Haley Nicole Johnson stood on a TIFF: The Market panel Saturday and said the plain thing out loud: it's a lot.

She's the co-producer behind Curry Barker's Obsession, the horror film that went from a $15 million Focus Features acquisition to roughly $500 million in worldwide ticket sales this summer, running alongside Kane Parsons' Backrooms as one of 2026's genre breakouts. "It's a lot. I'm not gonna lie. It's a lot," Johnson told the room. "But I've been overwhelmed with how welcoming the industry has been to everyone from Team Obsession."

She wasn't there just to relive the numbers. Johnson has already moved on to her next project, wrapping production on Alex Ullom's 4X4: The Event for Neon, and the panel spent as much time on what a hit like Obsession changes about how horror gets made and sold as it did on the film itself.

Adam Hendricks, who co-runs the production company Divide/Conquer, put it plainly: horror is where independent producers can still swing big without a big budget. "This is the place we can do the most," he said, pointing to the wave of opportunity that opened up after Obsession and Backrooms both cleared at multiplexes without star-driven casts.

But Hendricks also flagged the trap. Horror audiences, he argued, show up hungry for something they haven't already sat through. "We're averse to stories we've seen before," he said, whether the monster is a zombie or a werewolf, and viewers tend to clock the beats of a familiar plot before the scare even lands. His question to the room, and to himself, was simple: "What are the new mythologies and new stories?"

Nyla Innuksuk, whose debut feature Slash/Back has now been followed by In the Heart of the South premiering at TIFF this week, framed the same problem differently. For her, the job is finding stories rooted in a specific place and culture that still hit a universal nerve, whether that nerve is fear or something closer to obsessive love. Divide/Conquer's other co-founder, Greg Gilreath, said his own filter for scripts is whether a filmmaker is using everything available to them, not just plot and performance but effects and stunt work built into the storytelling itself.

None of it reads as a formula so much as a scramble to catch the same wave twice. Obsession's jump from a modest sale price to half a billion dollars has made low-cost horror the genre every producer in that room wants to bet on again. Whether the next mythology Hendricks is asking about actually turns up, and whether Johnson's follow-up with Neon lands anywhere near the same territory, is the thing this crowd will be watching for through the rest of festival season.