The bear was never the question.
I recently watched the horror movie Obsession, and I remember thinking the visual gore wasn’t that scary. At first glance, it was just like any other supernatural horror movie with a familiar formula: something supernatural takes hold of an unsuspecting victim, and chaos ensues, leaving nothing but violence and tumult in its wake. So if it was just like every other movie, why couldn’t I kick the underlying, ongoing pit of dread in my stomach?
Nikki is not simply the victim of an external supernatural force. She’s also the victim of a cowardly man– no, a boy, really– who couldn’t bear (no pun intended) the possibility of rejection, so he decided to eliminate the possibility.
And perhaps that’s what makes Obsession so disturbing. The supernatural elements might be fictional, but the very real issues the film confronts are far from it.
There’s a difference between wanting someone to love you and wanting someone to have no choice but to love you.
In Obsession, Bear makes a wish for Nikki to fall in love with him. On the surface, it sounds like the premise of a twisted romantic fantasy. A hopelessly lovesick guy finally gets the girl of his dreams. Except there’s one glaring problem: romance had nothing to do with it. “I wish Nikki Freedman loved me more than anyone in the f*cking world.” His wording is so specific, intentional. He doesn’t wish for Nikki to love him as much as he loves her. He doesn’t want reciprocation. He wants to be the center of Nikki’s world, to have complete dominion over her thoughts and emotions.
Her feelings, her independence and her ability to decide whom she loves are all sacrificed to satisfy Bear’s desires, to suit Bear’s life. What he intends to be the beginning of a great romance is, in reality, the complete removal of Nikki’s autonomy.
And the most disturbing part? Bear is given the opportunity to undo it.
Bear witnesses the increasingly frightening consequences of his wish. He hears the “real” Nikki plead for death in her sleep; he sees her come out at random, fighting for control of her own body. He can see the gravity of his wish, the damage he’s done. So, he calls the One Wish Willow hotline, where they ask if he wants to reverse it. He knows Nikki is no longer acting of her own free will. He knows his wish has fundamentally changed her; it is actively torturing her. Yet his first instinct isn’t to give her that freedom back. He rejects the offer to reverse it and instead tells the phone operator he’d prefer to alter the wish, so as to make Nikki’s obsession less extreme while preserving the affection he originally sought.
In other words, he didn’t want Nikki to stop being controlled, even after realizing that he is the cause of her drastic behavior shift. He wants her to be easier to control.
This sentiment is confirmed when Bear purchases two more One Wish Willows: one for his friend, Ian, and one for himself. Bear instructs Ian to wish that he never made a wish at all. More strategic semantics. Bear knows the One Wish Willows are limited to one per customer, so by asking for this in particular, he hopes he’s cheated the system for a second. He doesn’t ask Ian to wish Nikki was back to normal or something adjacent. He attempts to engineer a do-over.
This is where Obsession really starts fitting into the horror genre. Bear’s behavior reflects a disturbingly accurate concept that exists far beyond the boundaries of the supernatural: that a woman is something to be subjugated, from her attention to her body to her affection.
Bear doesn’t love Nikki. He hardly knows her. Bear loves the idea of Nikki. She’s desired for what she can provide, and when his desire becomes an obsession, her humanity becomes secondary to Bear’s wants.
Remember when the internet collectively lost its mind over the simple yet loaded question: Would you rather be alone in the woods with a man or a bear?
Men were outraged at the consensus among women that a bear would probably be safer. How choosing a wild animal over them was some kind of insult.
This conversation was never about bears.
When my close friends explained to me why they didn’t find Obsession scary, I realized it was because they lack the life experiences that would create that same pit of dread I had. To them, the horror was in the supernatural, the unknown. But to me, it was in all things familiar.
Obsession is eerily ironic in this circumstance: the man quite literally is the bear.
Beyond the coincidence of his name, Bear represents exactly what made the original hypothetical so unsettling. He isn’t a stranger lurking in the woods. He’s someone Nikki knows, someone who claims to care about her, someone who made her feel safe, wanted even. What’s even more unsettling is the fact that the pair are just another statistic. Women are most in danger around the men that they know.
Bear doesn’t look or behave like some obvious monster; he doesn’t prey on Nikki the same way a bear in the woods would. But I would argue that the horror is that he doesn’t. At least a wild bear wouldn’t call you on the phone at night and offer to drive you home before ripping your life away from you. His insecurity, awkwardness and seemingly innocent romantic intentions make it easier to overlook the depravity beneath his behavior.
The man-or-bear debate was never an accusation against every man. It was an attempt to explain something women have understood for far too long: feeling safe and being safe are not even remotely the same thing. And sometimes, most times, the person who makes you feel wanted is the very person you have reason to fear.
Women don’t need ghosts, exorcisms or possession to understand horror. We don’t need an impossible supernatural scenario to imagine what it feels like to have our autonomy threatened, our boundaries disregarded or our choices mocked.
Take away the One Wish Willow of it all. Make Nikki’s supernatural possession disappear. The attitude that made it possible remains; a boy who mistook desire for romance, with a nauseating sense of entitlement, remains. So does a woman whose feelings were treated as something to be conquered. So does a relationship in which one person’s happiness comes at the expense of another’s freedom. None of those things require movie magic.
This dynamic is precisely what makes Obsession so effective as a horror movie, and in more ways than one, a tragedy. It draws on the fears that already exist in the everyday female experience and exaggerates them just enough to send a chill through its audience.
And maybe that’s why I couldn’t shake that pit in my stomach, even after the movie ended.
Nikki’s story may have ended when the credits ran, but the message is still loud and clear. I choose the bear, and suddenly, that doesn’t seem so irrational after all.