For decades, horror told young women a simple, punishing rule: want someone, sleep with someone, and you die first. The slasher era practically ran on it. So there is something quietly radical about Obsession — the $750,000 sleeper that just outgrossed Star Wars — flipping the lesson on its head. The terror here isn't desire. It's what happens when desire gets everything it asks for.
Curry Barker's film follows Bear (Michael Johnston), who uses a cursed object to make his friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) love him. And in Nikki, the movie locates the real nightmare of modern intimacy: being wanted so completely that you stop being free. Love that removes all risk also removes all choice — and what's left isn't romance, it's control.
That fear is landing hardest with Gen Z women, and the data backs it up. Speaking to Metro, Lovehoney's relationship expert Annabelle Knight pointed to a global study showing “80% of Gen Z respondents felt lonely in the past 12 months, compared to just 45% of Baby Boomers.” The generation most fluent in boundaries and red flags is also, by its own account, the most isolated.
Chartered psychologist Dr Katie Barge, also speaking to Metro, cautioned against flatly calling young people “afraid” of intimacy, noting that “many studies suggest that today's young people are more cautious about emotional vulnerability, rejection and relational risk” — while still craving real connection. That tension, wanting closeness and fearing its cost, is the engine of nearly every great recent horror heroine.
Obsession doesn't sit alone. Fresh turned dating into a literal meat market. The Substance took being seen, judged and discarded and made it grotesque. Companion made the perfect partner monstrous. Across all of them, women are the ones forced to ask whether the person across the table is safe — or even real.
Relationship coach Lorin Krenn summed up the generation that made this film a phenomenon: “They know the vocabulary of the heart,” he told Metro. “They are just terrified of living it.”
That's the survivor's dilemma, updated for the age of the situationship. The final girl used to outrun a masked man. Now she's deciding whether to let anyone close enough to hurt her at all.
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