Hollywood wants horror’s money, but apparently not its awards

Curry Barker‘s Obsession cost about $750,000 to make. But the movie has made over $500 million at the box office around the world. That is one of the biggest money wins of the year. The whole time, Hollywood sold it as one of the best horror movies, even the posters said horror, and the trailers too. The marketing leaned hard into scares and dread.

Now, awards season is here, and Obsession has reportedly been entered at the Golden Globes as a comedy, not a drama. Not because anyone really thinks it is funny. The Golden Globes simply do not have a horror category, so comedy is the only spot left.

This is apparently not a new thing. Films like Get Out, The Substance, Poor Things, and Bugonia all went through the same thing. Horror keeps getting treated like it needs to borrow another genre’s name just to compete.

A genre good enough to sell, but not good enough to honor

Hollywood has zero problem calling horror “horror” when it is selling tickets. The word is all over the marketing because it works. But once awards season starts, that same label suddenly becomes a problem to work around.

Obsession did not stop being a horror film just because the Golden Globes do not know where to put it. The movie did not change. The category system is what is broken here, not the film.

Back in 2018, Get Out faced the exact same issue. Director Jordan Peele spoke to Deadline about it at the time. He said, “When I originally heard the idea of placing it in the comedy category it didn’t register to me as an issue. I missed it. There’s no category for social thriller. So what? I moved on.” He also said, “At the end of the day, call Get Out horror, comedy, drama, action or documentary, I don’t care.” Eight years later, nothing about the system has changed. Obsession is stuck in the same spot.

People online have noticed the pattern too. One Reddit user wrote, “I mean, for how prevalent the genre is, it’s weird horror doesn’t have it’s own category.” Another user broke down the numbers and said, “No other genre does. It has 4 main best film categories, and only 2 are genre based – Drama, and Comedy/Musical.” They added, “At the end of the day, it’s not really down to the genre, it’s down to where the studio submit it, and the golden globes just seem to go ‘OK, whatever you say it is, that’s what we’ll call it’. For obsession, they don’t want to go up against the Odyssey.”

Others pointed out that this hurts comedy, too. One comment said, “Which is also a shame because actual comedies in the 21st century usually get shut out in any other award show unless they’re tacked to another genre.” A reply added, “And even at the Golden Globes, dramas get nominated under Comedy and push out actual comedies.”

Horror earns the money and the audience. It earns the cultural buzz, too. What it still does not get is a fair shot at being honored as exactly what it is. Until the Golden Globes and other award shows build an actual home for the genre, films like Obsession will keep getting shoved into categories that were never built for them.