As of today, a staggering 611 films have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. That’s a lot of movies. And after nearly one whole century of Oscar ceremonies, only 1.3% of those Best Picture nominees were in the horror genre — including this year’s “The Substance.”
That’s a low number by any estimation, and it says a lot more about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences than it does about the horror genre. Although horror movies have long struggled to gain recognition of their artistic achievements, there has never been any shortage of ingenious movies that explore our deepest fears and anxieties.
And if you’re thinking to yourself “Hasn’t there been a lot of dreck too?” then hey, guess what? You’re correct. And you could also say that about dramas and comedies and documentaries while you’re at it. Most of the movies in literally every genre are at least a little underwhelming, if not kinda terrible. You don’t see anyone claiming all dramas suck just because “The Room” and “Pay It Forward” and “Hillbilly Elegy” give the genre a bad name, so why paint all horror movies with the same brush?
But if you still need convincing, this is the article for you. We’re taking a look back at the history of the horror genre and singling out 13 films that weren’t just great, but which the Academy had every reason to nominate for Best Picture and for one reason or another just didn’t. Many of these films won or were nominated for Oscars in other categories. All of them should have made the cut for the big prize.
“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1931)
The Academy may not vote for horror movies often, but it did vote for a horror movie early. The visually innovative “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” based on the classic tale by Robert Louis Stevenson, received three Oscar nominations at the fifth-ever ceremony, including Best Cinematography, Best Writing (Adaptation), and Best Actor. Fredric March won Best Actor, and although history says he was tied with Wallace Beery for his role in the classic weepy “The Champ,” more accurate history shows that March technically won by three votes and the Oscars had very weird rules back in those days.
The point is, Rouben Mamoulian’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” wasn’t an afterthought for the Academy. The expertly crafted and salacious pre-code monster movie had support from the voters. But for some reason it still couldn’t earn a Best Picture nomination, even though there were eight nominees at the 1931/1932 awards (the first six ceremonies covered the last half of one year, and the first half of the second — like I said, weird rules).
“King Kong” (1933)
It would take a few decades for the Academy to turn its back on so-called “genre” films. The early Oscar nominees for Best Picture included comic book movies (“Skippy”), pulp adventures (“Trader Horn”), sex comedies (“She Done Him Wrong”) and pirate flicks (“Captain Blood”). So there’s no particularly good reason why the visual effects monster movie spectacular “King Kong” was completely snubbed by the Academy in 1933.
To be fair, the Oscar for Best Visual Effects hadn’t been invented yet and “King Kong” probably would have been a shoo-in if it had, but it’s still odd that “King Kong” had zero support from the Academy. The film’s directors, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, directed the previous nominee “Chang,” a quasi-documentary picture that “King Kong” — a film about documentary filmmakers who find an island full of giant monsters — knowingly riffs on. And although “Kong” has some deeply unfortunate racism, it’s at least a little less racist and a lot more ethical than “Trader Horn,” the Best Picture-nominated safari film in which a crew member was killed by a rhinoceros on-camera and they left it in the movie.
In any case, “King Kong” would have had serious competition for Best Picture in in the 1932/1933 Academy Awards, with classics like “42nd Street,” “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,” “Lady for a Day,” “Little Women,” “The Private Life of Henry VIII” and “She Done Him Wrong” to compete with. But it deserved a place among those greats.
“The Phantom of the Opera” (1943)
Arthur Lubin’s Technicolor remake of “The Phantom of the Opera” may not be the most famous adaptation of the classic horror story these days. Even setting aside the musical, the image of Lon Chaney Sr.’s skeletal face behind his subterranean pipe organ still lingers. Still, it’s arguably the best, and even the Academy recognized its achievements. The film was nominated for four Oscars — Best Art Direction (Color), Best Cinematography (Color), Best Music (Scoring of a Motion Picture) and Best Sound Recording — and won the awards for Art Direction and Cinematography, besting the Best Picture nominees “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “Heaven Can Wait.”
As for the Best Picture nominees that year, nothing was going to beat “Casablanca” but there’s no shortage of mawkish filler that could have been cut, like the sappy Mickey Rooney drama “The Human Comedy” or the ultra-conventional biopic “Madame Curie,” which would have had a completely different ending if it had been produced just a couple years later, after the invention of the atomic bomb.
