There’s a good chance that anyone revisiting Obsession is paying considerably more attention to Nikki than to little details in the background, like the scenery outside a car window. That’s understandable. But the next time you watch Curry Barker’s horror movie, the buildings might deserve a little attention, too.
In a new interview with Collider’s Maggie Lovitt, Barker revisited the experience of making Obsession, from working through production challenges to watching the finished movie with some distance from the edit. Asked how many times he has seen it, he offered an estimate that should make even the most committed repeat viewers feel better about their ticket purchases. “So I've probably seen it over 200 times,” he said, before adding, “I couldn't actually count, but like a lot, you know.”
When Lovitt asked about a particularly difficult scene, Barker pointed to the movie's car sequences. The director explained that the scenery outside the windows came from an LED wall, and that setup left a detail in the finished movie that viewers can still spot:
“Sometimes we would see the same building passing over and over. Like if you watch the movie as of as of now, you'll see them like passing the same building over and over again, because that was just like the loop of video that we had. And I think I was pretty frustrated with that when I was in the edit, but we just didn't have the budget to fix that later in post or anything, so it's it's just still there in the movie.”
Curry Barker Had a Different Experience Watching ‘Obsession’ With Fresh Eyes
The conversation also returned to Barker’s experience revisiting the movie after spending some time away from it. Lovitt asked whether subsequent screenings had changed his impression of particular scenes, and Barker recalled returning to the beginning of the movie in a theater after a break of at least a couple of months, telling Collider:
“I didn't even watch the whole thing, but I rewatched the beginning of it in the theater, and I kind of was like, whoa, like it was the first time I'd had any experience of seeing it with fresh eyes ever. And I was just like, wow, this has like an interesting, eerie type of nostalgic— like all the feelings that I was trying to achieve. I was obsessed with like trying to achieve this certain feeling. And I always was so disappointed that I wasn't able to achieve that feeling, but I think I did. I was just too close to it. So, re-watching it, I felt that feeling that I've been chasing.”
‘Obsession’s Reach Beyond the Movie Was Something Curry Barker Never Expected
Image via Epic Games
Lovitt also asked about Nikki’s appearances in Fortnite and at Halloween Horror Nights. It’s a different sort of question from how to pull off a car scene, and Barker had plenty to say about it. “That's gotta be the craziest part,” he said, before discussing the expectations filmmakers encounter when starting out. He explained:
“Everyone kind of tries to tell you what it's gonna be and how you're how it's gonna be. And I think your characters showing up in Fortnite, your characters showing up at theme parks, those types of conversations don't ever really start until you've created some sort of IP, or you've created some sort of, you know, series or some giant so really it's just insane that this has happened to this movie and that it's kind of I guess I did create an IP, but I never would have thought about it like that.”
Stay tuned to Collider for more from our Obsession interviews.
Image via Focus Features
Image via Epic Games
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