Victor Wembanyama's team watched Alabama filmmaker Curry Barker's Obsession before Finals

Victor Wembanyama’s team did not settle for a standard playoff recovery night after Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals. They watched Obsession, the feature from Mobile filmmaker Curry Barker, as the San Antonio Spurs tried to decompress before the NBA Finals, giving an Alabama-made horror title a very public crossover into elite athlete culture.

That kind of co-sign matters because it moves Barker’s work out of the usual independent-film lane and into a different kind of attention economy. A movie like Obsession is no longer just a release date and a box-office chart entry. It is the sort of film a Finals-bound team chooses for a wind-down screening, which says as much about its tone and energy as any festival blurb ever could.

Barker, 26, grew up in Mobile and has become one of the most visible young filmmakers in Alabama. His horror obsession started early, after seeing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at age 11, and he built an audience first through the YouTube sketch-comedy channel That’s a Bad Idea before moving into features. That path has given him a strange but effective runway: internet momentum, then genre credibility, then a theatrical breakout that now has NBA players paying attention.

Obsession itself is a sharp, low-budget horror play with a clean hook. Focus Features set it for theatrical release on May 15, 2026, and the film follows Bear, who uses a mysterious One Wish Willow in an attempt to make Nikki fall in love with him. What begins as a half-joking wish turns into a nightmare that spills onto his friends too. Industry coverage says Barker shot the film in Los Angeles over 20 days for less than $1 million, and one report says Focus paid $15 million for it after a bidding war.

The numbers give the Wembanyama anecdote extra weight. Recent box-office coverage put Obsession’s opening at $17.2 million, with an A- CinemaScore, which means this is not just a viral talking point attached to a famous name. It is a real theatrical performer with heat behind it. For Alabama independent film, that is the larger story: Barker’s rise from Mobile to a national NBA watch party suggests the ceiling for regional indie work can be much higher when the right movie catches fire in the right place.