“The Night of the Hunter” (1955)
Charles Laughton was, and still is, one of the best actors to have ever been in front of a camera. He won an Oscar for his unforgettable turn in “The Private Life of Henry VIII” and although he was only nominated two more times — for “Mutiny on the Bounty” and “Witness for the Prosecution” — he headlined many more Best Picture nominees, including three in 1935: for “Bounty,” “Les Miserables” and “Ruggles of Red Gap.” The Academy clearly liked the guy.
So it stinks that the only movie Laughton ever directed, the terrifying child’s nightmare that is “The Night of the Hunter” — starring Robert Mitchum as a serial killer preacher who marries a widow and terrorizes her kids — was a box office and critical disappointment when it was released in 1955. It’s now considered one of the best movies ever made, and in retrospect, it seems utterly bizarre that it received zero Oscar nominations, despite at least three award-worthy performances, haunting cinematography, and Laughton’s frighteningly peculiar direction.
“Psycho” (1960)
It has been argued, pretty darn successfully, that Alfred Hitchcock’s sleazy, terrifying, experimental “Psycho” cleaved cinema history in half. There was before Hitchcock broke all the rules and got away with it — killing the protagonist 1/3 of the way through the movie, denying entry into the theater after the film begins, and even showing (gasp!) a flushing toilet on camera — and then there was after. We are, for better and worse (the problematic legacy of genderqueer killers in cinema can be traced right back here), living in the cinematic world “Psycho” made.
And yet… no Best Picture nomination. It’s not like the Academy ignored the film: “Psycho” was nominated for Best Director, Best Supporting Actress (Janet Leigh), Best Art Direction (Black-and-White) and Best Cinematography (Black-and-White). The snub for Anthony Perkins, giving one of the greatest performances in film history, still stings. The snub for Best Picture feels just as egregious.
“Alien” (1979)
Ridley Scott’s “Alien” was a hit when it came out, it was critically acclaimed when it came out, and even though it’s a movie about gross space monsters killing people on a starship, the Academy didn’t ignore it. The film was nominated for Best Art Direction, and lost to “All That Jazz” (which is actually pretty fair but a bummer regardless), and won Best Visual Effects, besting the spacey spectacles of “The Black Hole,” “Moonraker” and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (and also Steven Spielberg’s disastrous comedy “1941”).
But of course “Alien” was more than a visual effects movie. It was a painstakingly crafted film about a variety of topics towards which the Academy often gravitates: the plight of the working class, the evils of misogyny, and risking it all just to save an animal. Sigourney Weaver shouldn’t have been overlooked, a mistake the Academy later rectified when she was nominated for “Aliens” in 1986, and a Best Picture nod shouldn’t have been off the table.
“Manhunter” (1986)
The quasi-sequel “The Silence of the Lambs” would go on to win five Academy Awards including Best Picture, but it’s not the only great Hannibal Lecter movie. It might not even be the best. Half a decade earlier Michael Mann adapted the first of Thomas Harris’s terrifying books, “Red Dragon,” into a stylish and character-driven serial killer thriller that drafted the template for modern police procedural cinema.
That film was “Manhunter,” and it’s just one of many classic Michael Mann movies the Academy largely overlooked. (“Heat” didn’t receive a single nomination. Not one.) In retrospect its chilling, emotional depiction of the psychological torment of being a monster, and forcing oneself to empathize with one, hits as hard any horror movie or drama of the era. Brian Cox’s unassuming take on Hannibal Lecktor (the spelling was changed, yes it’s strange and unnecessary) was worthy of awards recognition, as were the film’s stars William Peterson and Tom Noonan, and the impeccable cinematography.
“Mulholland Drive” (2001)
The late, unbelievably great David Lynch made lemons out of lemonade with “Mulholland Drive,” a failed pilot for an ABC television series about crime, sex, horror and hope in Hollywood, California. When he clawed the footage back, he shot a conclusion to make “Mulholland” function as a standalone movie, and the result is one of the most celebrated films of his career.
Is it a horror movie? Well, it’s not not a horror movie. The scene behind the Winkie’s Diner is one of the scariest ever filmed. Certainly dives headfirst into the realm of psychological terror, as idealistic ingenue Betty (and/or Diane, played by Naomi Watts) is ultimately consumed by jealousy, anger and regret. Though not as impenetrable as some of Lynch’s other genre-defying works, “Mulholland Drive” is bizarre, heavy stuff by the Academy’s standards, and yet it still managed to earn a nomination for Best Director, seemingly kicking “Moulin Rouge!” auteur Baz Luhrmann off the ballot.
“Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006)
Guillermo Del Toro has been cranking out imaginative masterworks since the 1990s, but “Pan’s Labyrinth” may be his greatest achievement. The demonic fairytale tells the story of Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a little girl trying to survive in Francoist Spain as the new stepdaughter of a monstrous Captain Vidal (Sergi López). She retreats into the realm of fantasy but finds no reassurance, only twisted parallels to her real, terrifying plight.
The Academy recognized “Pan’s Labyrinth” in six categories, making its exclusion from the Best Picture race inexplicable. Del Toro’s film won three, for Best Art Direction, Cinematography and Makeup, but went home empty handed in the categories of Best Original Score, Original Screenplay and even Best International Film, despite many pundits believing that one was in the bag. (It lost to the World War II drama “The Lives of Others,” which to be fair was also exceptional.)
“The Witch” (2015)
The Academy loves historical films, and few directors seem to love history as much as Robert Eggers. His debut feature “The Witch” (sometimes written “The VVitch”) is a copiously accurate depiction of life in colonial America, in which a Puritan family — like, a really Puritan family, too Puritan for all the other Puritans — lives in isolation at the edge of the woods, gradually consuming themselves in religious paranoia. Or is it paranoia?
“The Witch” is one of the great modern horror movies, critically celebrated since its early film festival screenings. And as a horror movie it’s comparatively subtle, leaving much of the supernatural terror plausibly deniable for most of the film, allowing the audience to wonder if the nightmare is just in this sad family’s heads. Nominations for Best Actress (Anya Taylor-Joy), Best Production Design, Best Cinematography, Best Director and Best Picture should have been in the cards, and yet… zero. Zero nominations. The Academy must have used up all their “cool” cards when they (rightly) gave “Mad Max: Fury Road” ten nominations.
“Hereditary” (2018)
There’s a whole other article to be written about horror movie performances that deserved an Oscar nomination. The header image for that article would undoubtedly be Toni Collette in “Hereditary.” Ari Aster’s psychologically devastating horror story stars Collette as a mother ripped apart by her daughter’s death, blaming — and not without cause — her teenage son for the tragedy.
There are some who believe that “Hereditary” is one of the best horror movies ever made. There are others who think it’s a bit much, if they’re being honest. But when it comes to drama and scene-stealing performances the Academy historically loves “a bit much.” Aster’s film, which didn’t receive a single nomination, should have been a frontrunner for Best Actress but there was also plenty of room in the Best Picture category, since 2018 had one of the most scattershot nominee lineups in recent Oscars history. (“Vice,” “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Green Book,” and “Green Book” won over “BlacKkKlansman” and “Black Panther?” Yikes.)
“Nope” (2022)
Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” is one of the few horror movies that actually has broken into the Best Picture race, and for a moment it seemed like his third feature would make the cut too. “Nope” is an overwhelmingly distinct exercise in terror, filtered through the fringe of the entertainment industry. Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer play siblings who inherit their fathers horse ranch, where they train the animals for motion picture shoots. When they discover that a strange flying creature is eating their livestock, they decide to capture the entity on camera, even though it will probably destroy anyone who tries.
Overwhelmingly potent as a statement on Hollywood — and Hollywood sure does love movies about Hollywood — it would have made sense for “Nope” to have a strong presence at the Oscars. Nominations for Best Cinematography, Sound, Visual Effects, Editing, Musical Score, Actress, Screenplay, Director and Picture would have been well-deserved, respectable choices. Instead, “Nope” got shafted by the Academy, not appearing in a single category. Ridiculous.
“Godzilla Minus One” (2023)
Like King Kong, Godzilla has an innate connection to the horror genre but isn’t always used to strike terror into the hearts of audiences. But “Godzilla Minus One” is, alongside the original “Gojira” and “Shin Godzilla,” about as frightening as the giant monster ever got. In Ishirō Honda’s original film, Godzilla was a metaphor for the devastation of America’s nuclear weapons. In this acclaimed, rousing, tear-jerking reimagining, Godzilla represents Japan’s own culpability in World War II, forcing the citizens of Japan — including a failed, traumatized kamikaze pilot — to redeem themselves by finding a way to save their without needlessly sacrificing themselves.
“Godzilla Minus One” is the only Godzilla movie to win an Academy Award, and deservedly so, for Best Visual Effects. It was not Japan’s entry for the Best International Feature category, but if it had been, it could have been the frontrunner. But frankly, this surprising, powerful drama about a giant radioactive lizard deserved even more. “Godzilla Minus One” deserved a spot in the Best Picture race.