Possessed, Oppressed, and Depressed
A socio-demonological perspective on the films Obsession and It Follows.
This piece by our longtime contributor Arbogast is free to read without a subscription.
Possessed vs. Oppressed
Curry Barker’s smash-hit horror film Obsession is a movie for the ages. Made for approximately $750,000 by a young filmmaker who got his start on YouTube, Obsession has clearly captured the zeitgeist and has been rewarded handsomely for it. It is the most successful film ever of its type (a horror flick made for less than a cool million), grossing somewhere in the ballpark of $400 million worldwide. It is the number one film on IMDb. And in Anno 2026, it has transcended mere cinema and entered the hyper-world of memes, TikTok reels, and YouTube ambient playlists, where the sleep-deprived can drift off across the Lethe, basking in the yellowish glow of the film’s gloomy set designs.
The current consensus regarding this update of W. W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw” is that Obsession represents “incel horror” and exposes the many disquietudes of Zoomers and Gen Alpha regarding denied sex and romantic relationships. In this light, the protagonist Bear (played by Michael Johnston) is cast as the archetypal incel—he is shy and awkward, works an entry-level job at a music store, and is described by Nikki (played brilliantly by Inde Navarrette) as a “closed book” who rarely reveals his emotions or interior life to anyone. For the vocal coterie of very online left-wing critics, these character traits are evidence of Bear’s innate villainy—a villainy that gets exposed throughout the film as Bear takes advantage of Nikki, the supposed love of his life.
But wait. Let’s back up a little first. Not everyone reading this review has seen Obsession. A brief, non-spoiler rundown is therefore in order.
Obsession is the story of Bear, a young man deeply infatuated with Nikki, a beautiful coworker who is two weeks away from leaving their shared job. Bear feels the pressure and wants to confess his feelings for Nikki before she goes, but he is the reclusive type with a cabinet full of psych and sleep meds. He’s the kind who smiles, murmurs, and avoids conflict. He is the type who needs a more aggressive friend (played by Cooper Tomlinson) to help coach him through the difficult task of vulnerability. One night, following a weekly game of bar trivia, Bear tries to confess to Nikki but chickens out.
It should be noted here that during this same car ride, Nikki informs Bear that another coworker, Sarah (played by Megan Lawless), has feelings for Bear. Sarah is attractive, close to Bear, Ian, and Nikki, and, best of all, is interested in Bear. Nikki, on the other hand, is not, although she doesn’t hate or loathe Bear; she sees him as a friend. For Bear, this is a hateful wound. He desires Nikki, so after dropping her off at home, he reaches into his back seat where two items lie. The first is a necklace that he purchased earlier to replace one that Nikki had lost. Bear is such a wimp that he cannot even give a girl a present without having a panic attack. However, next to that necklace is a small item: the One Wish Willow. This toy, which looks like nothing less than a holdout from the 1960s, claims to grant its users the power of one wish and one wish only. As Nikki stands just outside of her own door, Bear wishes for her to love him more than anything in the whole world and then snaps the artificial willow branch.
Reality snaps right after that.
What follows is a stomach-churning, nail-biting, claustrophobic horror flick in which Nikki becomes so obsessed with Bear that she moves in with him, refuses to leave the house, and even starts watching him sleep. It is never in doubt that this Nikki is artificial—a demonic imp possessing the body and mind of the real woman. There are moments when Nikki, the true Nikki, screams out to Heaven (and Bear). She weeps about being unable to sleep and having horrific nightmares, and in the film’s most important scene, she begs and pleads for Bear to kill her and end her suffering.
