How ‘Obsession’ Rewrote TIFF History

There has probably never been a worse moment to open a film market in Canada. The country is locked in a grinding trade war with its largest partner and closest neighbor; tariff threats have crept from steel and lumber into the entertainment conversation, and the independent film business — the actual product on offer in Toronto this week — is in the middle of its own slow-motion restructuring. The class of buoyant new distributors who arrived at TIFF two years ago with fresh cash and big talk has thinned out considerably. Streamers are buying less and paying less. Theatrical is a coin flip. And yet TIFF: The Market, which runs Sept. 10-16 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre alongside North America’s largest film festival, opens with something no first-year market has any right to: momentum, and a founding legend. A legend called Obsession. Twelve months ago, a 25-year-old YouTube sketch comedian walked into the Royal Alexandra Theatre with a horror movie he had shot for $750,000 with a cast of unknowns. He walked out with the biggest TIFF acquisition in history — an estimated $15 million worldwide deal with Focus Features — and the film went on to gross $513 million globally, becoming the top-grossing festival pickup of all time. In fact, the story of Obsession’s TIFF triumph actually started on the Croisette. Capstone exec Ruzanna Kegeyan — who had sold 2010 Midnight Madness breakout Insidious worldwide — ambushed TIFF programmer Peter Kuplowsky the minute he landed in Cannes. “She said, ‘Have you heard of Curry Barker?’ Initially, I blanked,” Kuplowsky says. Then she mentioned the YouTube sketches, and a long-held theory clicked into place. “I’ve long had the belief that sketch comedy writers make terrific horror filmmakers,” he says, citing Zach Cregger applying setup-and-payoff structure to Barbarian. Kegeyan sent a rough cut; Kuplowsky watched it a week later and emailed her before it was even finished. Then came the phase no market can manufacture, only host: the whisper campaign. Nobody was screening the film. So the calls came to the programmer instead. “It was constantly, ‘How good is it? Is it this?’ ” Kuplowsky says. “And I was like, ‘Well, I’m invoking Barbarian in my note, so I think it’s as good as Barbarian.’ And they’re like, ‘What does that mean, that it’s going to make $40 million?’ And I’m like, ‘I would hope so. I think it depends on who buys it and how they release it.’ ” Days before the premiere, Jason Blum, Weapons producer Roy Lee and Paranormal Activity producer Steven Schneider preemptively greenlit Barker’s follow-up project, Anything but Ghosts, alongside Divide/Conquer’s Adam Hendricks and Greg Gilreath. In hindsight, it was the best marketing spend of the festival: three of horror’s shrewdest operators publicly betting on a filmmaker whose movie no one had seen. By the time Obsession made it to TIFF, the buzz on social media had become deafening. “I remember coming out onstage for the screening, and there were people in the audience that were already chanting Curry Barker’s name,” Kuplowsky says. “Then TIFF Next Wave came out and read their introduction, describing why they connected to this film. And I pointed to them and said, ‘Buyers, this is your audience. Pay attention.’ ” Blum sprinted in during the preshow. Kuplowsky stood at the back the whole time, watching the crowd more than the film. “So electric. Every moment was working. The big jump scares got everyone out of their seat.” Christian Mercuri of Capstone, which financed the film, had felt it in the room. “You can tell during the screening,” he says. “And then — it’s not that we said 100 percent we’re selling it. We had to sit with everybody that was interested and determine that that was the right path. It was a couple of days of negotiations, and then we felt we had the right partner.” Barker’s team spent the next 24 hours in meetings, landing at roughly 1 a.m. Sunday on Focus, which beat A24 and Neon largely on the strength of a global distribution apparatus its rivals don’t have. CAA and Capstone closed it. Obsession was not a triumph of the traditional system. It was a triumph around it. The film cost less than a studio spends on a trailer, was made by a director whose audience was built for free on YouTube, and was launched by buzz, word-of-mouth and the magic of a Midnight Madness crowd. At a time when the traditional indie model — established IP, star-driven packaging, presales stitched together territory by territory — looks shaky, Obsession offers an alternative. The lesson of Obsession, Mercuri says, is to bet on “original content, original ideas and strategies that “push the envelope and take risks. As an industry, it’s sort of our responsibility to listen to some new voices, not always do the same old, same old. The core of it is original fare.” Nobody expects this week to turn a $750,000 negative into $513 million. That was never the bet. The bet is that what happened in the Royal Alexandra last year — a room full of professionals watching a debut feature work, in real time, on an audience — is worth building a market around. Not because it can be repeated on schedule, but because it proved the thing everyone had started to doubt: that an original idea, made cheap and launched smart, can still detonate. A market has to be built on something. Worse foundations have held.