Are the Academy voters a bunch of scaredy cats? You might come to that conclusion if you cast an eye over the all-time list of Oscar nominations and notice how few horror movies have ever made the running.
Before the success this year of French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat’s unhinged body horror The Substance, just six scary movies had ever been nominated for Best Picture – despite Academy Awards being handed out for almost a century. The Exorcist, Jaws, The Silence of the Lambs, Sixth Sense, Black Swan and Get Out. Only one, 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs, actually took home Hollywood’s most esteemed prize. Jonathan Demme’s serial killer classic in fact swept the board to become the third film in history to pocket the Academy’s “Big Five” awards – but generally horror has been snubbed a lot more often than it’s been celebrated on the podium.
In 2023, after Mia Goth was overlooked entirely for her blood-spattered descent into madness in the technicolor slasher Pearl, her director Ti West told The Independent he wasn’t surprised. “You’ll notice that a certain kind of movie isn’t there as much,” said West. “Maybe the Oscars see themselves as more about movies that are representing a different message in a way. It’s hard to say.”
This year things might just be about to change. The Substance is the first body horror and arguably the goriest film ever to be nominated for the Academy’s top prizes. It stars Demi Moore as an ageing movie star and fitness guru who takes a mysterious drug that promises to restore her to youth and vitality. Disastrous and graphically horrific results ensue. It seems to have struck a chord with Oscar voters thanks to its giddy skewering of preposterous contemporary beauty standards, and shares some thematic crossover with Robert Zemeckis’s 1992 satire Death Becomes Her, which itself won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.
The Substance has far outdone that film in nomination terms, with Fargeat also up for Best Director and Moore considered a hot favourite to take home Best Actress. Moore’s performance has a subtlety and groundedness that the rest of the film doesn’t really bother with, and she’s deservedly already won a Golden Globe. She shouldn’t be too deterred by the Oscars’ general resistance to spookiness as she’s competing in the category that has historically proved kindest to horror, with Jodie Foster winning for The Silence of the Lambs and Kathy Bates triumphing for her chilling turn as an obsessive fan in the Stephen King adaptation Misery (1990). Natalie Portman also took home the prize for 2010’s psychological ballet drama Black Swan.
These wins, though, are exceptions to the rule. Ruth Gordon won Best Supporting Actress for 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby, but in the Best Actor category, before Anthony Hopkins won for The Silence of the Lambs, you’d have to go all the way back to the fifth ever Academy Awards in 1932 to find a horror winner, when Fredric March won for his dual role in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. (Granted, he had to share his statue with The Champ star Wallace Beery after winning by just a single vote and the contest being officially declared a draw.)
Down the years, horror has had the most luck in the technical categories. The Fly, Beetlejuice and An American Werewolf in London all won Best Makeup prizes during the 1980s, while the spine-tingling soundtrack to 1976’s The Omen took home Best Original Score.
Even the finest examples of the genre have tended to find themselves out in the cold come Oscars night. Psycho got four nominations, including Alfred Hitchcock for Best Director and shower scene scream queen Janet Leigh for Best Supporting Actress, but won nothing. The Exorcist is the most nominated horror film of all time with a total of 10 nods, but it ended up winning just two Oscars, for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Sound.
In the last decade the only pure horror movie to win an Oscar was 2017’s Get Out, with writer-director Jordan Peele receiving the prize for Best Original Screenplay. It was a well-deserved win, with Peele’s razor-sharp script showcasing how horror can be used as a scalpel to examine racism and class prejudice. That film’s success is arguably a good omen for The Substance, which also uses genre conventions as a vehicle for social commentary, something Academy voters like to see in the films they reward. There are arguments to be made that 2017’s The Shape of Water and 2019’s Parasite, which both won Best Picture, each incorporated horror movie elements, too, even if they weren’t strictly genre pieces.
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Those films managed to sail to success on the basis that they were seen as decidedly highbrow. In stark contrast, then, to the cheap, lowbrow thrills the Academy seems to still associate with the horror genre as a decades-old holdover of the schlocky B-movie era. Much like comedy, which is often overlooked by the Academy en masse, horror films have tended to be seen as not quite serious enough for the Oscars, no matter how much thought and technical skill goes into their creation. It’s high time the Academy got over that old taboo and declared that horror needs to be celebrated. Given how depressingly relevant the genre has become to a world descending into technological dystopia, and especially after the ecological collapse that sparked the recent Los Angeles fires, it’s arguably impossible for voters to ignore.
The Substance’s five total nominations (it’s also up for Best Original Screenplay and Best Makeup and Hairstyling) undoubtedly represent progress in that regard. “It’s a huge step,” Heretic star Sophie Thatcher recently told The Hollywood Reporter when asked what those nods mean for the horror genre. “People are finally taking it seriously.”
Nominations are one thing, but a Best Picture award for a film so giddily extreme that it prompted mass cinema walkouts around the world when it was first released? Now that really would be shocking.