At the risk of giving the game away, Bear’s offhand wish comes true, and he fights like hell against facing the fact that the woman of his dreams doesn’t love him, but her demon doppelgänger certainly does. The online commentariat continues to excoriate Bear as the film’s villain (and he is the villain), and most point out that he should have realized the gravity of the situation the moment when Nikki started acting strange, which is basically fifteen minutes into the 109-minute film. I, on the other hand, give Bear the benefit of the doubt: there are clues scattered throughout the film suggesting that Nikki has stressors and issues in her life that could be used to justify her odd behavior. We know that she has a troubled relationship with her father, that she’s not averse to taking mind-altering substances, and that she quit her job because she felt “unloved” at the music store (in other words, a goo gaga reason). Also, lest we forget, Nikki was known throughout her adolescence as “Freaky Nikki,” an appellation she hates and one that may or may not indicate a history of antisocial behavior. Most real people would not jump to supernatural explanations given that Nikki, who is suddenly acting weird, has a history of being “freaky.” Plus, the demon inhabiting Nikki’s body makes up lies about cancer and MDMA.
But back to the film’s most important scene.
When the disembodied voice of the real Nikki begs for Bear to kill her, a whimpering Bear resists the suggestion not because murder is a great sin but because he takes offense at the idea that being with him is worse than nonexistence. Rather than a plea to be rid of demonic possession, Bear takes Nikki’s cries as a revelation of his own inadequacy. When Bear refuses to grant Nikki’s wish and once again flees from a problem he caused, he becomes a full villain. Not evil or monstrous but certainly the film’s black heart.
From a demonological and Christian perspective, there is only one unalloyed evil in Obsession, and that is the mysterious force behind the One Wish Willow. While the goofy, braindead workers at the New Age shop that sells the unholy toy certainly deserve some scorn, Bear only sees the true horror once, and it occurs over the phone. During one of his attempts to undo his wish, Bear calls the phone number on the One Wish Willow box and is connected to a soft voice that sounds languid, bored, and accustomed to delivering customer service platitudes. And yet the voice on the other end of the line fully accepts that the One Wish Willow has the power to alter reality. The voice knows that bad juju is afoot. The exclamation point to this comes when the voice asks Bear if he wants to talk to the real Nikki. Bear says yes and hears the piercing, wailing scream of the tortured.
The idea here is that Nikki’s soul is trapped in Hell and that the One Wish Willow is an engine for infernal forces. Indeed, Obsession is a possession story, with Nikki’s body being occupied by an unnamed demonic entity.
Within the tradition of Western esotericism, love magic is of the left-hand path, for, like all black magic, love magic involves the deployment of a magician’s will to force change according to their wishes. Love may be the greatest symbol of light in our culture, with Jesus Christ being the image and bearer of pure love, but love magic twists this beauty and perverts it for selfish ends. This is what Bear does—unintentionally at first, then deliberately when he decides that it is preferable to be desired and even tortured by Nikki’s satanic love than to let his obsession go and make peace with loneliness (or, God forbid, Sarah’s legitimate love).
Our materialist age hates Bear for denying Nikki her autonomy, for having sex with her demon-possessed automaton. All of this is correct. However, and this is the moment when I shall receive hate mail, Bear is also the victim of malevolent forces. Nikki suffers possession as a result of Bear’s ill-thought wish, while Bear suffers from oppression.
Let me explain a little.
According to Church tradition and the Latin Rite of Exorcism, the more familiar stage of possession, which is the final and deadliest stage of demonic activity, appears when a demonic entity invades the soul of an individual and takes control of their will. The demon’s control of Nikki’s will is not total in Obsession. We do see flashes of the real Nikki screaming apologies from time to time. However, the possession is nearly complete and only deepens as the film rolls along.
Demonic oppression, which is typically the first stage of demonic activity, is characterized by harassment, evil influence, and mental oppression carried out by a demon or demons with the intent of delivering the victim’s soul to damnation. The oppressed may become possessed, but more often than not their torment is the torment of images and experiences—they are assaulted by profane visions, poltergeist-like disturbances in their homes, and horrific nightmares that encourage homicidal or suicidal ideation. The demons of the One Wish Willow never touch Bear’s soul, and thus his free will is left intact (which only further solidifies his culpability), but their oppression and the rules of the wish dictate that he must either kill Nikki or kill himself to end the wish. Either choice leads to Bear’s eternal damnation. Bear ultimately makes a choice—one many have labeled “cowardly.” Sure, but at the risk of sounding soft-hearted, by the film’s halfway point, Bear has no good options. If he kills Nikki, then he goes to prison for the rest of his life. If he kills himself, then either he is snuffed from existence and enters the eternal void or he descends into Hell and suffers until Judgment Day.
