Anna Biller has no plans to watch Obsession, brushing off the runaway horror release as a version of her own 2016 film told from the opposite side. The director of The Love Witch, who built her name on stories centered on women rather than around them, sat for a wide-ranging conversation ahead of her next project. Her comments arrived just as the very film she is avoiding kept climbing box office charts around the globe.

While her hands stayed busy building a new nightmare of her own, one question kept surfacing about the horror film everyone else could not stop talking about.

Anna Biller confirmed she has avoided Obsession entirely and does not plan on watching it soon. The buzzy horror release follows a hopeless romantic whose deepest wish turns into a nightmare, a plot she reads as a flipped version of her own heroine's arc in The Love Witch.

"It sounds like it's a reversal of The Love Witch, about a woman who loves too much," she said while speaking to Variety

She then added, "I'm a little afraid to see it because of that. It's almost like the male point of view of The Love Witch," underlining how a shift in perspective can rewrite a story's entire meaning.

The remarks came as Biller spoke with Variety about her upcoming feature The Face of Horror, a medieval reworking of the Japanese ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan set to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. During the same conversation, she pointed out that even when a film's ending sides with its heroine, the screen time leading up to it can still turn her into a spectacle for viewing rather than a person to root for. That distinction, she suggested, is exactly why The Love Witch never reached the scale Obsession has now hit.

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While Biller kept her distance from the film, its numbers refused to slow down at all.

Obsession, directed by 26-year-old former YouTuber Curry Barker on a budget of about $750,000, has pulled in more than $512.6 million worldwide as of early September 2026. That haul makes it the highest-grossing film ever produced for under a million dollars, pushing past the decades-old mark set by Enter the Dragon. Obsession has also become the top-grossing festival acquisition on record, edging past The Blair Witch Project's long-standing global total near $248.6 million.

The film broke a record that had stood for 27 years, dating back to The Blair Witch Project's original 1999 run, and it also passed Downton Abbey to become the highest-grossing release in Focus Features' history. Obsession further became the first English-language original film of the 2020s to cross $500 million worldwide, moving past Elemental along the way, and it now sits inside the top ten highest-grossing horror films in North American history. For a story Anna Biller admits she still has not watched, its numbers already speak louder than any review possibly could.

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What are your thoughts on Anna Biller refusing to watch Obsession's record-breaking success? Let us know in the comments.