Falling in love can be a scary thing. Interestingly, two movies this summer demonstrate opposite aspects of this experience for queers and straights alike. In “Leviticus,” two teenage boys resisting their affection for each other are haunted and stalked by an entity that takes on the other’s appearance. In “Obsession,” a mysterious One Wish Willow grants a man’s wish for his friend to love him more than anyone else in the world, with terrifying results. “Leviticus” asks: What are the consequences of suppressing and hating oneself for loving someone else, for religious reasons or otherwise? “Obsession” asks a different question: What if you got everything you thought you wanted in a romantic relationship, in all its ugly reality?
Though they share some of the same core anxieties, the movies’ approaches to romantic love with all its terror are almost opposite. In “Leviticus,” the enemy becomes Ryan and Naim’s (the two main characters) avoidance of love and respective self-hatred, materialized as the violent, malicious entity brought on by an institution: a Christian faith healer who, through a gruesome and visceral ritual where the boys froth at the mouth and seize, induces the entity to follow and hunt them, taking the form of the person they desire most.
Though the movie doesn’t fill out the world in a totally convincing way (that is, the world and the characters themselves don’t feel very convincing or interesting besides their relationship to the horrifying entities), the emotional core, centering on these entities, does make for a really satisfying movie. While I don’t want to spoil the major plot points, the way that Ryan and Naim connect and avoid each other makes those moments of connection especially resonant; we see the cost of avoiding and hating that connection clearly as physical violence.
“Obsession,” on the other hand, plays out another type of avoidance: Bear, in perpetual cowardice, continually avoids confessing his feelings to his close friend Nikki. After being given a direct chance by Nikki to reveal his feelings, Bear instead refuses again and afterwards, in a bout of frustration, uses a toy purporting to make any wish come true and wishes for Nikki to love him “more than anyone else in the f—ing world.” She appears again, but markedly different; behaving with sudden, surly girlishness and then snapping out of it to ask “Wait a minute, what the f–k?” before snapping back into the cartoonish affection.
For the rest of the movie, as Bear ignores more and more obvious evidence that the One Wish Willow worked, the audience sympathizes with Nikki bound into the unnatural and horrifying position of seeing herself used as an object to her supposed friend. While there are an abundance of misreadings of Nikki’s portrayal as just a crazy girlfriend, what makes the movie so terrifying is moral revulsion at Bear’s total lack of regard for Nikki, revealed in how little he does to reverse the wish once he confirms that it’s worked. And like “Leviticus,” the film’s climactic ending feels hauntingly earned, not just out of relief but with an emotional valence as well: the audience cares deeply about the feelings of Nikki, who we see emerge briefly throughout the movie before again being suffocated by the wish.
Despite having feelings for her, we see with clear eyes how self-serving Bear’s obsession for Nikki really is. No matter the cost to her, even when begged during a moment of Nikki’s lucidity, he will do everything to preserve the affection he has forced on her and nothing to save the person he supposedly loves. This makes all the movie’s violence and jumpscares more unnerving; we see them as the same consequences as the moments of affection that Nikki shows Bear after the wish. Loving someone else is essentially loving another, distinct person; Bear’s obsession with Nikki, as we are forced to watch in gruesome detail, is entirely selfish in its end of making Bear happy, no matter how painful to Nikki.
While one could speculate about why two relatively young directors made such similar movies about romantic love, for horror fans (even new ones like myself), it was exciting to see emotional drama and visceral horror blended together in both. It’s also interesting that the queer horror movie emphasized so much the connection despite the adversity of queer romantic love, while the heterosexual romance exploited the power imbalance and disconnect between two people to the same effect. Curry Barker, the director of “Obsession,” has talked about how another relatively recent emotion-horror, “Hereditary,” helped to shape his sensibility on how horror films can communicate to an audience and really get inside them. As someone who thoroughly enjoyed both movies, I hope to keep seeing horror films that share this conviction.
