‘The Simpsons’ 1991 episode that inspired ‘Obsession’: “A bunch of chaos”
There seems to be more and more young filmmakers rising up in the horror genre these days, as demonstrated by the recent success of both Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parsons’ Backrooms.
With Barker born in 1999 and Parsons in 2005, the genre appears to be welcoming the newest generation of filmmakers with open arms, and their younger perspectives on what makes us tick or what will keep us up at night have been received incredibly well. These are filmmakers whose upbringings have been largely defined by social media and a landscape soaked in easily accessible entertainment on demand, hence why it’s hardly surprising that Backrooms is the product of a 4chan-created ‘creepypasta’-inspired YouTube series that Parson began making as a teenager.
The horror genre is clearly changing, with modern media’s evolution having a profound effect on how new ideas are formed. Likewise, Barker looked to YouTube for his start, making comedic skits with his friend, Cooper Tomlinson, under the name ‘that’s a bad idea’. Tomlinson told The New Yorker, “It became our film school outside of film school,” with the pair actively making their videos look somewhat cinematic, rather than relying on the ease of a quick vertical iPhone-shot reel.
When it came to his debut feature, which saw him team up with beloved horror company, Blumhouse Productions, Barker pitched an idea that you could only expect from a director born at the tail end of the ‘90s: he wanted to make a horror movie inspired by an episode of The Simpsons. Like many of us, Barker grew up watching the popular animated series, which began back in 1989. It’s not a show that any of us particularly associate with horror, but that’s forgetting the fact that The Simpsons has been making annual Halloween episodes since 1990 under the title ‘Treehouse of Horror’.
It’s ‘Treehouse of Horror II’ that inspired Barker’s Obsession, which in turn, took influence from The Monkey’s Paw, a short story by WW Jacobs published in 1902. In the episode, too much candy consumption leads to Bart, Lisa, and Homer all having nightmares, and it’s Lisa’s segment that proved to be the fuse that sparked Barker’s imagination.
In the episode, Homer buys a monkey paw that grants its owner anything they wish while the Simpson family are holidaying in Morocco. Ignoring advice that the monkey paw might actually wreak havoc on the family’s lives, Bart wishes for the family to become super-famous, but that doesn’t last long before the public is sick of them.
Meanwhile, Lisa wishes for world peace, but that only makes the Earth too vulnerable, and soon it’s attacked by aliens. In the end, this series of misfortunes is corrected when Ned gets his hands on the monkey paw, although he has much better luck with it. When he finds himself with a mansion, you can’t help but draw a parallel between this and Obsession’s Ian (played by Tomlinson), who wins $1billion after using the ‘One Wish Willow’, much to Bear’s dismay.
Barker told Variety, “Bart gets a monkey paw and causes a bunch of chaos. 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 ‘One Wish Willow’ concept that defines Obsession, and sees Bear’s life turned upside down after he wishes for his crush to be in love with him and no one else, might not have emerged, then, if Barker hadn’t got the idea from watching an old episode of The Simpsons.
