Are the Oscars too afraid to recognise the horror genre?

As The Substance’ becomes the first body horror to be nominated for Best Picture, Kevin EG Perry looks back at the Academy’s long-running fear of awarding scary movies

- Kevin EG Perry

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 bloodspattered 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