All of this is because of a lovelorn wish made by a young man fiddling with what he believes to be an innocuous trinket.
Obsession’s criticisms have been primarily sociological in orientation. Bear figures prominently in these criticisms as the weak male Zoomer who could have saved himself by simply being honest. Rob Henderson, writing in his Rob Henderson’s Newsletter on Substack, makes the simple case that Bear and, by extension, the millions of lonely, loveless young men in America who’ve gone years without a date, should have asked Nikki out in Act One, thereby saving himself and all the others from the film’s gruesome and gore-soaked horrors. While this is good advice in general, it would not have saved Bear or Nikki in Obsession. It is made obvious throughout the film that Nikki does not have romantic feelings for Bear. Not only does she hook up with Ian on occasion, but Ian and Sarah both tell Bear that Nikki has admitted in the past to putting him in the dreaded friend zone. And for those incapable of paying attention to dialogue, signs, or signifiers, the ending shows Nikki throwing Bear away like a hateful piece of rubbish.
Matthew Schmitz, writing in Compact magazine, articulates that Obsession embodies “heteropessimist horror,” or horror fiction that displays a fear of heterosexual relationships and dating. In a culture awash in never-ending gender wars, where almost one-third of young adults are projected to reach the age of forty-five as unwed and unattached singles, Obsession reads like an admission by Zoomers that sex and love and couplings frighten them. Many in their cohort have given up on sex altogether, and Obsession offers insight into why that may be (generalized social anxiety, infinite rejection, the absolute avalanche of terrible dating advice—see Ian in the film).
It is this last bit that got my little gray cells activated.
Sex has long played an important role in horror films. After all, horror has a reputation for being conservative and sex negative because every ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s slasher film has a scene where a couple gets axed, stabbed, chopped, and/or flambéed while they do the dirty deed. But since the growth of quiet horror in the late 2000s, sex has ceased being a vehicle for titillation in horror films and has instead become a character in and of itself.
Thinking this late last night when I couldn’t sleep made me realize that Obsession has a Millennial antecedent.
It Follows – Progenitor of Obsession
It Follows, directed by David Robert Mitchell and released in theaters in March 2015, tells the story of a shambling entity, presumably a demon of some stripe or other, that gets passed along like an STD following the act of coitus. The lead character is a young woman in her early twenties named Jay (played by Maika Monroe) who, following a one-night stand with “Hugh” (played by Jake Weary), becomes infected and begins seeing the demonic shapeshifter as it slowly follows her. “Hugh,” real name Jeff Redmond, explains to Jay (Monroe) that the only way to survive the entity is to pass it along, i.e., have sex with someone and give them the infection.
Filmed in the Detroit suburbs during the early stages of autumn, It Follows is a masterpiece of Millennial horror. It is also the template that Obsession borrowed. Both have a dreamlike quality and feel out of time. It Follows deliberately cultivates a neo-’80s aesthetic, from the synth-heavy soundtrack by Disasterpeace to the mise-en-scène of a homogeneous suburban street, while still taking place in the contemporary period. Obsession likewise has the moody ambiance of the 1990s, with the Zoomer characters floating in and out of a world that includes music stores, pubs with wood paneling, and parties where nobody is doomscrolling on their phone. Both movies traffic in nostalgia, which has been the primary aesthetic and interest of Millennials and Zoomers for multiple decades now.
It Follows centers on the difficult topic of sex among the young. Whereas Obsession has a single sex scene that makes everyone uncomfortable because of its criminal character, It Follows has multiple sex scenes ranging from the passionate to the awkward. It Follows also includes a high degree of nudity, as the entity often masks itself as naked men and women, including one presumed rape victim (the female walker seen in Jay’s kitchen) and the half-naked mother of Greg (played by Daniel Zovatto). When the entity gets its victim, it dry humps them to death, draining their vitality before severing their limbs. All of this is because It Follows is about the anxieties inherent in hookup culture, the bête noire of Millennials. The demon in Mitchell’s movie comes from meaningless and nonromantic deeds of flesh, and it is passed along by the same sickness. Yes, It Follows also includes themes of maturity, but Jay’s struggles with growing into womanhood derive first from her ugly sexual encounter with Hugh/Jeff. It Follows is a movie about and for a culture where sex is something easily accessed, and thus its downsides become widespread.
