Horror has always held a mirror to society. But something shifted around 2017. The genre stopped hiding its messages in subtext and started putting them front and centre. The result is a string of low-budget, high-impact films that function less as pure scare machines and more as moral lessons. Curry Barker’s ‘Obsession’ (2025) is the latest and most commercially explosive entry in that tradition.
The film that changed the template
Jordan Peele’s ‘Get Out’ (2017) is the obvious starting point. Peele, best known as one half of the Comedy Central duo Key and Peele, wrote and directed a film about a Black man who visits his white girlfriend’s family and discovers something sinister beneath their liberal hospitality.
The film was made for $4.5 million. It grossed $259.8 million worldwide. It opened to $30.5 million domestically on its debut weekend, topping the box office. And, it earned a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes at launch. Peele received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and won Best Original Screenplay.
‘Get Out’ proved something important. Audiences would pay to watch horror that had something to say. The monster did not need to be a creature or a ghost. It could be a social system, a set of assumptions, or a type of person. The film’s horror came directly from its social observation. Strip out the commentary on race, and the scares evaporate.
That fusion of message and mechanism set a blueprint that others quickly followed.
Comedy backgrounds, dark material
Every significant film in this wave shares one structural fact. The directors came from comedy.
Peele came from sketch television. Zach Cregger came from The Whitest Kids U’ Know, a sketch comedy group. Danny and Michael Philippou built an audience through their horror-comedy YouTube channel RackaRacka. Curry Barker made sketch videos on YouTube alongside his collaborator Cooper Tomlinson before shooting ‘Obsession’.
This is not coincidence. Comedy and horror share the same core mechanics. Both rely on timing. Both build tension through misdirection and release it at the right moment. And, both require a precise read of an audience’s expectations. A comedian who pivots to horror brings those tools with them.
Cregger’s ‘Barbarian’ (2022) is the clearest example of how that background works. The film was made for $4.5 million and earned $45.4 million worldwide. It begins with an awkward comedy of errors: a woman arrives at her Airbnb to find it double-booked with a stranger. The tone feels almost sitcom-adjacent. Then it goes somewhere entirely different.
Cregger has said the film grew out of his reading of ‘The Gift of Fear’, a non-fiction book that encourages women to trust their instincts around men who set off warning signs. He wrote the opening scene as an exercise in loading a situation with as many of those red flags as possible. The result is a film that is, at its core, about how predatory male behaviour hides behind social performance.
The monsters in ‘Barbarian’ are not supernatural. They are men who abused their power and built systems to protect themselves. The creature in the tunnel is a product of that abuse. The horror is real. The source is human.
‘Talk to Me’ and the grammar of addiction
Danny and Michael Philippou followed a similar path. Their 2022 film ‘Talk to Me’ used possession horror as a metaphor for addiction and grief. Made for $4.5 million, it grossed $91.9 million worldwide and became A24’s highest-grossing horror film of all time, surpassing ‘Hereditary’.
The film centres on a teenager, Mia, still processing her mother’s death. She and her friends discover they can contact spirits using an embalmed hand. They become addicted to the rush. Mia becomes increasingly desperate to reach her dead mother. The horror escalates from there.
The Philippous came from RackaRacka, a YouTube channel with millions of subscribers known for violent, frenetic comedy. Their shift to feature filmmaking brought the same restless energy but directed it toward something more disturbing. ‘Talk to Me’ uses the mechanics of drug addiction to structure its supernatural horror. Every escalation mirrors how dependency works. The film is frightening precisely because its behaviour is recognisable.
‘Obsession’ and the nice guy
Barker’s ‘Obsession’ fits squarely in this lineage. The premise is simple. Bear, a shy music store employee, buys a supernatural toy called a One Wish Willow and uses it to make his childhood friend and co-worker Nikki fall in love with him. The wish works. What follows is a nightmare.
The film was produced on a budget of under $1 million. Focus Features acquired it out of the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival for $15 million. It opened domestically to $17.2 million. In its second weekend, it earned $23.9 million, a 39% increase. Its third weekend brought in $26.4 million, pushing it past $100 million domestic. That third-weekend increase was the first of its kind for a non-holiday wide release since ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’ in 1982.
The film’s social target is specific. Bear does not see himself as a villain. He is patient, sensitive, and certain that he has suffered enough to deserve Nikki’s love. In Bear’s mind, Nikki’s lack of romantic interest is not a reflection of her own feelings but a failure to recognise his value. He is the archetype of what has been called “Nice Guy Syndrome”: the belief that kindness, persistence, and suffering entitle a person to another’s affection.
Also Read: From ‘Vertigo’ to ‘Obsession’: How one horror idea has dominated cinema since 1958
Bear is obsessed with Nikki long before the wish happens. The film repeatedly emphasises that his entitlement creates the nightmare consuming both of them.
Nikki, meanwhile, is robbed of her agency entirely. She blacks out, commits violent acts, and slowly becomes a husk of herself, existing solely to satisfy the wish forced upon her. The film does not let Bear off the hook for enjoying this, even briefly. Even after he learns she is a prisoner in her own body, he does not take real steps to change things without first seeing if he can remain with Nikki.
That is the moral engine of the film. The horror is not the supernatural wish. It is the logic that made the wish feel reasonable in the first place.
What this wave has in common
‘Get Out’, ‘Barbarian’, ‘Talk to Me’, and ‘Obsession’ were all made for under $5 million. All four grossed far beyond their budgets. All four were debut or near-debut features from directors with comedy backgrounds. And, all four used horror mechanics to examine a specific social failure: racism, male predation, addiction, entitlement.
None of these films are subtle about their intentions. That directness is a feature, not a flaw. The genre’s mass audience makes it one of the most effective vehicles for social criticism available to filmmakers. The monster is always a metaphor. In this wave, the metaphor is always something real.
‘Obsession’ is the most commercially successful of the group so far. Its box office numbers suggest the audience appetite for this kind of horror is not shrinking. It is growing.