‘Obsession’ Has Crashed the IMDb Top 250, and the Numbers Behind It Are Genuinely Staggering
Horror has had more than its share of unexpected champions over the years, but few stories have unfolded quite like the one surrounding Curry Barker’s debut feature. The 26-year-old YouTuber-turned-filmmaker shot ‘Obsession’ in just 20 days on a budget of roughly $750,000, a figure so lean it barely registers as a rounding error against standard Hollywood productions.
Before ‘Obsession’ made its festival debut, Barker was primarily known for his viral 2024 short ‘Milk and Serial’, a thriller following a duo of YouTube pranksters that he released for free online. Nothing in that origin story suggested the seismic cultural moment that was about to follow.
The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 5, 2025, as part of its Midnight Madness section, and the reaction in that room changed everything. Studios entered a bidding war for the project out of TIFF, with Focus Features ultimately prevailing over Neon and A24 for domestic rights, acquiring it for a reported $14 million.
Universal Pictures International was brought on board to handle overseas distribution. The premise that sparked all of this is deceptively simple: a hopeless romantic breaks the mysterious “One Wish Willow” to win his crush’s heart, only to discover that some desires come at a dark, sinister price.
That price, it turns out, has been paid back many times over. As highlighted by Geek Vibes Nation, ‘Obsession’ has now landed on the IMDb Top 250 Films of All-Time, sitting at number 248 with a rating of 8.1 drawn from over 82,000 user votes.
The film also holds a Certified Fresh 96% rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes alongside a Verified Hot 95% audience score, numbers that are almost impossibly rare for any horror release, let alone a micro-budget debut. Rotten Tomatoes critics called it creatively grotesque and darkly funny, praising Inde Navarrette’s performance and cementing Barker as a filmmaker to watch.
The box office trajectory has been equally jaw-dropping. The film opened to a domestic debut and earned matching 94% scores across critics and audiences, before doing something almost unheard of in the industry. According to producer Jason Blum, ‘Obsession’ is the only wide-release horror film on record to grow in its second weekend at such a scale, earning $22.4 million, up 30% over its opening.
It then added another 10% jump in its third weekend, pulling in $26.4 million domestically. The film has now surpassed $234.5 million globally, making it the highest-grossing horror film of 2026 and landing in the top 10 highest-grossing films of the year overall.
The film’s success has already put Barker in serious demand, with the director tapped to helm the next installment in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, while his Blumhouse follow-up ‘Anything But Ghosts’, starring Bryce Dallas Howard and Aaron Paul, is currently in post-production.
A sequel to ‘Obsession‘ is also possible, though Barker has floated the idea of an anthology series where other filmmakers give their own spin on the world he created. For a film that started as a passion project shot in under three weeks by a YouTuber with a $750,000 budget, an IMDb Top 250 placement feels less like a milestone and more like an inevitability.
Whether ‘Obsession’ eventually climbs even higher in that ranking or fades as the votes settle, it has already secured its place in horror history. Now the real question is what you think: does ‘Obsession’ deserve a spot in the all-time Top 250, or does its meteoric rise feel too fast and too fresh to sit comfortably alongside the classics?
