Much of the brilliance of Obsession is how it’s constantly a gazillion steps ahead of the audience: director Curry Barker knows that we’ve seen a ton of horror movies before, and weaponises our familiarity with the usual genre tropes to great effect. Case in point: the gnarliest scene in the entire movie, when Bear’s (Michael Johnston) friend and would-be love interest Sarah (Megan Lawless) confesses her crush while they’re sat in a car. For most of the scene, the shot is framed with the driver-side window just over her shoulder. It’s pretty cute, the music swelling with passion like a rom-com. We know that possessed girlfriend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) is probably out there, and we wait agonisingly for her to strike — you laugh awkwardly, you chew your nails down to the cuticles, you watch through your hands. Nothing happens. But then: sike, bitch! Nikki breaks through the window like the Kool-Aid man, grabs Sarah by the hair, and pummels her face with a brick against the driving wheel, rendering her skull a jammy crater. The initial scare hits like a slap, followed by such visceral, cartoonish violence that you cringe like it’s a gross-out Jackass skit. Stop, stop. She’s already dead.
6. Jurassic Park (1993)
Scared armless
Ah, Steven Spielberg. The Hollywood GOAT, the king of the summer blockbuster, and the master of making kids soil their pantaloons. Jurassic Park is basically a Sunday afternoon slasher movie, and deploys a lot of the same effects: gnarly kills, tension-laden chase scenes, and a ton of scares, essentially acting as a preteen horror gateway drug. In proper slasher fashion, the best involve severed limbs: first off, that bit when the fences first go down, and a bloodied leg of lamb suddenly hits the windscreen of one of the tour vehicles, signalling the arrival of the lawyer-chomping T-Rex. And later? When Ellie (Laura Dern) races to reboot the park’s security systems in a maintenance shed, unaware that the raptors are on the loose. She hits the switch, and then comes with a wave of relief — which is quickly broken when doomed cig-chaining techie Ray Arnold’s (Samuel L. Jackson) disembodied arm grabs her by the shoulder. It’s dark, comes outta nowhere, and really pushes the PG-13. But there’s also a silliness that breaks the terror; it’s kind of funny that she carries the arm around, obviously in shock. Such corny relief is soon broken when a snarling raptor pops up at the fence, and you’re shitting it again. Huggies ruined.
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