Hollywood has been telling this story since 1958. A man. A fixation. A woman reduced to a projection. Curry Barker did not invent this horror. He just made it impossible to ignore.
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Curry Barker’s ‘Obsession’ (2025) did not arrive in a vacuum. Critics called it “the Gen-Z ‘Fatal Attraction'” almost immediately. That comparison stuck. But the film’s lineage goes back further than Adrian Lyne’s 1987 thriller. It stretches all the way to Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ in 1958. Between those two poles sits Brian De Palma’s 1976 film also titled ‘Obsession’. Together, these four films form a direct line. Each one takes the same corrosive subject, a man’s fixation on a woman, and filters it through its own era.
‘Vertigo’ is where the modern cinematic obsession story begins. Hitchcock adapted it from the 1954 French novel ‘D’entre les morts’ by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. James Stewart plays Scottie Ferguson, a retired San Francisco detective with a fear of heights. An old friend hires him to follow his wife, Madeleine. Scottie follows her and becomes dangerously fixated on her.
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When Madeleine apparently dies, Scottie falls into a psychological collapse. He later meets Judy, a woman who looks exactly like Madeleine. He does not know they are the same person. Then he starts remaking Judy in Madeleine’s image: the same hair, the same clothes, the same posture. He cares nothing about who Judy actually is.
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The film flopped on release. Critics were lukewarm, and it made less money than Hitchcock’s previous films. Hitchcock later bought back the rights, and the film was largely unavailable until 1983. Over the following decades, its reputation reversed entirely. It is now considered one of the greatest films ever made.
What ‘Vertigo’ introduced was a specific type of horror: the horror of a man who loves an image rather than a person. Scottie does not fall in love with Judy. He falls in love with his own projection. The real woman is irrelevant. That idea would echo through cinema for the next seventy years.
Brian De Palma and screenwriter Paul Schrader both openly acknowledged that ‘Vertigo’ was the direct inspiration for their 1976 film ‘Obsession’. De Palma has discussed it in multiple interviews and in the documentary ‘De Palma’ (2015).
The film stars Cliff Robertson as Michael Courtland, a wealthy New Orleans developer whose wife and daughter die during a kidnapping gone wrong. Years later, in Italy, he meets a young woman who looks exactly like his dead wife. He falls in love with her and brings her back to America.
The parallels with ‘Vertigo’ are deliberate. A man. A dead woman. A look-alike who triggers the same fixation. De Palma even hired Bernard Herrmann — who scored ‘Vertigo’ — to compose the music for ‘Obsession’. Herrmann called it among his best work. Vilmos Zsigmond’s soft-focus cinematography gave the film a dreamlike quality that mirrored Hitchcock’s visual style.
Columbia Pictures picked up the film but demanded changes before release. Some of the more controversial elements of the original script were altered or obscured. Despite this, ‘Obsession’ became De Palma’s first major box office success when it opened in 1976. Critics gave it mixed reviews, largely because of its close resemblance to ‘Vertigo’. According to some accounts, Hitchcock was furious about the film.
De Palma and Schrader did push the material in a darker direction. The original Schrader script included elements that De Palma ultimately cut. The obsession in their film has a grimmer psychological texture than Hitchcock’s. Where ‘Vertigo’ kept a kind of melancholic romanticism, ‘Obsession’ edges closer to something more disturbing.
Adrian Lyne’s ‘Fatal Attraction’ shifted the lens. In ‘Vertigo’ and De Palma’s ‘Obsession’, the man is the one consumed by fixation. Lyne’s film gave the obsessive role to the woman.
The film was written by James Dearden, based on his own 1980 short film ‘Diversion’. Michael Douglas plays Dan Gallagher, a married attorney who has a weekend affair with Alex Forrest, played by Glenn Close. When Dan ends the affair, Alex refuses to accept it. She begins stalking him and his family.
‘Fatal Attraction’ was made on a budget of $14 million. It grossed over $320 million worldwide. It spent eight weeks at number one in the United States and became the highest-grossing film globally in 1987. It received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress for Close, and Best Supporting Actress for Anne Archer. It won none.
The film was controversial. Many critics pointed out that Alex is framed as a monster while Dan, who cheated on his wife, faces no real moral reckoning. The original ending had Alex commit suicide and frame Dan for her death. Test audiences rejected it. The final release version ends with Dan’s wife shooting Alex.
Glenn Close’s performance was widely praised regardless. The phrase “fatal attraction” became a permanent part of the cultural vocabulary. The film also launched a wave of similar thrillers throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, including ‘The Hand That Rocks the Cradle’ (1992) and ‘Single White Female’ (1992).
What ‘Fatal Attraction’ added to the lineage was scale and pop culture penetration. It made obsession a mainstream horror. It also, for better or worse, reframed the obsessive as female — which influenced how the subject was handled in popular cinema for years afterward.
Curry Barker’s ‘Obsession’ is a supernatural horror film written, directed, and edited by Barker himself. It stars Michael Johnston as Bear, a shy music store employee who cannot find the courage to tell his co-worker Nikki, played by Inde Navarrette, how he feels. He buys a trinket called a One Wish Willow and wishes for her to love him.
The wish works. But what follows is not a romantic comedy. Nikki’s behavior becomes increasingly extreme. Bear begins to understand what he has done. He forced his will onto another person. The love she now feels is not real. He did not earn it.
The film was produced by Blumhouse Productions and Capstone Pictures on a reported budget of around $1 million. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025 and opened in the United States in May 2026. Its male star Michael Johnston described it as “the Gen-Z ‘Fatal Attraction’.”
The comparison is accurate but incomplete. Like ‘Fatal Attraction’, the film uses the mechanics of obsessive love to build dread. But it inverts the moral framing. In Lyne’s film, the obsessive woman is the monster. In Barker’s film, the obsessive man is the monster, even though he sees himself as harmless. Bear is not violent or aggressive. He thinks of himself as sensitive. That is the point.
The film also borrows the ‘Monkey’s Paw’ structure that ‘Vertigo’ uses in a different way. In both films, a man cannot accept the loss of something he wanted and takes action to recover it. In both, the action destroys the very thing he wanted.
These four films span nearly seventy years. The details change with each decade. The cultural anxieties around gender, agency, and desire shift. Hitchcock’s 1950s romanticism gives way to De Palma’s 1970s unease, then Lyne’s 1980s mainstream horror, and finally Barker’s Gen-Z interrogation of the “nice guy” myth.
But the core subject stays the same. A person becomes fixed on an idea of someone else. They treat the real human being as a prop for their own desire. The consequences are always catastrophic.
‘Vertigo’ introduced this template. Brian De Palma adapted it openly. ‘Fatal Attraction’ mass-marketed it. Barker’s ‘Obsession’ strips it down to its ugliest implication. Cinema keeps returning to this story because it keeps being true.
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