San Francisco Frontiers - Horror film 'Obsession' is exploding cinema profit records

After premiering at the Toronto Film Festival last year and releasing at the beginning of May, it has become a word-of-mouth phenomenon over the last two months with fright-loving Gen Z audiences in particular.

Its success has catapulted 26-year-old Barker from a YouTube video creator into Hollywood's A-league with a first feature-length film that cost just $750,000 to $1 million to make.

"In terms of the ratio between the worldwide box office and the production budget, 'Obsession' is going to be the biggest success of all time, which is extraordinary," Bruce Nash, founder of industry-tracking website The Numbers, told AFP.

With ticket sales of around $430 million worldwide, it has already overtaken the 1999 supernatural thriller "The Blair Witch Project", which made around $250 million on a full budget of $600,000, according to Nash.

In absolute terms, Hollywood mega-hits such as the "Avatar" films, "Frozen" or "Titanic" made more money but with blockbuster budgets several hundred times the one available to Barker.

- Burgers to big screen -

The Alabama-born director's success at the box office has surpassed that of the other remarkable horror hit of the year -- "Backrooms" by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, which has earned $360 million with a budget of around $10 million.

Both films are in the top 10 highest-grossing movies of 2026, underlining the appetite for horror among young audiences and starting what is set to be a new trend -- young social media creators moving into cinema.

"They're very encouraging for the future of cinema," Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan told AFP and other entertainment journalists last week in Paris.

Barker moved from his home town of Mobile to Los Angeles after finishing high school, initially studying film and hoping to make it as an actor.

A few years ago, he was flipping burgers in L.A., working at Starbucks, and taking whatever jobs he could find in the film or TV industry to make ends meet.

The blonde-haired sunglasses collector scored a minor role in the series "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" and took a position overseeing Covid safety protocols during the pandemic on another production.

All the while, he and creative partner Cooper Tomlinson were trialling content online, mixing comedy sketches on TikTok and Instagram with horror shorts such as "The Chair" on their YouTube channel "That's a Bad Idea".

"In that journey, you figure out timing, you figure out tricks like how to get someone's attention in the first three seconds," Barker told The Big Picture podcast recently.

- Next projects -

The "Obsession" plot is a simple but original idea from Barker: a young man uses a lucky charm known as the "One Wish Willow" to wish that his long-time friend and crush falls madly in love with him.

The violent and unsettling consequences deliver enough scares to thrill even a hardened horror fan, while raising questions around toxic relationships, dating culture and consent.

It was turned into a cash bonanza for Focus Features, part of Hollywood studio Universal, which bought the distribution rights for $15 million at the Toronto Film Festival last year.

Barker has several new projects already in the pipeline: a second feature, "Anything But Ghosts", in which he acts alongside Tomlinson, while he has also been tapped to direct a new version of the 1974 slasher classic "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre."

"I have a lot to weigh and that’s where the stress really comes from. I don’t know what to do next," he told The Hollywood Reporter.

B.Ramirez--SFF