Obsession director reveals ‘darker’ original ending he wrote for hit movie - The Independent

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The ending of Obsession was originally much darker, according to director Curry Barker.

Barker, 27, recently spoke about his alternate ending for the breakout horror hit at a Q&A event moderated by filmmaker Rian Johnson in New York City.

“I had this Romeo and Juliet ending,” Barker told Johnson at MoMa’s The Contender series, according to a video shared by Rolling Stone.

In the final cut of the movie, Michael Johnston’s character Bear fatally overdoses in order to break the spell he cast on Nikki, played by Inde Navarrette. After he dies in her arms, Nikki wakes up traumatized from her trance as she screams and cries.

However, in Barker’s original script for the movie, he had planned for Nikki to shoot and kill herself after Bear dies in her arms, leaving both of the main characters dead.

Barker explained that financier Capstone Pictures had asked him to shoot a version of the ending where Nikki survives, but he initially refused because he was so set on the morbid ending.

He ended up trying the alternate ending to appease Capstone, and was blown away by Navarrette’s performance.

“I said action and it was the best take she’d done,” Barker said. “It was so good... It totally changes the ending because it’s like, now what is she going to do?”

Johnson added: “It’s so much darker.”

Obsession brought a new spin on the long-running “be careful what you wish for” trope. In the film, Bear buys a cursed One Wish Willow, which promises to grant its owner one wish. He uses it to force his co-worker and longtime crush, Nikki, to “love me more than anything in the entire world.”

Bear then goes on to regret his wish as Nikki becomes creepily obsessed with him, leading to terrifying scares and, eventually, several deaths.

The film took the box office by storm this summer. The low-budget horror, made on a $750,000 budget, grossed more than $500 million worldwide, setting multiple box-office records and marking an unprecedented success for the indie.

As Barker’s first feature film, the horror also landed him a $10 million bid for his next film without it even existing yet, although the project will have to wait as Blumhouse-Atomic Monster has the right of first refusal for the film.

Most recently, the director released a five-minute short film titled Mama Bear on YouTube ahead of Halloween.