'Obsession, You're My Obsession'
Behind that twisted wish ...
The horror film Obsession has become the breakout hit of the year. Curry Barker, a 26-year old YouTuber, wrote and directed the film with just a $750,000 budget, and it’s now banked more than $150 million worldwide. It’s a true Cinderella story, though the “Cinderella” in Obsession is the victim of mental rape. Look, I said it was a horror film not a rom-com.
I confess I can’t read the film’s title without hearing Animotion’s 1984 hit song “Obsession,” which Holly Knight and the wonderful Michael Des Barres originally wrote and recorded in 1983. (Their version appears in the movie “A Night In Heaven.”)
The song “Obsession” was controversial upon its release, at least in South Carolina, because of the lyric “Who do you want me to be to make you sleep with me?” Apparently, the fact that “sleep with me” is a euphemism for “sex” meant that the song was still saying “sex,” which might as well have been “fuck,” so they’d bleep out “sleep.” Southern radio stations weren’t big on euphemism. However, the bleeped-out word just made us kids believe they were singing something explicitly profane. This is also how I first learned that “sleep with me” was a euphemism for “sex.”
The movie Obsession’s success is interesting to me. It’s not unusual for a well-made horror film to pack seats. Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners were both cultural events, but superficially at least, Obsession might seem like a feature-length Twilight Zone episode: Bear (Michael Johnston), who works in a music store, buys a supernatural toy that grants him what he desires most — the undying love of his friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette). Unfortunately, her “love” is truly undying. There’s always a twist to those supernatural gifts, though he can at least get Nikki wet and feed her after midnight.
Obsession has been described as a modern spin on W.W. Jacobs’s 1902 classic short story The Monkey’s Paw, in which the White family receive a mummified monkey’s paw that grants three wishes but with “the living will envy the dead” consequences. The thing is so cursed that a previous owner’s third wish was death. So, of course, the Whites give it a go: They wish for 200 pounds (about 15,000 pounds today), which the paw delivers but as a settlement after their son is fatally mangled in a workplace accident. Sick with grief, they later wish for their son to come back to life. The monkey paw again fulfills the wish but the Whites freak out when they realize their son’s decomposing corpse is probably knocking on their door. So, their final wish is for the zombie kid to go away. Altogether, it wasn’t a good monkey’s paw experience.
I don’t think Obsession is anything like The Monkey’s Paw, though, because the Whites’ motivations were relatively benign and well-meaning. The lesson here was about messing with fate. Still, the Whites didn’t aspire to greatly alter their status. They wished for security and, in desperation, their son’s life. Bear’s wish is far more selfish. He craves love from someone he knows would never willingly offer it. Like many real-life incels, he views love as a form of possession and once he gains “possession” of Nikki, he can’t accept the consequences. We pity the Whites, but we should only have contempt for Bear.
When I compared Obsession to a feature-length Twilight Zone, I was referring to an actual episode, specifically 1960’s “The Chaser,” from the end of the show’s first season. (It was the 31st episode with another five to go — almost the entire run of a modern, long-running streaming series.)
“The Chaser” was itself based on a short story by English author John Collier that appeared in a December 1940 edition of The New Yorker. A nervous Alan Austen buys a love potion from a strange old man, who explains the frankly horrible things it will do to Alan’s intended victim, the woman he claims to love.
“For indifference,” said the old man, “they substitute devotion. For scorn, adoration. Give one tiny measure of this to the young lady -- its flavor is imperceptible in orange juice, soup, or cocktails-and however gay and giddy she is, she will change altogether. She will want nothing but solitude and you.”
“I can hardly believe it,” said Alan. “She is so fond of parties.”
“She will not like them any more,” said the old man. “She will be afraid of the pretty girls you may meet.”
“She will actually be jealous?” cried Alan in a rapture. “Of me?”
“Yes, she will want to be everything to you.”
“She is, already. Only she doesn't care about it.”
“She will, when she has taken this. She will care intensely. You will be her sole interest in life.”
“Wonderful!” cried Alan.
“She will want to know all you do,” said the old man. “All that has happened to you during the day. Every word of it. She will want to know what you are thinking about, why you smile suddenly, why you are looking sad.”
“That is love!” cried Alan
No, it’s not. The Whites genuinely loved their son — enough that they didn’t want him in mindless zombie form. However, Alan can’t wait to have a mindless zombie as his non-consenting love slave.
Alan notices that the old man also sells a lethal poison in addition to the love potion. However, while he practically gives the love potion away for just one dollar, he sells the potion for $5,000 and “not a penny less.” The business model here seems obvious, but Alan is too evil and horny to understand. The old man is certain he’ll see Alan again.
Screenwriter Robert Presnell Jr. expanded the short story for Twilight Zone. Alan Austen is now Roger Shackleforth (George Grizzard) and the object of his obsession now has a name, Leila (Patricia Barry). It’s made comically clear that Leila can’t stand Roger and finds him a nuisance. She’s cold and aloof while Roger remains willfully oblivious to her obvious contempt. Unfortunately, this occurs before restraining orders, so he remains a pest she can’t shake.
Eventually, Roger visits a professor named “A. Daemon,” who sells him the $1 love potion. After Roger drugs her, Leila falls madly in “love” with him, and they get married. However, it’s not long before Roger feels imprisoned within that very love he purchased so “cheaply.” He returns to the diabolical professor, who offers to sell him a “cleaner” that will remove his problem, permanently. Of course, the “cure” for his love potion costs significantly more. “First, the ‘stimulant’ ... and then the ‘chaser.’” (Watch below.)
The short story’s ending is uncertain, but The Twilight Zone episode shows Roger fully prepared to murder the woman he enslaved until he discovers she’s pregnant with their child. He tells himself he never would’ve gone through with it, but self-awareness is not one of his more prominent traits. This is probably 1960 television’s idea of a “happy ending,” even though Leila remains a brain-damaged slave to this sociopath.
“The Chaser” and Obsession are about men who mentally (and physically) rape a woman. You could say that the “twist” is that these pathetic men inadvertently create a monster, but the truth is that they were the monsters all along. This entitlement to a woman’s interest and affection, the refusal to take “no” for an answer … even without magic potions or supernatural toys, they’re ongoing threats to women in the real world.
Notable that in these cases the guy never wishes for a potion to change himself to become a more desirable person, or even better to be able to find attractiveness in those who could equally desire him (wait I might have just described “Shallow Hal”). One reason the guy in that Twilight Zone episode wanted out was that the potion made his target woman a different person than the one he had been attracted to—he liked her when she didn’t like him, perhaps because she didn’t like him.
Bit of a tangent, but I always assumed the 1983 Animotion song was inspired by the 1963 novel "The Collector" by John Fowles, which I read for a literature class in 1982. A male butterfly collector kidnaps and imprisons a female art student that he's obsessed with. Written in first person, like the song, it gives the perspectives of both the collector and the captive.