reshot, but it feels a lot bigger now than it did on set. We were just a bunch of kids trying to make something.

Were there local creatives that you went to help make this happen?

I had never been part of the process of finding department heads, a makeup person, or a main costume designer. Usually, it’s just me, and maybe I’m reaching out over Instagram if I see somebody’s work that I like. We had a producer, Haley Nicole Johnson, who was my age, so it still felt like we all had something to prove and that this was a big opportunity. Haley had people she had worked with before and was presenting to me. My role wasn’t to find the candidates; it was to meet with them and scope them out. Specifically talking about makeup, Allie Shehorn took on the mantle. She was someone that we actually found because we did a video together, and she made me look like a zombie. We were like, “Remember that girl that made me look like a zombie that one time? She was pretty cool,” and so we hired Allie for the movie.

There are so many great locations in Obsession that don’t feel like the LA we’ve seen on screen a million times before.

Definitely not. When I wrote it, it took place in a very small town, and if I had my way completely, we would have shot it in my hometown in Alabama, maybe somewhere in Texas, or somewhere that felt small, where you would work at a music shop, and there would be parking lots. It just happened that shooting this in LA felt like the right move. There are pros and cons to shooting outside of LA. Anything but Ghosts, which is my next movie, we shot in Canada, a completely different country, but I can see why there’s a certain budget level where that isn’t plausible. Some people say you could save a lot of money by not shooting in LA, but for this particular project, we saved a lot of money by shooting there.

The locations are real, right? The music store and the restaurant are particularly key.

Yeah, the music store was a real music store in San Fernando called Cassells Music, which is what it’s called in the movie, but it got shut down a year after we wrapped, so you can’t even go there anymore. I was so upset. (Cassells Music was also featured in Wayne’s World). The restaurant where Bear and Nikki have dinner is Little Toni’s, a pizza place in Burbank. The bar and the crystal shop are also in Burbank. Next to the Bob’s Big Boy, there’s a Vons, and in the same complex, there’s a bar called The Roguelike Tavern. That’s where we shot the trivia bar scene. The Green Man, the crystal shop, is also on that strip. Pretty much everywhere we shot was real.

A lot of the time, the devil is in the details in Obsession. There is a phone number on the One Wish Willow box. What happens if someone calls that?

I believe that number is now a real number that Focus has paid for. If you call that number, you’ll reach a recording of me. I do remember going into the studio and recording some lines for it, so I’m pretty sure it’s real. I’m the guy on the phone in the movie, too. 

The sound design of this movie is very specific, even down to the sound of the One Wish Willow snapping.

I can’t take credit—that was Juniper Post in Burbank. They picked a really good cracking sound. They did a really great job with this movie as a whole. I spent hours fine-tuning it with them, but the One Willow crack is not work I can take credit for. I did design the little jingle, though. I made that.

As an independent filmmaker who is already graduating to bigger projects while out promoting Obsession, what are your thoughts on preserving the theatrical experience?

There was a statistic that came out recently that Gen Z, people my age, is the group that is going to movie theaters the most and keeping it more alive than ever. That’s really interesting on face value, but the more you think about it, the more you realize the movie theater is the perfect thing for us because it’s an escape from what we’re absolutely sick and tired of: our phones. It’s also a social activity that doesn’t require you to talk to anybody else. You feel like you’re in a social setting, you’re experiencing something with people, but you’re not required to talk to them. It would actually be weird if you talked to the people at the theater too much. The theatrical experience is such an important thing to keep alive for multiple reasons. It’s the best way to watch a movie, and it’s more important than ever. 30 years ago, you could watch a movie on your TV and have a similar experience, but now, with so many distractions, you need a place that disciplines you to put your phone away and just let a story take you over for an hour and 40 minutes.

Obsession is in theaters now.

Featured image: Inde Navarrette stars as Nikki and Michael Johnston as Bear in OBSESSION, a Focus Features release. Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features / © 2026 FOCUS FEATURES LLC