‘Obsession’s Nikki is a Top Halloween Costume But Here’s Why I’m Avoiding It (Op-Ed)
Why I’m skipping the controversial 'Obsession' Halloween costume—and rethinking how we turn Latina characters into stereotypes
Credit: Focus Features | Courtesy
The first time I watched the horror film Obsession this year, I left the theater unsettled yet entertained. After its global box-office success all summer, it’s safe to say plenty of others enjoyed it, too. As someone who looks forward to planning Halloween costumes every year, I initially saw it as a fun excuse to dress up as Inde Navarrete’s hit character, “Nikki Freeman,” in Obsession. After all, Nikki is the third most-searched Halloween costume of 2026, according to Google’s Frightgeist rankings, an annual analysis of trending Halloween TV/film costume searches.
One of Navarrete’s most popular looks from the movie featured long black hair, a red zebra-print halter top, short leather shorts and black boots. Searches for Nikki’s signature top reached an all-time high right after the movie came out in May. Fast-fashion websites like Dolls Kill and Princess Polly quickly offered replicas. With my brunette hair and half the outfit already in my closet, I figured I could pull off the look. Plus, paying homage to one of this year’s most popular Latina actresses sounded cool.
But while planning for Halloween, I decided dressing up as Nikki wasn’t worth the risk of perpetuating the “toxic Latina girlfriend” trope. I didn’t want to dismiss valid concerns about how the character’s controlling, manipulative and jealous behavior played into this old stereotype—and overshadowed her experience as a victim.
By now, netizens largely agree that, despite being the movie’s main source of horror, Nikki wasn’t the villain. She was stripped of her free will and left to suffer. Bear—the film’s antagonist and the only person who knows what Nikki is really going through—is portrayed as a casualty of her behavior. That framing mirrors the experiences of many Latina women who are written off as tóxicas.
The movie follows Bear, a young man with an obsessive crush on his coworker, Nikki. When he loses his nerve while trying to express his feelings, he turns to a novelty toy called a “One Wish Willow” and wishes that Nikki would love him more than anyone in the world. Unbeknownst to Bear, his supernatural wish unleashes a curse, and Nikki becomes possessed by an otherworldly, sometimes deadly obsession with him.
Nikki wears the frequently searched red-and-black outfit in some of her most notable scenes: her infamous eerie pout, her uncanny backward walk away from Bear, and the moment she calls herself “Freaky Nikki,” a derogatory nickname her real self hated. She is possessed in most of these scenes. In frightening, fleeting moments, her conscious self desperately breaks through, only for the wish to take over again.
The longer I considered the costume, the more uneasy I felt. Nikki was the victim of a man obsessed with the idea of having her. To be clear, the movie never explicitly identifies Nikki’s cultural background. The only scene that might allude to her heritage is when possessed Nikki creates an altar on the kitchen floor, arranging a red cloth, a prayer candle, and cempasúchil flowers and petals around Bear’s recently deceased cat. It resembles a Mexican ofrenda, typically created to honor the dead for Día de los Muertos. Even if this was a throwaway scene, using a traditional Mexican custom in a horror plot feels intentional. Nikki’s character drives much of the film’s horror—blood and gore, supernatural activity and murder. Still, the motives behind her actions complicate her connection to the toxic Latina girlfriend trope.
Across TV, movies, music and social media, Latinas have historically been portrayed as jealous, controlling, hot-tempered, obsessive and manipulative in romantic relationships. Latinos also perpetuate this stereotype. In an interview with Navarrete a few weeks after the movie’s May 2026 debut, video producer Alex Canales called Nikki a “total tóxica,” to which Navarrete nodded and said, “uh huh.” Doubling down, Canales added that there are “so many girls” he knows “in real life that don’t need a magic wish to be like [Nikki].”
The stereotype also remains rampant in music. Take Romeo Santos and Prince Royce’s hit 2025 bachata song “Lokita por mi,” whose lyrics romanticize a love interest who is “stubborn, paranoid, sarcastic, high-strung, feisty, possessive, and jealous,” while trying to turn “my crazy bitch” into a term of endearment. Or listen to the many songs titled “La Tóxica” by artists such as Farruko, Mariah Angeliq and Anitta—different artists, different songs—all reducing Latinas to the same one-dimensional caricature.
Even when a Latina’s identity isn’t central to her role, the entertainment world has made these traits seem Latina-coded. That implicit connection is hard to unsee with Nikki. Navarrete addressed the discourse in an interview with “De Los,” the Los Angeles Times‘ Latinidad vertical. She said people had used the “tóxica” label to reduce Nikki to a stereotype based on her own identity as a Mexican American woman—and that it hurt her.
“Whenever I first saw that, I kind of cried because it made me really sad that people took my pride in being Mexican and saw it as, ‘Let’s degrade this person’s experience,'” Navarrete told De Los. “There’s this idea that Latina women are just so intense and so crazy. But let’s look a lot deeper than that. It did hurt my feelings. But I can understand where they’re coming from. It’s a surface-level thing to say, and sometimes jokes are just that.”
And that’s the problem with stereotypes: they persist and spread, regardless of the original intention. Many of us box ourselves into them to survive until something better comes along. Obsession was a small-budget production that became an overnight success and gave Navarrete her major feature-film breakout role. She was Obsession’s “final girl”—a horror trope in which one last female character survives. In a way, she mirrored the resilience and survival mechanisms many “tóxicas” rely on to endure the pressures of patriarchal power structures.