Obsession is quite different. Sex is not a major theme in the film. Bear does not wish for Nikki to be his unthinking sex doll; he wishes for her to love him. This may seem like romance is the key anxiety at play in the film, but in truth, Bear’s response to Nikki’s disembodied voice underscores that everything—the horror, the bloodshed, the death—derives from Bear’s fear of being unloved and unworthy. Bear’s selfish fear is that there is something malformed and undesirable within his soul, and this is the same fear shared by millions of Zoomers who have grown up in an atomized, antiseptic, and lonely America where the screen has replaced the priest, the parent, and the lover. Comparing Obsession to It Follows highlights the distinctions between Millennials and Zoomers: It Follows depicts a fuller social world lived mostly outdoors, while Obsession takes place indoors or in cars. It Follows has a central friend group of five people who are constantly seen together; Obsession’s scenes typically include only two people at a time. Both films are haunted by demons, but only Obsession feels like its little world is cold, empty, and thoroughly occupied by internal agonies.
Horror has a way of teaching us about our own insecurities. Each generation has its own fears and hang-ups. The young ones geeking out over Obsession recognize that Bear is something of a tulpa—the fictional representation of the collected energies of repressed and (demonically) oppressed young men grappling with unrequited love. The possessed Nikki gives Bear everything he wants and more, and, like “The Monkey’s Paw,” the film’s simple conclusion is “Be careful what you wish for.” Obsession, like its antecedent It Follows, offers insight into how the youth struggle with the war for intimacy and how that war so often warps its participants. The distinctions between villain and victim are not so easy in both films, as the ancient desire for love is warped by diabolical entities who turn love into possession, rape, and exchanges of sickness designed to keep death at bay for another day.
Possessed vs. Oppressed
Curry Barker’s smash-hit horror film Obsession is a movie for the ages. Made for approximately $750,000 by a young filmmaker who got his start on YouTube, Obsession has clearly captured the zeitgeist and has been rewarded handsomely for it. It is the most successful film ever of its type (a horror flick made for less than a cool million), grossing somewhere in the ballpark of $400 million worldwide. It is the number one film on IMDb. And in Anno 2026, it has transcended mere cinema and entered the hyper-world of memes, TikTok reels, and YouTube ambient playlists, where the sleep-deprived can drift off across the Lethe, basking in the yellowish glow of the film’s gloomy set designs.
The current consensus regarding this update of W. W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw” is that Obsession represents “incel horror” and exposes the many disquietudes of Zoomers and Gen Alpha regarding denied sex and romantic relationships. In this light, the protagonist Bear (played by Michael Johnston) is cast as the archetypal incel—he is shy and awkward, works an entry-level job at a music store, and is described by Nikki (played brilliantly by Inde Navarrette) as a “closed book” who rarely reveals his emotions or interior life to anyone. For the vocal coterie of very online left-wing critics, these character traits are evidence of Bear’s innate villainy—a villainy that gets exposed throughout the film as Bear takes advantage of Nikki, the supposed love of his life.
But wait. Let’s back up a little first. Not everyone reading this review has seen Obsession. A brief, non-spoiler rundown is therefore in order.
Obsession is the story of Bear, a young man deeply infatuated with Nikki, a beautiful coworker who is two weeks away from leaving their shared job. Bear feels the pressure and wants to confess his feelings for Nikki before she goes, but he is the reclusive type with a cabinet full of psych and sleep meds. He’s the kind who smiles, murmurs, and avoids conflict. He is the type who needs a more aggressive friend (played by Cooper Tomlinson) to help coach him through the difficult task of vulnerability. One night, following a weekly game of bar trivia, Bear tries to confess to Nikki but chickens out.
