Why Are the Oscars Scared of Horror Films?

Opinion|The Movies the Oscars Are Too Scared to Celebrate

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.