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After seeing the movie Obsession in the theater, I was inspired to re-watch 2 other movies about wishes gone horribly wrong from the past: Wishmaster (1997) and Wish Upon (2017). Obsession has gotten its own full, spicy review behind my Substack paywall, however, I will synopsize it here without spoilers.

Obsession is the story of a Caspar Milquetoast named Bear who lives a lonely, post-teenage life in the house he inherited from his dead grandmother. He is on a daily banquet of antidepressants which somehow end up being eaten by his cat Sandy, who tragically dies. Bear is in love/lust with his friend Nikki who is his co-worker at another friend’s father’s music store. On the night Bear finds his dead cat, Nikki invites him to a party. Instead of declining to mourn over his pet, Bear allows himself to be dragged into attending. On the way, he picks up a gag gift an an occult store called the One Wish Willow, a glorified stick that promises to grant one wish when broken in half. Bear is tasked with driving an intoxicated Nikki to her home. After Nikki mildly confronts him and asks him “Do you like me?” Bear takes the coward’s way out and denies he has any romantic interest in his friend. He then uses the One Wish Willow outside Nikki’s house, wishing for her to love him more than anything else in the world. Nikki becomes instantly obsessed with him, which is paradise for a short time but quickly devolves into Nikki having a violent split personality. The “real” Nikki suffers and rots inside as Bear has his way with the demonic Nikki who is in love with him. She begins an escalating campaign of possessiveness, jealousy, and self-harm that culminates in an eerie climax.

Wishmaster is a Wes Craven film directed by Robert Kurtzman that became an offensively franchised intellectual property. This review considers only the first Wishmaster from 1997 directed by Robert Kurtzman. The film begins in 12th century Persia. An emperor is using his second wish (it is implied that his first wish was to become Emperor) granted to him by a djinn who has been released from a red jewel. He foolishly asks to “see wonders”, and his wish is granted when his entire palace becomes infested with wondrous horrors such as a people being turned into reptiles and trees and H.R. Geiger-style aliens bursting out of their stomachs. The emperor’s mage corners the emperor before he can make the third wish to “set things right”, warning him that the djinn wants it because it would allow djinn-kind to spew itself all over the planet to presumably work more “wonders”. The mage traps the djinn in a fire opal with some esoteric incantations and the chaos ends without the third wish being made.

Cut scene to modern day America. A drunk crane operator accidentally drops a priceless statue of Ahura Mazda — the very same one that the mage used to embed the fire opal — and kills a guy while breaking the statue. The collector, Raymond Beaumont played by Robert Englund of Freddie Krueger fame, is rightfully pissed. A dockworker surreptitiously finds the opal in a chunk of the broken statue and brings it to an appraiser. The appraiser, Alexandra Amberson played by Tammy Lauren, accidentally wakes the djinn by examining the stone with a bright light. This ends up psychically bonding her to the djinn and all his upcoming misdeeds.

Not knowing what she has done, Alexandra or Alex as she is known in the film takes the gemstone to her colleague Josh, who ends up as a casualty of the djinn when it explodes out of the stone for the first time in 800 plus years. Josh examines the stone as a favor to Alex right after he makes it known he has a crush on her. The djinn asks Josh, who is bleeding out from severe wounds, if he would like some pain relief. Josh says yes and the djinn ends his life, which Alex feels as a sort of awful vision. The djinn uses more unfortunate victims to gain a human form. His regular form is very deluxe Spirit Halloween scary demon costume, complete with hooked nose and pointy ears. He hijacks some dude’s corpse via his ability to “wear” faces and bodies, transforming himself into a more debonair Agent Smith. With his new body, it is much easier to terrorize the general populace with wishes as boneheaded literalism. A woman who wishes to be forever beautiful becomes a mannequin and a man who wishes for a million dollars ends up getting his mother (also his insurance beneficiary) killed in a plane crash.

Wishmaster is a silly film and its ending is equally silly, and though I will try not to spoil it, it’s the adult rendition of “whoops, it was all a bad dream.”

2017’s Wish Upon, written by Barbara Marshall and directed by John R. Leonetti, opens with a tragedy. A mother says goodbye to her young daughter and her golden labrador, sending them off on her bike to ride down the block. She then retreats to the upper floor of a quaint Victorian house and hangs herself. Her daughter returns, witnessing the end moments of her mother’s suicide.

Years later, the girl, whose name is Clare Shannon, is an unhappy teenager and her dog is no longer a puppy. She is being harassed at school by an evil bully named Darcie and her crew of friends. Clare’s father, a compulsive hoarder, gives Clare a birthday gift in the form of a Chinese music box that he found in a dumpster dive near her high school. Clare, who happens to be taking Chinese in high school, deciphers the “make a wish on this box” part of the inscriptions on the box. She casually wishes for her enemy Darcie to rot. Darcie develops severe necrotizing fasciitis, which is worth a few laughs among Clare and her friends and also saves Clare having to deal with the aggravation of Darcie and her bully crew. The same day, Clare’s beloved dog dies, his guts spilled out underneath the rickety porch on the old Victorian house. The premise of Wish Upon is that the box grants 7 wishes to its owner, however, every wish has a price that must be paid in blood and the seventh wish’s blood price is the soul of the wisher. Clare slowly figures out this mystery, picking up goodies along the way, all with a commensurate price in the form of both boneheaded literalism and somebody literally dying every time a wish is made. Once again, the ending was a cop out, though done in a slightly more clever and stylish way.

Wishmaster was a big deal when it came out and Wish Upon was the talk of the town back in 2017 from what little I remember. Obsession made a huge splash because it was made for only a million dollars and raked in over 150 million on opening weekend, making it the most profitable horror movie ever made.