It should be noted here that during this same car ride, Nikki informs Bear that another coworker, Sarah (played by Megan Lawless), has feelings for Bear. Sarah is attractive, close to Bear, Ian, and Nikki, and, best of all, is interested in Bear. Nikki, on the other hand, is not, although she doesn’t hate or loathe Bear; she sees him as a friend. For Bear, this is a hateful wound. He desires Nikki, so after dropping her off at home, he reaches into his back seat where two items lie. The first is a necklace that he purchased earlier to replace one that Nikki had lost. Bear is such a wimp that he cannot even give a girl a present without having a panic attack. However, next to that necklace is a small item: the One Wish Willow. This toy, which looks like nothing less than a holdout from the 1960s, claims to grant its users the power of one wish and one wish only. As Nikki stands just outside of her own door, Bear wishes for her to love him more than anything in the whole world and then snaps the artificial willow branch.
Reality snaps right after that.
What follows is a stomach-churning, nail-biting, claustrophobic horror flick in which Nikki becomes so obsessed with Bear that she moves in with him, refuses to leave the house, and even starts watching him sleep. It is never in doubt that this Nikki is artificial—a demonic imp possessing the body and mind of the real woman. There are moments when Nikki, the true Nikki, screams out to Heaven (and Bear). She weeps about being unable to sleep and having horrific nightmares, and in the film’s most important scene, she begs and pleads for Bear to kill her and end her suffering.
At the risk of giving the game away, Bear’s offhand wish comes true, and he fights like hell against facing the fact that the woman of his dreams doesn’t love him, but her demon doppelgänger certainly does. The online commentariat continues to excoriate Bear as the film’s villain (and he is the villain), and most point out that he should have realized the gravity of the situation the moment when Nikki started acting strange, which is basically fifteen minutes into the 109-minute film. I, on the other hand, give Bear the benefit of the doubt: there are clues scattered throughout the film suggesting that Nikki has stressors and issues in her life that could be used to justify her odd behavior. We know that she has a troubled relationship with her father, that she’s not averse to taking mind-altering substances, and that she quit her job because she felt “unloved” at the music store (in other words, a goo gaga reason). Also, lest we forget, Nikki was known throughout her adolescence as “Freaky Nikki,” an appellation she hates and one that may or may not indicate a history of antisocial behavior. Most real people would not jump to supernatural explanations given that Nikki, who is suddenly acting weird, has a history of being “freaky.” Plus, the demon inhabiting Nikki’s body makes up lies about cancer and MDMA.
But back to the film’s most important scene.
When the disembodied voice of the real Nikki begs for Bear to kill her, a whimpering Bear resists the suggestion not because murder is a great sin but because he takes offense at the idea that being with him is worse than nonexistence. Rather than a plea to be rid of demonic possession, Bear takes Nikki’s cries as a revelation of his own inadequacy. When Bear refuses to grant Nikki’s wish and once again flees from a problem he caused, he becomes a full villain. Not evil or monstrous but certainly the film’s black heart.
From a demonological and Christian perspective, there is only one unalloyed evil in Obsession, and that is the mysterious force behind the One Wish Willow. While the goofy, braindead workers at the New Age shop that sells the unholy toy certainly deserve some scorn, Bear only sees the true horror once, and it occurs over the phone. During one of his attempts to undo his wish, Bear calls the phone number on the One Wish Willow box and is connected to a soft voice that sounds languid, bored, and accustomed to delivering customer service platitudes. And yet the voice on the other end of the line fully accepts that the One Wish Willow has the power to alter reality. The voice knows that bad juju is afoot. The exclamation point to this comes when the voice asks Bear if he wants to talk to the real Nikki. Bear says yes and hears the piercing, wailing scream of the tortured.
The idea here is that Nikki’s soul is trapped in Hell and that the One Wish Willow is an engine for infernal forces. Indeed, Obsession is a possession story, with Nikki’s body being occupied by an unnamed demonic entity.
