Maybe the real villain is the man who believes he’s owed a woman’s love.
Editor’s note: This piece contains spoilers for Obsession, Companion, Don’t Worry Darling, The Menu, Passengers and Ex Machina.
When I first watched Curry Barker’s Obsession, I assumed the horror was obvious. Not the supernatural curse at the center of the film but the decision that sets it in motion: a man deciding he is entitled to a woman’s love, to a woman’s body, regardless of her autonomy.
Online, women have begun calling this kind of story “incel horror.” Especially on TikTok, viewers are naming a longstanding source of terror in horror films that often goes unexamined: the belief that men are entitled to women’s bodies, affection or attention. Reexamining older films through this lens has also prompted new conversations about contemporary releases like Obsession and how feminist audiences are reshaping the way horror is interpreted.
In Barker’s film, it isn’t the occult magic in the “One Wish Willow” toy that causes Bear to control Nikki. The true horror is Bear’s conviction that he has the right to use a supernatural force to obtain her affection. While Nikki becomes the film’s visible threat—obsessed with Bear and ultimately violent toward their friends—the story begins with his decision to override her autonomy.
In Obsession, Bear has romantic feelings for his friend Nikki. In fact, she asks him directly if he likes her after an uncomfortable car ride but he denies it. (We learn earlier during a conversation between Nikki and their mutual friend Sarah, played by Megan Lawless, that the former only sees Bear as a “little brother,” but at the time, Bear doesn’t know this.)
Upset with how the conversation played out in real life after fantasizing about it for months, he thrashes in the driver’s seat, throwing a temper tantrum because he is unable to communicate his feelings. Unwilling to answer her truthfully and develop a relationship of trust, he decides to make a literal “deal with the devil,” using the “One Wish Willow” toy instead: While she is right outside of his car, he wishes that she would love him more than anyone in the world.
And it works … sort of.
Nikki’s magically-induced love escalates to obsession and outright murder: from creating a sandwich with the remains of his recently deceased cat, to threatening self-harm if he does not agree to sleep together. Meanwhile, their mutual friends—Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah—grow concern about Nikki’s increasingly erratic behavior, wondering if Bear is using her. In a particularly horrifying scene when the ‘real Nikki’ is temporarily lucid from the spell (claiming that the part of her that is obsessed with Bear is still asleep), she begs Bear to kill her, to put her out of her misery. He refuses, deeply hurt that she would rather die than be with him.
The root of the term incel refers to men who identify as “involuntary celibates,” framing rejection from women as denying a man’s rightful access to sex and a form of prosecution.
Incel horror describes films in which the true source of terror is not a monster or supernatural force, but a man’s sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, attention or affection. Obsession fits squarely within this practice.
Incel horror has roots in older Puritanical horror traditions. For decades, slasher films like Halloween and Friday the 13th often treated teenage sexuality as something to be punished, with sexually active characters frequently meeting violent ends. Amid the sexual revolution of the late 20th century, these deaths reinforced a familiar moral lesson that the “final girl” who survives is often the one who abstains from sex or delays it.
Sex as the act of horror itself (at least partially connected to purity culture expectations) took center stage in 2014’s It Follows where a deadly supernatural entity is only passed to another by having sex, like a horror STD.
Incel horror takes this dynamic one step further: Rather than positioning the “nice guy” as the victim of some external threat, these films ask viewers to consider whether he is the threat. What Nikki does under the spell is horrifying. Yet what lingers long after the credits roll is the fact that she never consented to any of it. Her terror begins the moment Bear decides that his desire for her matters more than her autonomy.
The genre of incel horror develops from the audience itself. At times, it stems from a reexamination of recent films or an immediate response to new ones, where the “moral” of the story (which appears in this case to be “be careful what you wish for”) isn’t what sticks with the audience.
Director and writer Barker admits that he did not make Obsession with incel horror in mind, initially not even knowing what an incel was. “I didn’t think of it that way when I wrote it,” he told The Guardian, “He [Bear] just makes some bad decisions but I think it starts from a really innocent place. It’s what he chooses to do after that that’s bad. Embarrassingly, I wasn’t even familiar with the term incel until someone brought it up to me.”
It makes sense: Amid the continued horror of gender-based violence, women identify the threat as the man who sees himself as protector and savior.
And it’s not just Obsession. Other films like Don’t Worry Darling (2022) and Companion (2025) hint at not only the objectification of women but their exploitation for male fantasy and pleasure.
In Don’t Worry Darling, viewers learn that Alice (Florence Pugh) is trapped in a simulation of an idyllic 1950s desert company town against her will by her partner Jack (Harry Styles). Jack argues that he was miserable in the real world, and we learn that all but one woman does not know that they are living in a simulation designed for the men to live their ideal lives.
Similarly, Drew Hancock’s Companion follows Iris (Sophie Thatcher) who learns over the course of the film that she is not human but rather a companion robot that her boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) is renting from a company called Empathix. Josh can control her intelligence using an app on his phone and that he purposefully disabled the part of her programming that stops companion robots from harming or killing people so that she was forced to be an accomplice in his murder-robbery plot. Josh later lectures her about how he is a “nice guy,” and one of his friends even claps back at how he uses Iris, stating, “I’m not your robot, Josh. You can’t control me.”
Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014) has a strikingly similar plot: Tech CEO Nathan Bateman (Oscar Issac) has created humanoid robots with artificial intelligence. The robots are equipped with interchangeable human faces and female-presenting bodies, and horrifyingly later, Bateman has sex with the very androids that he shows pass the Turing test and display intellectual behavior. In the end, Ava (the central protagonist robot) escapes, just as Iris does in Companion.
In films like The Menu (2022) and Passengers (2016), women are unwittingly brought into a horrifying situation without their consent. They become companions in a later disaster—from being hunted by a slasher killer or deranged chef, to just succumbing to the real effects of time.
For many women viewers, the most frightening part of these stories is not the robot, the simulation, the curse, or the killer. It’s the man who believes he has the right to decide a woman’s fate in the first place. The monster isn’t lurking in the shadows. It often arrives convinced it’s the hero.
