The biggest horror hit of the year is going to the Golden Globes as a comedy. Focus Features has submitted Obsession in the musical or comedy categories, with nominations announced December 7.
Curry Barker‘s film opened May 15 on a production budget of roughly $1 million and became the highest-grossing release in Focus Features history. Michael Johnston plays Bear, a lonely man who uses an object called a One Wish Willow to make his childhood friend love him back, and Inde Navarrette plays what the wish produces. The Hollywood Reporter, which first reported the submission, says Focus rates the film better in the comedy field and that Globes voters already view it that way, pointing to audience laughter at Navarrette’s wish-version of Nikki and the memes made out of it.
Focus Features Named Six Earlier Films
The studio pointed to Get Out, The Banshees of Inisherin, Triangle of Sadness, Poor Things, The Substance and Bugonia as films that ran in musical or comedy without being comedies in any ordinary sense. The Substance is the one that settles the argument on strategy. In January 2025 Demi Moore won Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy for a film in which she tears a second woman out of her own spine, and it was the first major acting award of her career.
Jordan Peele Objected to the Same Label
The first name on that list comes with its own history. Get Out ran in the musical or comedy field at the 2018 Golden Globes, and Peele was asked about it more or less immediately. His answer was that the movie was none of those things: “‘Get Out’ is a documentary.” The nomination went forward in that field anyway, and Daniel Kaluuya was nominated for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy alongside it. That ceremony became the reference point for every horror awards campaign since, including this one.
The Globes Have Two Film Categories and Neither Is Horror
Best Motion Picture at the Globes splits into Drama and Musical or Comedy, and that is the entire menu. A horror film has to be filed as one or the other, so the decision is never really a claim about tone. It is a read on which room is less crowded. Horror has done better in the comedy half, which is less a quirk of voting than a sign that the category is where voters put anything they cannot classify.
Whether any of it converts is a December question. Barker is not waiting on it either way: his next film, Anything But Ghosts, is dated May 7, 2027 at Focus. What a nomination would actually settle is smaller than the campaign makes it sound, and bigger than horror usually gets: it would put a $1 million wish-gone-wrong movie on the same ballot line as the year’s prestige comedies, and leave voters to explain the category to themselves.