Within the tradition of Western esotericism, love magic is of the left-hand path, for, like all black magic, love magic involves the deployment of a magician’s will to force change according to their wishes. Love may be the greatest symbol of light in our culture, with Jesus Christ being the image and bearer of pure love, but love magic twists this beauty and perverts it for selfish ends. This is what Bear does—unintentionally at first, then deliberately when he decides that it is preferable to be desired and even tortured by Nikki’s satanic love than to let his obsession go and make peace with loneliness (or, God forbid, Sarah’s legitimate love).
Our materialist age hates Bear for denying Nikki her autonomy, for having sex with her demon-possessed automaton. All of this is correct. However, and this is the moment when I shall receive hate mail, Bear is also the victim of malevolent forces. Nikki suffers possession as a result of Bear’s ill-thought wish, while Bear suffers from oppression.
Let me explain a little.
According to Church tradition and the Latin Rite of Exorcism, the more familiar stage of possession, which is the final and deadliest stage of demonic activity, appears when a demonic entity invades the soul of an individual and takes control of their will. The demon’s control of Nikki’s will is not total in Obsession. We do see flashes of the real Nikki screaming apologies from time to time. However, the possession is nearly complete and only deepens as the film rolls along.
Demonic oppression, which is typically the first stage of demonic activity, is characterized by harassment, evil influence, and mental oppression carried out by a demon or demons with the intent of delivering the victim’s soul to damnation. The oppressed may become possessed, but more often than not their torment is the torment of images and experiences—they are assaulted by profane visions, poltergeist-like disturbances in their homes, and horrific nightmares that encourage homicidal or suicidal ideation. The demons of the One Wish Willow never touch Bear’s soul, and thus his free will is left intact (which only further solidifies his culpability), but their oppression and the rules of the wish dictate that he must either kill Nikki or kill himself to end the wish. Either choice leads to Bear’s eternal damnation. Bear ultimately makes a choice—one many have labeled “cowardly.” Sure, but at the risk of sounding soft-hearted, by the film’s halfway point, Bear has no good options. If he kills Nikki, then he goes to prison for the rest of his life. If he kills himself, then either he is snuffed from existence and enters the eternal void or he descends into Hell and suffers until Judgment Day.
All of this is because of a lovelorn wish made by a young man fiddling with what he believes to be an innocuous trinket.
Obsession’s criticisms have been primarily sociological in orientation. Bear figures prominently in these criticisms as the weak male Zoomer who could have saved himself by simply being honest. Rob Henderson, writing in his Rob Henderson’s Newsletter on Substack, makes the simple case that Bear and, by extension, the millions of lonely, loveless young men in America who’ve gone years without a date, should have asked Nikki out in Act One, thereby saving himself and all the others from the film’s gruesome and gore-soaked horrors. While this is good advice in general, it would not have saved Bear or Nikki in Obsession. It is made obvious throughout the film that Nikki does not have romantic feelings for Bear. Not only does she hook up with Ian on occasion, but Ian and Sarah both tell Bear that Nikki has admitted in the past to putting him in the dreaded friend zone. And for those incapable of paying attention to dialogue, signs, or signifiers, the ending shows Nikki throwing Bear away like a hateful piece of rubbish.
Matthew Schmitz, writing in Compact magazine, articulates that Obsession embodies “heteropessimist horror,” or horror fiction that displays a fear of heterosexual relationships and dating. In a culture awash in never-ending gender wars, where almost one-third of young adults are projected to reach the age of forty-five as unwed and unattached singles, Obsession reads like an admission by Zoomers that sex and love and couplings frighten them. Many in their cohort have given up on sex altogether, and Obsession offers insight into why that may be (generalized social anxiety, infinite rejection, the absolute avalanche of terrible dating advice—see Ian in the film).
It is this last bit that got my little gray cells activated.
Sex has long played an important role in horror films. After all, horror has a reputation for being conservative and sex negative because every ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s slasher film has a scene where a couple gets axed, stabbed, chopped, and/or flambéed while they do the dirty deed. But since the growth of quiet horror in the late 2000s, sex has ceased being a vehicle for titillation in horror films and has instead become a character in and of itself.
