Obsession (2025) follows Bear, a socially awkward music store employee who uses a supernatural toy to wish for his crush Nikki to fall in love with him — and she does, completely and terrifyingly. What starts as a romantic fantasy curdles into possession, violence, and obsession taken to its logical horror endpoint. It sits at the intersection of supernatural horror and a sharper, more uncomfortable idea: that a man who believes love is something he’s owed might just be the scariest thing in the room.
If you can’t get enough of the movie, here are 22 best movies like Obsession, ranging from incel horror, psychological thriller, dark romance, and more.
Incel Horror movies like Obsession
The monster in these films isn’t a creature or a curse — it’s male entitlement followed to its conclusion. These are stories about men who believe women owe them affection, companionship, or their bodies, and the horror of what happens when that belief goes unchallenged. The genre has existed for decades but only recently been named, driven by broader conversations around misogyny, online radicalisation, and the “nice guy” myth.
1. Ex Machina (2014)
A programmer is invited to a remote facility to test whether an AI — built and owned by a reclusive tech billionaire — can pass as human. The more time he spends with her, the more he realises something deeply wrong is happening beneath the surface. Like Obsession, the horror lives in a man’s belief that he can possess and control a woman, and what it costs when that assumption is tested.
2. Fresh (2022)
A woman tired of bad dates thinks she’s finally found someone genuine — charming, attentive, seemingly normal. What unfolds is something far more sinister, hidden behind the exact behaviour society tells women is romantic. Shares Obsession‘s DNA in how it disguises its horror inside a love story before pulling the rug entirely.
3. Promising Young Woman (2020)
A woman spends her nights exposing men who prey on vulnerable women under the guise of being “nice guys.” Sharp, darkly funny, and furious, it approaches the same entitlement Obsession puts on screen — but from the other side of it.
4. Companion (2025)
A woman and her boyfriend head to a remote lake house for a weekend with friends, and tensions quickly begin to surface in ways she can’t explain. Picks up exactly where Ex Machina left off — what does it mean to design someone to love you, and what happens when they start asking questions?
5. Passengers (2016)
On a spacecraft carrying thousands of colonists in hibernation, one man wakes up 90 years too early. Isolated and desperate, he makes a decision that will change another passenger’s life forever — and the film asks you to find it romantic. Often cited as accidental incel horror for the same reason Obsession works: it dramatises male loneliness as justification.
6. You (Series)
A charming, well-read bookstore employee becomes dangerously fixated on a woman he meets, convincing himself that everything he does is in the name of love.
Supernatural Horror / Wish Gone Wrong
These films take desire — for love, power, revenge, or just not to be alone — and weaponise it. A wish is granted, and the horror is in the granting. The supernatural element isn’t incidental; it’s a literalisation of the idea that wanting something badly enough, at any cost, will cost you everything.
7. Talk to Me (2022)
A group of teenagers discover a way to channel spirits through a severed, embalmed hand — and turn it into a party game. When one of them uses it to feel close to someone she’s lost, things spiral beyond anyone’s control.
8. Wish Upon (2017)
A teenage girl is given an antique music box that grants wishes — but each wish comes with a price she doesn’t get to choose. The wishes start small and reasonable, then the desperation sets in. Nearly a mirror image of Obsession‘s premise: a magical object, a lonely person, and consequences that escalate past the point of return.
9. It Follows (2014)
After a sexual encounter, a young woman begins to be followed by a slow-moving, shape-shifting entity that only she can see. It never stops, and it never hurries. Built entirely around the horror of romantic and sexual consequence — the idea that intimacy can pass something terrible from one person to another.
10. Drag Me to Hell (2009)
A bank loan officer denies an extension to an elderly woman and finds herself on the receiving end of a devastating curse. Sam Raimi runs the wish logic in reverse — a punishment for not giving someone what they felt entitled to.
11. The Craft (1996)
Four teenage girls discover they have real power when they practice witchcraft together — and the results are immediate, intoxicating, and deeply dangerous.
12. Wishmaster (1997)
An ancient Djinn is accidentally released from a gemstone and begins granting wishes in the most grotesquely literal ways imaginable.
Dark Romance & Obsessive Love
Love as a horror premise — not because something supernatural intervenes, but because the love itself is the thing that destroys. These films treat obsession, possession, and devotion as forces as dangerous as any monster, often more so.
13. May (2002)
A socially isolated woman who has never known real connection finally starts reaching out — to friends, to a love interest, to anyone who might understand her. When those connections fall apart, something in her breaks. The closest film in spirit to Obsession: a lonely person who wants to be loved, and the horror of what that want becomes when it has nowhere to go.
14. Fatal Attraction (1987)
A married man has a brief affair and assumes it’s finished when he walks away — but the woman he was with doesn’t see it that way. A slow escalation from discomfort to genuine terror.
15. Possession (1981)
A man returns home to find his wife wants to leave him, and what follows is a visceral, surreal unravelling that blurs the line between emotional breakdown and supernatural horror. One of the most extreme films about how love curdles into something unrecognisable — and one of the most honest about how ugly that is.
16. Crimson Peak (2015)
A young American writer falls for a mysterious English aristocrat and follows him to his crumbling, ghost-filled estate, where the secrets of the house slowly reveal themselves. Guillermo del Toro at his most gothic.
17. Let the Right One In (2008)
A lonely, bullied boy forms an intense friendship with the strange girl who has just moved in next door, not fully understanding what she is. Tender and deeply unsettling in equal measure — the romance makes it more frightening, not less, in exactly the way Obsession uses Bear and Nikki’s dynamic.
18. The Fly (1986)
A scientist accidentally merges his DNA with a housefly during a teleportation experiment, and begins a slow, irreversible transformation while the woman who loves him watches. One of the most devastating love stories in horror — about watching someone you care about become something you don’t recognise.
Psychological Horror with a Romantic Core
The relationship is the architecture. Remove the love story and the horror collapses — because the horror only works because someone trusted, wanted, or needed someone else. These films use intimacy as the mechanism of dread.
19. Get Out (2017)
A Black man travels to meet his white girlfriend’s family for the first time, expecting awkwardness, finding something far worse.
Curry Barker, the Director of Obsession, has stated in multiple interviews how inspiring Jordan Peele, the Director of Get Out, was to his creations. If you liked Obsession, this is a must-watch!
20. Midsommar (2019)
A couple on the verge of breaking up travel to a midsummer festival in rural Sweden, where the pastoral beauty slowly gives way to something ancient and violent. Ari Aster described it as “a breakup movie dressed in folk horror” — the relationship isn’t the backdrop, it’s the whole film.
21. Under the Skin (2013)
A woman drives alone through Scotland, picking up men and luring them somewhere they don’t return from. Cold, hypnotic, and deeply strange — it treats romantic intimacy as predation in a way that quietly reframes every interaction you’ve ever had.
22. Antichrist (2009)
A couple retreat to a remote cabin in the woods to grieve the death of their child, and what surfaces between them is something neither of them can contain. Lars von Trier at his most unrelenting — the horror is completely inseparable from their grief and their relationship. Not easy watching, but impossible to forget.
23. Together (2025)
The most literal horror film ever made about a relationship you can’t leave.
A couple so toxically codependent they begin to physically merge — Together is Cronenbergian in ambition and completely committed to its central metaphor. Dave Franco and Alison Brie play two people who’ve lost the line between where one ends and the other begins, and the film runs that idea to its grotesque conclusion. It connects to Obsession‘s logic directly: the belief that you can possess someone, and what the universe does when it decides to grant that wish
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