The first time I watched the horror film Obsession earlier this year, I left the theater unsettled yet thoroughly entertained. Following its breakout global box-office success over the summer months, it is safe to say plenty of other moviegoers enjoyed the cinematic thrill ride as well. As someone who always looks forward to planning elaborate Halloween costumes every year, I initially saw the film as a fun, timely excuse to dress up as Inde Navarrete’s hit character, “Nikki Freeman.” After all, Nikki quickly emerged as the third most-searched Halloween costume of 2026, according to Google’s Frightgeist rankings, an annual data analysis tracking trending television and film costume searches.

One of Navarrete’s most popular and recognizable looks from the movie features long black hair, a red zebra-print halter top, short leather shorts, and sturdy black boots. Searches for Nikki’s signature top reached an all-time high almost immediately after the movie hit theaters in May. Fast-fashion and retail websites quickly capitalized on the demand, offering direct replicas for fans looking to recreate the ensemble. With my own brunette hair and at least half of the outfit already hanging in my closet, I figured I could easily pull off the look. Furthermore, paying homage to one of the year’s most visible and popular Latina actresses sounded like a cool way to celebrate the holiday.

Yet, as the process of planning my Halloween attire continued, I ultimately decided that dressing up as Nikki simply wasn’t worth the risk of inadvertently perpetuating the persistent “toxic Latina girlfriend” trope. I simply did not want to dismiss valid, ongoing concerns about how the character’s controlling, manipulative, and jealous behavior played directly into an exhausted cultural stereotype—one that ultimately overshadowed her actual experience as a victim of supernatural manipulation.

By now, audiences and online commentators largely agree that, despite serving as the primary source of terror in the film, Nikki was never truly the villain of the story. Instead, she was systematically stripped of her free will and left to suffer immensely. Bear, the film’s actual antagonist and the only person who knows what Nikki is truly going through, is consistently portrayed as an innocent casualty of her behavior. That specific framing mirrors the real-world experiences of countless Latina women who are routinely written off, dismissed, and labeled as tóxicas in their personal lives.

The movie follows Bear, a young man harboring an obsessive, unrequited crush on his coworker, Nikki. When he loses his nerve and fails while trying to properly express his romantic feelings, he resorts to using a novelty toy known as a “One Wish Willow.” He makes a selfish wish that Nikki would love him more than anyone else in the world. Unbeknownst to Bear, his supernatural wish unleashes a dark curse, causing Nikki to become possessed by an otherworldly, and at times deadly, obsession with him.

Nikki wears the widely searched red-and-black outfit during several of her most memorable and chilling scenes: her infamous eerie pout, her uncanny backward walk away from Bear, and the startling moment she refers to herself as “Freaky Nikki,” a derogatory nickname that her conscious self utterly despised. She remains actively possessed throughout most of these sequences. In fleeting, terrifying moments, her true conscious self desperately breaks through the supernatural fog, only for the wish to forcefully take over once again.

The longer I considered putting the costume together, the more profound my unease became. Nikki was fundamentally the victim of a man obsessed with the mere idea of possessing her. To be completely clear, the movie never explicitly identifies Nikki’s cultural background in the dialogue. The singular scene that might subtly allude to her heritage occurs when a possessed Nikki meticulously creates an altar on the kitchen floor, arranging a red cloth, a traditional prayer candle, and cempasúchil flowers and petals around Bear’s recently deceased cat. The setup strongly resembles a Mexican ofrenda, a traditional altar typically created to honor the dead during Día de los Muertos. Even if this was intended merely as a brief throwaway scene, incorporating a traditional Mexican custom into a dark horror plot feels deliberate. Nikki’s character drives a massive portion of the film’s horror elements, spanning blood and gore, supernatural activity, and murder. Still, the external motives behind her cursed actions deeply complicate her superficial connection to the toxic Latina girlfriend trope.

Across television, movies, music, and social media, Latinas have historically been pigeonholed and portrayed as jealous, controlling, hot-tempered, obsessive, and manipulative within romantic relationships. Unfortunately, Latinos themselves also actively perpetuate this stereotype. In an interview with Navarrete conducted just a few weeks after the movie’s May 2026 debut, video producer Alex Canales referred to Nikki as a “total tóxica,” prompting Navarrete to nod and respond with a simple “uh huh.” Doubling down on the characterization, Canales added that there are “so many girls” he knows “in real life that don’t need a magic wish to be like [Nikki].”

This harmful stereotype also remains rampant throughout Latin music. Consider, for example, Romeo Santos and Prince Royce’s hit 2025 bachata song “Lokita por mi,” whose lyrical content romanticizes a love interest described as stubborn, paranoid, sarcastic, high-strung, feisty, possessive, and jealous, while continuously attempting to turn the phrase “my crazy bitch” into a term of endearment. Similarly, listeners can look to the numerous songs titled “La Tóxica” released by various major artists—including Farruko, Mariah Angeliq, and Anitta—with different creators and different tracks all repeatedly reducing Latina women to the exact same one-dimensional caricature.

Even in instances where a Latina character’s cultural identity is not central to her narrative role, the entertainment industry has consistently made these specific behavioral traits seem uniquely Latina-coded. That implicit, ingrained connection is remarkably difficult to unsee once attached to a character like Nikki. Navarrete herself addressed this broader cultural discourse during an interview with “De Los,” the Los Angeles Times’ Latinidad vertical publication. She candidly shared that many people had weaponized the “tóxica” label to reduce Nikki to a tired stereotype based directly on her own real-life identity as a Mexican American woman—an experience she admitted genuinely 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 therein lies the fundamental problem with cultural stereotypes: they persistently spread and endure, entirely regardless of the original creator’s intentions. Many individuals feel pressured to box themselves into these preconceived notions simply to navigate and survive within rigid societal frameworks until something better comes along. Obsession began as a modest, small-budget production that miraculously transformed into an overnight box-office sensation, providing Navarrete with her major feature-film breakout role. In the context of the story, she effectively served as Obsession’s “final girl”—the classic horror genre trope wherein a single female character ultimately outlasts the terror. In a poignant way, her onscreen fight mirrored the quiet resilience and survival mechanisms that many real-life “tóxicas” must rely upon to endure the suffocating pressures of patriarchal power structures.