Thinking this late last night when I couldn’t sleep made me realize that Obsession has a Millennial antecedent.
It Follows – Progenitor of Obsession
It Follows, directed by David Robert Mitchell and released in theaters in March 2015, tells the story of a shambling entity, presumably a demon of some stripe or other, that gets passed along like an STD following the act of coitus. The lead character is a young woman in her early twenties named Jay (played by Maika Monroe) who, following a one-night stand with “Hugh” (played by Jake Weary), becomes infected and begins seeing the demonic shapeshifter as it slowly follows her. “Hugh,” real name Jeff Redmond, explains to Jay (Monroe) that the only way to survive the entity is to pass it along, i.e., have sex with someone and give them the infection.
Filmed in the Detroit suburbs during the early stages of autumn, It Follows is a masterpiece of Millennial horror. It is also the template that Obsession borrowed. Both have a dreamlike quality and feel out of time. It Follows deliberately cultivates a neo-’80s aesthetic, from the synth-heavy soundtrack by Disasterpeace to the mise-en-scène of a homogeneous suburban street, while still taking place in the contemporary period. Obsession likewise has the moody ambiance of the 1990s, with the Zoomer characters floating in and out of a world that includes music stores, pubs with wood paneling, and parties where nobody is doomscrolling on their phone. Both movies traffic in nostalgia, which has been the primary aesthetic and interest of Millennials and Zoomers for multiple decades now.
It Follows centers on the difficult topic of sex among the young. Whereas Obsession has a single sex scene that makes everyone uncomfortable because of its criminal character, It Follows has multiple sex scenes ranging from the passionate to the awkward. It Follows also includes a high degree of nudity, as the entity often masks itself as naked men and women, including one presumed rape victim (the female walker seen in Jay’s kitchen) and the half-naked mother of Greg (played by Daniel Zovatto). When the entity gets its victim, it dry humps them to death, draining their vitality before severing their limbs. All of this is because It Follows is about the anxieties inherent in hookup culture, the bête noire of Millennials. The demon in Mitchell’s movie comes from meaningless and nonromantic deeds of flesh, and it is passed along by the same sickness. Yes, It Follows also includes themes of maturity, but Jay’s struggles with growing into womanhood derive first from her ugly sexual encounter with Hugh/Jeff. It Follows is a movie about and for a culture where sex is something easily accessed, and thus its downsides become widespread.
Obsession is quite different. Sex is not a major theme in the film. Bear does not wish for Nikki to be his unthinking sex doll; he wishes for her to love him. This may seem like romance is the key anxiety at play in the film, but in truth, Bear’s response to Nikki’s disembodied voice underscores that everything—the horror, the bloodshed, the death—derives from Bear’s fear of being unloved and unworthy. Bear’s selfish fear is that there is something malformed and undesirable within his soul, and this is the same fear shared by millions of Zoomers who have grown up in an atomized, antiseptic, and lonely America where the screen has replaced the priest, the parent, and the lover. Comparing Obsession to It Follows highlights the distinctions between Millennials and Zoomers: It Follows depicts a fuller social world lived mostly outdoors, while Obsession takes place indoors or in cars. It Follows has a central friend group of five people who are constantly seen together; Obsession’s scenes typically include only two people at a time. Both films are haunted by demons, but only Obsession feels like its little world is cold, empty, and thoroughly occupied by internal agonies.
Horror has a way of teaching us about our own insecurities. Each generation has its own fears and hang-ups. The young ones geeking out over Obsession recognize that Bear is something of a tulpa—the fictional representation of the collected energies of repressed and (demonically) oppressed young men grappling with unrequited love. The possessed Nikki gives Bear everything he wants and more, and, like “The Monkey’s Paw,” the film’s simple conclusion is “Be careful what you wish for.” Obsession, like its antecedent It Follows, offers insight into how the youth struggle with the war for intimacy and how that war so often warps its participants. The distinctions between villain and victim are not so easy in both films, as the ancient desire for love is warped by diabolical entities who turn love into possession, rape, and exchanges of sickness designed to keep death at bay for another day.
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