At the 82nd annual Golden Globes held on January 5, Demi Moore, who has been working steadily in Hollywood for decades, won her first ever competitive acting award thanks to Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror hit “The Substance.”
Moore beat out some stiff competition to win Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy award, including Cynthia Erivo in “Wicked: Part One” and Mikey Madison in “Anora,” and her powerful speech about how women in the entertainment industry are constantly trying to measure up to a truly impossible standard was nothing if not deeply inspiring. Despite apparently being told that she would never be anything more than a “popcorn actress” by some foolish studio executive, Moore proudly stood on stage at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles, telling women all over the world, “In those moments when we don’t think we’re smart enough or pretty enough or skinny enough or successful enough or basically just not enough — I had a woman say to me, ‘Just know, you will never be enough, but you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick.'”
This is all to say that, thanks to her absolutely incredible performance as fading star Elizabeth Sparkle in “The Substance” and her galvanizing awards speech, Moore has a very real shot of earning an Academy Award nomination for her role. If she does, it would mean that the star of a horror movie could score this prestigious acting accolade, defying the Academy’s long-standing bias against horror. In recent years, incredible performances from Toni Collette in “Hereditary,” Lupita Nyong’o in “Us,” and Florence Pugh in “Midsommar” have all been completely snubbed.
If Moore does go on to win an Oscar for “The Substance,” she’d join a very small group of performers who won their statuettes for horror films. Here are the only six actors that have ever pulled off this very specific feat.