There’s nothing new in noting that horror tends to be a pretty good return on investment. The annals of movie history are full of films that dropped a couple million dollars on a few gallons of red paint and whatever else was required to execute on some fucked-up, interesting ideas their creators had kicking around in their heads, then reaped huge profits at the box office. Even within that world of low-risk, high-return, high-splatter moviemaking, though, Curry Barker’s Obsession is proving to be something of a phenomenon. This is per the CBC, which reports that the romantic horror hit broke through another big box office record this week, becoming the highest-grossing film to be ever made for less than $1 million.
Barker’s movie smashed through the milestone this past weekend (its eighth in theaters) when its long tail sent it up over the $405 million mark—surpassing the total for Bruce Lee’s Enter The Dragon, which scored the record back in 1973, earning $400 million off of a reported $850,000 budget. (All of these numbers—both the budgets and the box office hauls—are non-adjusted for inflation, to be clear.) Barker’s movie cost a bit less than Lee and director Roger Clouse’s spy/martial arts thriller, reportedly coming in at $750,000 before factoring in marketing costs, which means it’s made its budget back something like 540 times at this point. (Not the most profitable film in movie history, an accolade that usually goes to Oran Peli’s Paranormal Activity, which was initially shot for about $15,000 before going back for technical improvements that helped it make $194 million back in 2009, but still a pretty ridiculous return on investment.)
In contrast to Paranormal (and The Blair Witch Project, also frequently discussed as part of the low-budget success story discourse), it feels worth noting that Barker’s film doesn’t rely on any big formal conceits to help cover up its low-budget aesthetics, instead simply focusing on a small cast of characters and a premise that roots its horror in dialogue and character behavior far more than gore or effects shots. (We hope someone at Focus Features—which noted weeks ago that the film has become its highest-grossing effort ever by a country mile—has sent a nice fruit basket or something to Inde Navarrette for creating an absolutely terrifying horror “antagonist” almost entirely through highly effective, and highly economical, acting.) Barker famously came up in the YouTube mines, where he and comedy partner (and Obsession co-star) Cooper Tomlinson cut their teeth making maximally effective videos on minimal budgets; the potential to achieve blockbuster numbers on shoestring indie budgets like this is likely to send Hollywood executives scurrying ever deeper down online video rabbit holes, hoping to find the next creator who can generate a massive windfall on a budget that is, as far as the usual studio balance sheet goes, basically nonexistent.
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