With Demi Moore’s recent wins for her role in The Substance (2024) and the film’s Oscar nominations, it seems like horror is back in the award season’s good books. After years of acting and directing snubs and losses, can the Best Picture win for The Substance give horror the award season spotlight that it truly deserves?
Horror and the Oscars have always had a mixed relationship, with the latter always looking down on the former, regarding it as tacky and as a lesser-than-film genre. However, historically, there have been rare instances of horror praise at the Oscars. At the 46th Academy Awards, the controversial film The Exorcist (1973) received 10 nominations (including Best Picture), unheard of for a horror film famous for its blasphemy and people fainting at screenings. Despite only winning two, Best Screenplay and Best Sound, it was one of the first mainstream wins for a horror film, shaking the industry’s moral values at the time. A first major win for a horror film wouldn’t come till the 64th Academy Awards, with Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), taking home the unprecedented “Big Five”: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and a Best Screenplay win.
However, despite the film being firmly in the horror genre, its marketing advertised it as a “psychological thriller”, making it seem more critically important, distancing itself from its true horror identity, if only to please the snobs on the Academy jury.
Horror-acting snubs have been at the forefront of this discourse in recent years. Toni Collette’s performance in Hereditary (2018) was worthy of every award on the planet, yet the Oscars once again turned a blind eye to scream queens; Mia Goth’s dual role as Maxine Minx and Pearl in Ti West’s X trilogy also went unrewarded by the Oscars community. The toxic relationship between this genre and the snobbery of the Academy leads some horror fans to make horror-only award shows, such as YouTube’s Dead Meat. It broadcasts its annual award show every March, giving horror films a chance in the spotlight, getting the praise they truly deserve.
Horror and the Oscars will never have a good relationship; horror will always push boundaries with gore, violence (something the Academy has never been a massive fan of anyway); and with their metaphors for the horrors of everyday life combined with guts spilling out on the screen, they provide something that the Oscars never could: a bloody good time.
Illustration by Lucy Wellington @luspaints
