For fans of scary movies, 2024 was an extraordinary year. Vital and thrilling horror films, such as “Nosferatu,” “Red Rooms,” “I Saw the TV Glow” and “Longlegs,” all earned critical respect and box office success. Yet you’d barely know this from the Oscar nominations, which were announced Thursday morning.
With the exception of “The Substance,” that rare Academy-approved gore-fest that scored five nominations including best picture, very few of last year’s notable horror films were recognized in the major categories — a continuation of a long-running snubbing by the Oscars that’s gone from curious to downright shameful.
This refusal to acknowledge an entire genre feels especially out of touch at a time when horror is not only critically ascendant but especially attuned to our feelings of ambient dread. We’re living in an age of real-life terrors — climate catastrophe, political unrest, tech-driven dehumanization — so it’s no wonder that many of the most exciting filmmakers working today are using the vocabulary of horror to reflect our moment’s anxieties back to us, and maybe help us process them.
If the 1940s was a decade defined by film noir, the ’50s by westerns and the ’70s by paranoid conspiracy thrillers, then the current era is a golden age for frightening films. The genre has long deserved to be treated as real cinema, with the Oscar recognition to match.
Not all horror movies are created equal, as the term can plausibly encompass everything from the most brazen teensploitation flicks to “The Silence of the Lambs,” the only horror film to win best picture. For my purposes, I’m including any film that’s primarily designed to frighten or unnerve its audience through dark and disturbing subject matter. Even given that relatively narrow definition, only seven horror films have been nominated for best picture since the Academy Awards began in 1929 — including, this year, “The Substance,” an unholy fusion of art-house ambition and B-movie gore from the French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat.
A partial list of essential American horror movies that were ignored entirely by the Oscars can start with “Dracula” in 1931 and continue through 1968’s “Night of the Living Dead” and “The Shining” in 1980 from the director Stanley Kubrick. At the 1987 Oscars, David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” was nominated only in the makeup category, leaving its star Jeff Goldblum so disappointed that he had to discuss the snub with his psychoanalyst.
This year’s best picture nomination for “The Substance” might seem like a positive step. The body horror film, about a washed-up actress who seeks a respite from aging that has horrifying consequences, combines the memorably disgusting with bracing social critique, and along with best picture it earned nominations for its star, Demi Moore, and its director, Ms. Fargeat.
Yet “The Substance” continues a tradition in which the Academy embraces horror only when voters can focus on everything but the horror: a pointed social message, an obvious allegorical lesson, an actor’s overdue comeback narrative. In 1987, the film critic Gene Siskel argued that Mr. Goldblum’s standout performance had been passed over by the Oscars because “The Fly” was “a horror film and not a film with an obvious social conscience.” While recent decades have brought the innovative found-footage horror of “The Blair Witch Project,” the genre-bending surrealism of Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” “Us” and “Nope” and the harrowing visions of “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” from the director Ari Aster, the award season negligence persists.
Why the lack of respect? Horror has a holdover lowbrow reputation that dates from the trashy thrills and lurid appeal of midcentury B movies. When “The Fly” was snubbed, Mr. Siskel speculated that “older Academy voters” were turned off by its “few ‘gross-out’ horror sequences,” and hadn’t even bothered to see the film.
The continued snubbing is confounding. Horror’s appeal now extends well beyond the weirdos who once flocked to double features and midnight madness screenings. The genre has proved to be one of the few that can reliably lure audiences to see original, non-franchise fare on the big screen. Consider the success last year of “Longlegs,” a chillingly inventive “Silence of the Lambs” homage, which rode an ingenious marketing campaign and a flamboyant performance from Nicolas Cage to a box office return of over $125 million worldwide, making it the year’s highest grossing independent film.
Last year also solidified the rise of a new generation of auteur horror filmmakers, such as Robert Eggers, whose darkly erotic “Nosferatu” remake earned four Oscar nominations, but in the technical categories of cinematography, costume design, makeup and hairstyling and production design. The director Jane Schoenbrun delivered a genre-blurring art-house hit, “I Saw the TV Glow,” that was as good as any movie that came out last year, and is a perfect example of the kind of original horror that the Oscars habitually ignore. “I Saw the TV Glow” employed Lynchian surrealism to explore gender dysphoria and the film’s preoccupation with the ways pop culture can speak to alienated youth feels profound and essential. Yet as far as the Academy is concerned, “I Saw the TV Glow” wasn’t just unworthy but invisible — an oversight made more notable by the recent death of Ms. Schoenbrun’s professed inspiration, David Lynch.
Thankfully, the genre is thriving globally. The dark Danish period piece “The Girl With the Needle” earned an Oscar nomination for best international feature, the riveting French Canadian thriller “Red Rooms” won critical praise and South Korea’s “Exhuma” became a box office smash. And Ms. Moore’s welcome acting nomination for “The Substance” is an overdue acknowledgment that horror is a genre where many of the most memorable, and memorably unhinged, performances can be found. Along with Ms. Moore, last year brought Mr. Cage in “Longlegs” and Hugh Grant in the sinister hit “Heretic.” But when Ms. Moore and Mr. Grant were nominated for Golden Globes, they were in the musical or comedy categories, the sort of absurd mischaracterization that illustrates how ill-equipped the award season apparatus is to honor worthy work in the horror genre.
In 2018, when “Get Out,” a widely praised horror-satire hybrid, received a best picture nomination and won an Oscar for best original screenplay, it seemed to herald a new era of recognition for horror’s artistry. (Even as some traditionalist Academy voters anonymously whined that it was “not an Oscar film.”) Mr. Peele’s film introduced mainstream audiences to horror’s ability to potently confront pressing issues of race and class. Yet while scary movies have continued to evolve and excel, additional awards recognition has seldom followed. This year’s nominations confirm that the Academy will occasionally recognize those scary movies, such as “Get Out” or “The Substance,” that serve as vehicles for overt social commentary — a stance that’s consistent with the kind of film the Oscars tends to celebrate, but that renders the institution blind to the artistry of other exceptional horror films.
As horror fans — an increasingly expansive and inclusive group — already understand, the thrill of a great scare comes from a deep and primal place. Horror has already staked its claim as the pre-eminent genre of our moment. It’s time for Academy voters to stop covering their eyes.
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