Courtesy of Focus Features / © 2026 FOCUS FEATURES

In Curry Barker’s Obsession, a seemingly innocent gift store item wreaks havoc on an unsuspecting friend group, turning their ordinary lives upside down.

A selfish wish in the heat of a moment, by Michael Johnston’s ‘Bear,’ takes things to a level so extreme, so shockingly unnerving, that it resulted in this year’s most beloved horror film.

We take a closer look at two undeniable elements that add to the eeriness of Obsession, The One Wish Willow, and the place where most of the horrors take place, Bear’s home.

Crafting Horror: Bear’s Home

When crafting the characters’ world, production designer Vivian Gray put a heavy focus on Bear’s home, a set that needed to be visually stimulating on screen while also speaking to the character’s history.

“Briefly, the dialogue alludes to the fact that Bear’s house is actually his recently deceased grandmother’s. He was her caretaker for a time, and now that she’s passed, my understanding was that he has no desire to go through her things or make the place his own.” One of few personal possessions that made it into this space was Bear’s gaming set-up. “The deliberate juxtaposition of his possessions versus his grandmother’s is in an effort to make Bear feel foreign in his own home, exacerbating the fact that he fears not being the protagonist of his own life or a capable executor of his desires.”

When Gray inherited the shooting location for Bear’s house, it was nearly all white, so it’d take a significant amount of work to achieve the style she wanted, one that subverted certain horror expectations. “The character of a southern grandmother’s home I think has been much too cabin-leaning or Victorian in the horror genre canon, so I went for something more true, at least to myself.”

Gray turned to photos from friends and family that featured 70s faux stucco murals, potted plastic palm trees, basement pool tables, valance upon valance wallpapers, animal print upholstered arm chairs, lots of coral, lots of seafoam, iron bookshelves, quilted floral couches, wood paneling, oceanic bathroom themes, and grasscloth wrapped tables preserved in resin for inspiration. “My references were mostly nostalgic, but as we built everything out and dressed the windows to make it safe for day for night shooting, overstimulation and claustrophobia set in for me.”

Gray credits art director Sally Choi with further evoking those sensations with her team. “Bear himself cannot escape or believe his actions, and his environment mirrors this.”

With the rest of Obsession’s key locations, producer Haley Johnson made it a priority to film on location. You can find a Burbank staple, The Rougelike Tavern, in the movie, and also North Hollywood’s The Green Man Store, which becomes the shop where Bear finds the One Wish Willow.

In addition to that, Obsession will contribute to preserving the memory of two locations. First is Cassell’s Music, which can also be seen in Wayne’s World, but permanently closed as of July 2025. Gray also noted, “Ian’s house was located in Altadena, and the family who owned it lost it all in the 2025 wildfires.”

DESIGNING THE ONE WISH WILLOW

Central to the film is its own original Monkey’s Paw-style device, the One Wish Willow. Barker kicked off that part of the process with research. “I researched a lot of wish-related objects, including wishbones, wishing wells, shooting stars, and the Monkey’s Paw.” When nothing felt just right, Barker committed to making something original.

Barker credits his mother for getting this part of the process going. They had the original vision for the One Wish Willow and then passed those ideas over to Obsession production designer Vivian Gray and graphic designer Amy Vega to professionally execute it. Gray recalled, “The box came first. Curry and Amy collaborated several months before most of the crew was even on the project.” Together, they went through a number of designs for the One Wish Willow box ranging from “modern and cool toned to dream-core and curved.” Gray knew precisely when they’d found the final design. “For me, the final design of the box was decided upon because it’s almost like it has its own field of gravity, a three-walled box, angular like a gem — a rare find, yet nostalgic.” These qualities made the design reminiscent of gag gifts from mom and pop joke shops or candy stores. Gray added, “The perversion of that aesthetic innocence and the product’s promise is therefore all the more disturbing.”

Equally as important as the box design was the One Wish Willow stick itself. Gray didn’t want it to be any old stick. She wanted the One Wish Willow to have a very specific history. “I wanted the lore of the willow to extend beyond just a product. Deciding on it being merchandise from a niche television show, as if the magic from that story has grown into the one we are watching now, felt apt and also that meant it was probably mass-produced and plastic.”

Gray turned toward a Scooby-Doo aesthetic for the stick, specifically the animated series’ canonical “spooky forest” matte paintings. “I wanted it to feel as though the willow had been snapped from the tip of a branch.”

Gray wanted the willow to have “a presentiment of danger in each of its parts — subtle uncanniness, something deeply wrong but you can’t look away.” She turned to dried cactus skeletons to craft the willow’s silhouette. “The not too cool, not too warm grey, like an unrendered animation, was decided upon.” She added, “The white ovals are aesthetically inspired by the painterly, simple shading in 2D cartoons but also have a clear pattern to follow on screen in the dark.”

Gray was well on her way to having a complete One Wish Willow, but there was one more vital aspect of the design that had to be perfected before filming — how the stick cracks.

“Curry was very drawn to the snapping mechanism of a prank pen he used to play with as a kid.” Gray and Obsession property master, Luke Cull, set out to hunt one down. When they did, they dissected the pen for inspiration and actually wound up incorporating a piece of it into their One Wish Willow design. “It’s attached to the string, opened, and then shoved inside the willow. When you pull the stick off, it snaps back onto itself again, giving a visual cue for where the light spark would be.”

The combined visual of the opening of the box and the snapping of the stick gave Gray and Barker the precise sensation they hoped to achieve. “You have to see through the slight moment of resistance, pulling the willow entirely off the string after opening the box. It’s a quiet but suspenseful ‘are you sure you want to do this?’”

Obsession is in theaters now.

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