All three of these films use the plot device of wish-making as boneheaded literalism, and right out of the gate, it is a tiresome premise. Horror as a genre has always suffered from lacking nuance, and nothing says “this isn’t actually worth thinking about” than a jump scare where someone dies by getting her hair caught in a garbage disposal or having her head bashed in on the steering wheel of a car by an insane murderer.
These movies actually serve to keep us from thinking about the consequences of wishes by fooling us into the trance of the belief that wishes mean nothing because they don’t immediately result in obvious tragedy or grievous physical harm. Our world does not resemble the world of fantasy, where a wish made on a stick, stone, or box can bring instant fame and fortune, such as a billion dollars literally falling from the ceiling (Obsession) or the instant inheritance of a family fortune (Wish Upon, Wishmaster). We think that because we cannot wish to win the lottery (unless you are Jeffrey Epstein, who won it twice) and have it happen that we don’t have to reap any consequences from pining for unearned wealth. That is what these wish morality plays are about, by the way — the horrific karma of unearned wealth.

We all do magic

Our era is one of profound misunderstanding of magic. Magic is never understood as something that is done by everybody all the time. To grotesquely oversimplify, magic is the inception, process, and reverberation of intention. People will jump to even more oversimplified conclusions and say “magic is intention.” Yes and no. Magic is the way intention works, not intention itself. You are doing magic right now. You intended to read this article and you are reading it. This took a bunch of magic, such as applying the skill of reading, forcing yourself to keep your eyes on my words in an extremely distracting environment, and by the potential of thinking these words after you have read them. I thank you for the your magic you have done in reading this article, and this in itself is me doing magic on the article and you, its reader. Gratitude is the most powerful magic in the universe, and it spreads by the power of 7, which is a long story I won’t get into right now. At any rate, human beings are not the only ones capable of magic, and that is what my book Sacred Homemaking attempts to explain. Houses, trees, animals, rocks, towns, couches, doors, and even toilets do magic because they participate in the processes of intention. It is my opinion that the toilet wants to be cleaned and thanked every day, and that is the foundation of my quirky book, this idea that helping household objects by appreciating them can help them to help you. Magic is not as obvious as light beams shooting out of Harry Potter’s fingers. If it was, we would live in the world of Wishmaster, Wish Upon, and Obsession where stupid wishes brought even stupider consequences right on schedule. Instead, we live in a complicated, deeply enchanted world of intersecting intentions that is more akin to ripples in a pond. Never forget that there is more to the pond than just the surface.

The bad witch

Feminists like to imagine a fantasy of all ancient witches being good, persecuted by evilly evil Christianity for daring to operate outside of its toxic monotheist system. Yes, that definitely happened, and there were some herbalists who were burned at stake for the mere crime of being better at healing than the local priest or doctor. Sometimes, witches were burned because they actually were causing harm.
Everyone does magic all the time, and that means that intention is actually pretty important. Some people are extremely good at weaponizing the mental power to wish harm, and though it cannot be proven, if they put their mind to it, they can cause someone to get hurt, suffer, and die just by thinking it. I had one of these who used to attend the meetings of a group I was part of. She had no pretensions to doing witchcraft or formal magic. She just wished harm all the time, and sometimes her wishes came true. She was certainly good at antagonizing other people in the group and causing them direct drama and stress from her asinine behavior. In medieval times, I can see her being pilloried and cast out of whatever city she had blighted by her presence and she would have deserved it. Nowadays, nobody except I was able to detect what she was doing, so she and witches like her run amok and wreak whatever harm they want.

Intentions matter

I am going to pick on those who wish to win the lottery for a hot minute, as I think it plays into the theme of the 3 movies featured in this article. The wish to win the lottery seems perfectly innocent, and much like Bear of Obsession half-heartedly wishing for Nikki’s love and teenage Clare wishing for affection from the popular boy who becomes obsessed with her, wishes are made in a half-assed, thoughtless manner that can later ruin our lives and the lives of those around us. Wishing to win the lottery is a failure to be grateful for the lotteries you’ve already won. If you are reasonably healthy, have a roof overhead, clean water to drink, and plenty to eat, you are already richer than several billion people on this planet. Those who get the literal wish granted and come into a great deal of money are more cursed than blessed, even if they don’t know it yet. That is what Matthew 19:24 was talking about when Jesus said that it was very hard for a rich man to enter heaven. The more luxury you have, the more you want to wallow in it, and the more it acts as a prosthetic so you can be lazy and lose even the most basic abilities to organize, cook, clean, and think for yourself.

Pop stars and their intentions

We can almost imagine a child Ariana (a childhood she seems desperate to capture even at age 32) wishing to become the most beautiful princess in the world. She got her wish. For a time, she was at the top of a game that was nearly impossible to win. Perfect pitch, perfect body. The blood price of Adriana’s wish was having to go through Dan Schneider, Tom Hanks, and who knows how many countless other pedophiles to get to the top of the heavily-frosted layer cake. These encounters have taken their toll and now a frail, skeletal Ariana struts the stage invoking images of Eugenia Cooney and Karen Carpenter. The powers granted her wishes but at great cost. The same is true of Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber, and every actor, actress, and personality that has achieved Hollywood fame. They gained the largest stages and arenas and sold their souls along the way, because certain intentions carry a price.

So let's please stop thinking of wishes as things that literally come into being like instant coffee when you add water. A wish is an intention that morphs over time along with its consequences, shaping both the wisher and the environment itself. Wishes are magic. Not literally turning a pumpkin into a coach or zapping someone dead, though I suppose both of those are possible if you know the right tech crew. Wishes are dangerous enough without having to be literally life-ending, and though Hollywood will never catch on, that should not stop us from learning the truth.