Obsession — and the internet — is about to change the face of horror

We shouldn’t be surprised that some of the best horror in 2026 is coming from a very online sketch comedian.

Fans mined last year’s Oscar-winning horror sensation Weapons for inside jokes, declaring a tray of seven hot dogs was surely a reference to director Zach Cregger’s former comedy troupe Whitest Kids U’Know — a theory Cregger tepidly accepted.

If you ask Donald Glover’s sketch collaborators from his Derrick Comedy days, they’ll say he always had a dark side, which jumped out in his 2023 parasociality series Swarm.

And of course if you were to ask the ostensible OG of the comedy-horror crossover Jordan Peele, the reason he was able to switch from the jokes of Key & Peele to Get Out is so obvious it’s barely worth discussing.

“The reason [horror and comedy] work — why they get primal, audible reactions from us — is because they allow us to purge our own fears and discomforts in a safe environment,” he told the Guardian in 2017. “It’s like therapy. You deal with deep issues that are uncomfortable with the hope that there is a release.”

WATCH | Obsession trailer:

Enter Obsession, the horror film from 26-year-old TikTok comedian Curry Barker — half of the comedy duo That’s a Bad Idea — whose keen eye for social commentary is about to change horror for good.

Not that the plot is revelatory, exactly. We follow Bear (Michael Johnston), a twentysomething certified-Nice-Guy who sobs mournfully over the loss of his cat, selflessly drives his friends home after a night of drinking — and spends the days practicing professions of love for the girl he pines after with best friend Ian (That’s a Bad Idea’s Cooper Tomlinson). 

And it is that beloved girl, Nikki (Inde Navarrette), the plot revolves around; a typical kind of painful unrequited love story that quickly pivots into a “careful what you wish for” cursed object tale, whose message and consequence seems inescapably self-evident from the first few seconds.

Stumbling on a “One-Wish Willow” at the local holistic crystal store, Bear is suddenly presented with a magical opportunity: should he make Nikki fall hopelessly, madly in love with him? Would it violate her agency to do so, or would he just be nudging her in the right direction? 

Is it wrong to force someone to love you, or could he — whoops, too late, he just did it. And now Nikki’s walking back to his car with open arms and a smile on her face. And now she’s moving into his place, putting romantic notes in the work lunch she made for him and cuddling up against him in bed late at night. 

It’s everything he could have dreamed of. It’s just … why is she smiling all wide-eyed like that? What’s that odd taste in his sandwich? And waking up during one of those late nights … dear God, what’s that in the corner? 

Unsettling, unnerving

You can probably see where we’re going here. And if not, it only becomes more clear after witnessing the otherworldly performance given by Navarrette. Her whip-fast transitions between the Stepford Wife Bear asked for, a horrifying It-like Eldritch horror walking backwards around corners, and the suddenly hysterical Nikki trapped inside will soon become the stuff of acting legend.

And it all happens around the kind of deeply unsettling commentary that has already shot the film into the stratosphere. That, after its world premiere at TIFF, got Barker the highest priced sale for a genre movie in the festival’s history. That led to its pre-release 97 per cent Rotten Tomatoes “fresh” rating — the best for any wide-released film of 2026 so far. 

It’s a success Barker lands on by focusing on what horror can do best: transgress social boundaries in a way that feels actually unnatural, while subverting the self-serving saviour narrative of most exorcism films. And he does it with a mixture of suspense and lunacy that holds a funhouse mirror to society.

We see Bear as the unequivocal villain of the story, instead of the put-upon Everyman we’ve come to expect. The film questions what kind of man would rationalize his control and personal comfort as love and care — making us ask why we’ve been so comfortable romanticizing it in the first place.

It’s only when we recognize how familiar these wonky images are that we either laugh (or in this case, scream) at how bizarre life actually is. 

Barker comes from a generation raised on the internet — in a world that feels constantly about to end — so he knows how we struggle to cope with a perpetual state of terror and disorientation, and can blur the lines between comedy and horror until they’re functionally the same thing. 

This connection fuelled Barker’s TikTok and Instagram sketches about demonic possession and psychopaths, and now a horror movie about perfect love. It prompted I Saw The TV Glow‘s Jane Schoenbrun to make their first film: a YouTube collage about the internet myth Slenderman’s unique mixture of violent delusion and ironic idiocy.

And it inspired 20-year-old Kane Parsons to make the hotly anticipated Backrooms — a star-stuffed “elevated horror” film inspired by a meme designed to scare self-serious eight-year-olds, coming from now the youngest ever director to work for A24. 

If you were to believe Jason Blum, head of horror studio Blumhouse, Barker and Parson’s apocalyptically online artistic visions represent a sea change for the industry.

In truth, the juice likely isn’t worth the squeeze: getting that perfectly crafted, carnivalesque dread is really only possible by subjecting an entire generation to an environment of dislocated emotional terror.

But if the end result is a wave of new horrors as good as Obsession, at least we get something good out of the world ending.