Horror films like Obsession are shut out of the Golden Globes

The Golden Globes' rigid genre categories have forced three of the past decade's most celebrated horror films — Obsession (2025), The Substance (2024) and Get Out (2017) — into the musical-or-comedy bracket, where they must compete against films their makers never intended to be grouped with.

That is the argument made in a Guardian analysis published October 2, 2026. The piece opens by asking what the wish-gone-wrong thriller Obsession, the body-horror film The Substance, and Jordan Peele's Get Out have in common. The answer: critical and box-office success, crossover awards appeal, and — per the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's rules — the label of comedy.

A taxonomy that punishes horror

The 2025 Toronto International Film Festival selection Obsession is described in the Guardian as "a terrifying, violent nightmare of lovestruck madness." Under the Globes' current architecture, such a film must enter the dramatic category or register as a musical or comedy.

That framework has long troubled the genre. Peele's 2017 film, which the Guardian called "a fantastically twisted horror satire on race in America" and "a generational masterpiece," earned major awards recognition. The piece notes it as a title that "broke free of genre snobbery to become an awards-season contender."

The Substance, Coralie Fargeat's 2024 transformation bloodbath starring Demi Moore, brought similar issues. The Guardian's review called it "visceral female body horror" in which Moore is "fearless." The film's positioning at the Globes drew the same "toe-tapping laugh riot" framing the article applies to all three titles.

Why horror keeps getting shunted

The Guardian piece notes all three films share a status as "modern horror success stories, with critics and at the box office." Each, the writer argues, broke through genre walls during awards season. The shared treatment exposes how the Globes' binary between drama and comedy leaves no proper home for films that use terror, satire and shock in roughly equal measure.

The result is a category that lumps genuine horror with anything lighter. At the Globes, the article argues, these films must be either "toe-tapping laugh riots" or invisible.

What the rule costs the genre

The Guardian's analysis flags a campaign problem: distributors must decide whether to push horror as drama (and lose to prestige biopics and historical epics) or as comedy (and lose to breezy crowd-pleasers). Either path costs the films their natural constituency.

With Obsession now in the 2026 awards conversation and The Substance still cited from the 2024 cycle, the Globes' comedy-vs-drama split remains the genre's most visible structural obstacle. The Guardian does not predict a rule change, but its framing makes the cost plain: horror's most decorated recent films are forced to compete as something they are not.