‘Obsession’ Is the First Horror Box Office Hit of the Summer

Focus Features has officially kicked off summertime horror with Obsession (read our review), the first big horror movie of the year, setting off a string of genre films coming out over the next few months. Summer used to be dedicated to blockbusters, but now we get horror films that studios actually believe in.

As many of you older readers know, August, September, January, and February used to be considered “dump months,” where studios would unload horror films they didn’t believe in, with lesser marketing spends and less risk, just to get them off the books and move on. We horror fans always felt irritated by this because, a lot of the time, those movies were pretty good. We enjoyed them, they performed really well, and we’d ask: why? Why didn’t you take a chance on this and give it a wider audience? Why throw it out when kids are back in school? We could never understand it.

Anyways, things have changed over the past few years, and here we are with the first big movie of the summer: Obsession. And Curry Barker’s Obsession is kind of a big deal.

As much as I’d love to talk about Backrooms right now, Obsession is the movie we’re going to be talking about next January and February when Oscar season comes around. This is our new Hereditary.

But I want to digress for a moment. Hereditary was extremely divisive. It’s a slow-burn arthouse horror film, and it did not connect with a lot of the horror audience, and that’s totally fine. I get it. But Toni Collette’s performance was Oscar-worthy, and to this day it’s still bullshit that she wasn’t even nominated. I didn’t expect her to win, but I wanted to see her there. I wanted to see Hereditary up on that screen, and it still pisses me off.

Now, Indie Navarrette‘s performance in Obsession already feels like the kind of performance that should be in the Oscar conversation next year.