Horror’s buzziest new movie, Obsession, is a classic tale of “be careful what you wish for”; however, YouTuber-turned-filmmaker Curry Barker has revealed that a specific episode of The Simpsons pushed him to make the film.
Months before Obsession took the box office by storm with terrifying visuals and Inde Navarette’s star-making performance as a terrifyingly possessive girlfriend, its 26-year-old director admitted that the idea for the film came as a surprise during a hangout with his friends.
Barker told Variety in a September 2025 interview that he had invited a group of people over to watch his performance in an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but was struck by inspiration when a rerun of an old 1991 episode of The Simpsons, “Treehouse of Horror II,” played before the episode and reminded him of a classic horror trope.
“Bart gets a monkey paw and causes a bunch of chaos,” Barker explained. “I was thinking that I’ve never seen a straight crazy horror where … we’ve seen ‘be careful what you wish for’ tons of times. But we’ve never seen my version of it. I instantly started thinking about what I could do with that.”
The throwback episode of The Simpsons centers around a nightmare that Lisa Simpson has about her dad Homer ignoring a shopkeeper’s warning and buying a cursed monkey hand. She dreams that her iconic yellow family then takes turns making wishes that backfire and cause chaos.
In Obsession, the main character Bear (Michael Johnston) buys a cursed “One Wish Willow,” which promises to grant its owner one wish, and uses it to force his co-worker and longtime crush, Nikki (Navarette), to “love me more than anything in the entire world.” Bear goes on to regret his wish as Nikki becomes scarily obsessed with him — leading to deadly consequences.
The “be careful what you wish for” trope utilized in The Simpsons and Obsession — along with other horror movies like Pet Sematary and Coraline — was made popular with W.W. Jacobs’s 1902 horror short story The Monkey’s Paw. In the tale, a monkey’s paw grants three wishes to a family, but they come true in tragic ways.
Barker rose to internet fame in the YouTube sketch duo “that’s a bad idea” with his creative partner Cooper Tomlinson, who plays Bear’s friend Ian in Obsession. He made his first movie, Milk & Serial, with just $800 and put it on their YouTube channel for free, which made waves online among horror fans.
When asked why he was drawn to the “careful what you wish for” trope, Barker told Time earlier this month that he wanted to explore the selfishness of desire, saying, “Any time you wish for something, it's probably going to be selfish. When people ask me, ‘Curry, if you had one wish, what would it be?’ I always say, ‘That the movie does really great at the box office,’ and it kind of gets a laugh. But really, that's pretty selfish. I could wish for world peace.”
So far, Obsession has made more than $60 million domestically and $75 million worldwide on a budget of less than $1 million.
