Why Obsession Hit a Nerve
The numbers tell one story, and the story is unusual. Curry Barker's Obsession opened to $17.2 million on a $1 million production budget, posted a 94% Rotten Tomatoes score, and—most strikingly—earned an A- CinemaScore, a grade horror films almost never see. The last time a horror movie hit that mark, the title was Weapons. Before that, you have to reach back to Get Out. That's the company Barker's debut is keeping.
Look closer at who showed up and the picture sharpens. The opening weekend audience skewed 59% male, with roughly 40% in the 25–34 bracket and about three-quarters of the crowd between 18 and 35. Focus Features paid around $15 million for it out of TIFF after a bidding war with Neon and A24, then watched previews alone bring in $2.6 million. This is not a movie that snuck up on anyone. It was acquired with the explicit understanding that something in its DNA was going to land.
That something is a structural trick, and the trick has a lineage. Obsession spends a remarkable amount of its runtime acting like a romantic comedy—meet-cute beats, banter, the warm pull of attraction—before the floor caves in. The A- isn't a fluke of marketing. It's audiences responding to a specific kind of betrayal they've been trained to love by a quarter-century of horror movies films that smuggle their menace inside courtship.
Barker's leap from YouTube horror shorts to a Focus Features marquee release also matters. It's a generational handoff: the people who grew up on creepypasta and short-form scares are now the ones being handed studio budgets, and they're bringing the rom-com-horror hybrid into the multiplex with them. The nine films below are the bloodline. Some are gateway-friendly. Some will hurt. All of them taught the audience that just bought $17 million in tickets exactly how to be seduced.
The Rom-Com-Horror Hybrid: A Brief Anatomy
The load-bearing trick of this subgenre is deceptively simple. The first act obeys romantic-comedy grammar—chance encounter, charged banter, the spark of attraction, maybe a montage—and then, somewhere between the 25-minute mark and the first act break, the movie reveals what it actually is. Captivity. Body horror. Cannibalism. Possession. Whatever the engine, the engine was always there. The romance was the camouflage.
It works because we're already trained to ignore red flags inside love stories. The charming oddball, the intense first date, the partner who's "just protective"—rom-coms tell us these are features. The hybrid simply makes the flags literal. Takashi Miike's 1999 dating-audition nightmare codified the move; Mimi Cave's 2022 "meat cute" updated it for the dating-app era. Obsession is the version that finally cracked the mainstream.
This is also why Obsession doesn't quite belong next to the slow-burn arthouse horror it's being compared to commercially. IndieWire grouped it with Hereditary for box-office trajectory, but formally it's a different animal—less dread-pageant, more genre-switch. The films below share that switch.
9 Romantic Horror Films for Curry Barker Converts
1. Fresh
Mimi Cave's debut is the closest formal cousin Obsession has. It withholds its own title card for thirty minutes so the rom-com lull can do its work, and Sebastian Stan's chef-charmer routine is essentially the template for how Obsession sells its central courtship before pulling the rug. The Hollywood Reporter's review pinned down exactly what makes it tick—the front-loaded rom-com beats curdling into something else—and that structural flip is the clearest modern thesis statement for the entire subgenre. If Obsession got its hooks into you, start here.
2. Audition
Takashi Miike's 1999 grenade is the genre's foundational text. A lonely widower stages a fake film audition to find a new wife, and for nearly an hour the movie plays as melancholy character drama—until it doesn't. Rotten Tomatoes' romance-horror canon describes it as a grisly psychological piece built around a widower's twisted dating audition, which undersells the back half by design. The acupuncture-needle finale remains the high-water mark for tonal betrayal in any language. Required viewing, full stop.
3. Bones and All
Luca Guadagnino's road-trip cannibal romance treats love and consumption as the same verb. Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet give the subgenre its most aching performances; the violence is real, but the longing is what guts you. If you walked out of Obsession fixating less on the threat than on the ache underneath, this is your next move. It's also the entry that best demonstrates how romantic the romantic horror hybrid can actually be when the filmmaker commits.
4. Possessor
Brandon Cronenberg's body-swap assassin thriller routes obsession through identity dissolution. The kills are extraordinary, but the intimacy scenes are more disturbing—a corporate hitwoman occupying another person's body while that body kisses, fights, and dies. Obsession clearly studied the way Possessor turns closeness into trespass. This is the chilliest film on the list and the one that most rewards a second watch.
5. Your Monster
Caroline Lindy's 2024 musical-leaning closet-monster romance is the soft landing the list needs after Audition. Fangoria's romantic horror canon flagged it as a genre-defining touchstone, and it earns the title by proving the hybrid can swing genuinely sweet without losing its teeth. It's tender, funny, and finally a little feral. Show it to the friend who claims they don't like horror; watch them change their mind around minute fifty.
6. The Hunger
Tony Scott's 1983 vampire triangle starring Bowie, Deneuve, and Sarandon is the subgenre's most stylish ancestor. Fangoria has long included it among the essentials, and you can see why—it establishes that romantic horror was always about aesthetic seduction as much as plot. Every match cut, every silk curtain, every long held look is part of the lure. Obsession's slicker visual passages owe this film a real debt.
7. Edward Scissorhands
Tim Burton's suburban fairy tale is the PG-13 gateway entry, and the one most likely to surprise viewers who don't think of it as horror-adjacent. Fangoria's romantic horror canon places it firmly in the conversation, and rewatching it now, the framing is unmistakable: the romance is impossible because the lover is monstrous, and the monstrousness is the romance. That structural idea echoes through Bones and All and lives at the center of Obsession's central dynamic.
8. Spring
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's Italian-coast lovecraftian romance is Before Sunrise with shapeshifting. Two strangers meet on a beautiful coast, they walk, they talk, they fall—and one of them is something the audience won't have words for until the third act. It's the most underrated entry in the 2010s movies hybrid canon and a perfect mid-marathon palate cleanser. Quiet, gorgeous, devastating.
9. Raw
Julia Ducournau's veterinary-school coming-of-age cannibal drama is where the subgenre fully crossed into prestige festival territory. It's also where the body-horror movies tradition Obsession draws on—without ever quite committing to—gets its most uncompromising recent statement. Raw is the punishment-tier entry on the list. It earns its reputation, and it pays off the patience the earlier titles ask you to develop.
What Comes After Obsession
Barker isn't a one-off. The Hollywood Reporter reported that he's already lined up with Blumhouse and attached to A24's Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot, which means the rom-com-horror hybrid is becoming a directorial calling card rather than a stunt. Rotten Tomatoes' 2026 horror roundup placed Obsession's Certified Fresh consensus alongside the year's other notable hybrid horror titles, and the audience math backs that up: a 59% male, predominantly 25–34 crowd showed up for a romance that turns into a nightmare, and they gave it the same CinemaScore as Get Out. That demographic kept early-2010s mumblegore alive on a much smaller scale. At this budget-to-return ratio, it's about to do far more.
The films above are the canon that made Obsession possible. The next wave is going to look a lot like Barker, and a lot like the directors who taught him. If you want more of this lineage surfaced for you—the dark-romance movies corner where the meet-cute is the bait—RandomFlix's horror movies hub is a good place to keep digging.
Roll the dice. Fall for the wrong person on screen. That's the whole pitch.