Welcome to Statue Season! Each week leading up to the 98th Academy Awards ceremony, we’ll be checking in on the closest races, the winningest narratives, and the plain old movie magic that will decide who’s taking home the gold on March 15. This week, we’re evaluating the horror genre’s ascendance into awards talks, as it has several films in contention for Oscars this year.
The Silence of the Lambs is remembered now as one of the most dominant Oscar movies of all time—it’s one of only three movies to have swept the big five categories—but its historically impressive evening wasn’t a sure thing. For one, there weren’t as many ceremonies on the awards circuit back in 1991—key precursors like the SAG Awards (recently renamed to the Actor Awards presented by SAG-AFTRA) and the Critics Choice Awards didn’t debut until a few years later. As a result, there wasn’t as much evidence to inform our Oscar predictions back then. But even the data we did have, like the BAFTAs and the Golden Globes, didn’t indicate a sweep was incoming. Major awards on the road to the 1992 Oscars went to Bugsy and The Prince of Tides, other competitors in the Best Picture race, with the former leading the 64th Academy Awards with 10 nominations.
But more importantly, The Silence of the Lambs’ Oscar coronation was completely unprecedented because no horror movie had ever won Best Picture before, let alone swept the top five categories. Other scary films had been nominated for the Oscars’ top prize, like The Exorcist and Alien, but Jonathan Demme’s masterpiece was the first to land it. In doing so, the film opened the door for the horror genre to compete against more traditional dramas for the industry’s biggest award.
Except … that didn’t exactly happen. Spooky flicks still occasionally creep into the Best Picture slate—2017’s Get Out comes to mind—but The Silence of the Lambs is still the only horror film to nab the statuette. Often, the horror-adjacent films that do get nominated are closer to typical prestige fare than a midnight monster movie (think: Guillermo del Toro’s output). And in the other top categories, the genre hasn’t fared much better: Many horror performances that garnered an Oscar push (Hereditary, Pearl, Nope) continued to be ignored by the Academy.
That is, until this year. At the 2026 Oscars, there will be three distinct takes on horror represented in the general field categories. There’s del Toro’s Frankenstein, an offering from an Academy favorite that lands in that more traditional prestige camp. There’s Weapons, a hagsploitation hit that was made by a student of slashers and earned Amy Madigan a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her bewitching transformation into Aunt Gladys. And, of course, there’s Sinners, a pulpy vampire flick that sharpened itself into a cultural phenomenon and received a historic 16 nominations. With a variety of scary films in tow, can this year’s Academy Awards finally resume horror’s coronation that made a false start over 30 years ago?
Let’s begin with the acting categories. Normally, the bloodier and slashier horror roles are DOA with the Academy, but there is an array of horror performances that got nods this year. Sinners earned three acting nominations across three categories: Michael B. Jordan got to portray both monster and man in his dual role that landed him the Best Actor nod, and Delroy Lindo and Wunmi Mosaku both surged late to nab surprise supporting nominations for their scene-stealing presences. Frankenstein’s Jacob Elordi also garnered a Best Supporting Actor nod for his prosthetic-laden yet tender turn as the lumbering science experiment come to life. But holding the best odds of any of them to win an Oscar next month is Madigan, who got Weapons its sole nomination with the most horror-y horror role to break through at this year’s Academy Awards. It’s a big villain performance caked in foundation and lipstick that conjures jump scares from her appearance alone. (You probably saw a couple of Gladyses at Halloween parties a few months ago.) After Demi Moore and The Substance broke through with the Academy last year, I suppose it’s not terribly surprising that Madigan got the recognition. But after a string of significant horror snubs (specifically for performances by women), two totally atypical Oscar roles getting nods in back-to-back years feels like a huge win for the genre. Here’s a reminder of some of those horror performances that earned awards buzz but ultimately failed to turn the Academy’s head:
- Scarlett Johansson, Under the Skin (2013): Johansson took a quick break from Marvel to casually drop a completely haunting performance in Jonathan Glazer’s critical darling. Her awards campaign didn’t go beyond a Gotham nomination.
- Toni Collette, Hereditary (2018): A favorite of critics circles, Collette won a Gotham Award and earned a Critics Choice nomination for her anguished turn as Annie in Ari Aster’s debut. Alas, she didn’t set the Academy on fire with her performance—but she lives on in memes (both yassified and not).
- Lupita Nyong’o, Us (2019): An impressively layered role that, like Jordan’s in Sinners, had Nyong’o playing both villain and victim, but in a subtly nuanced way so that you couldn’t always tell who was who. She got nods from SAG and the CCAs, but that guttural moan didn’t move the Academy. (I’m still mad about this one.)
- Florence Pugh, Midsommar (2019): Going from grief-stricken to disturbingly cathartic, Pugh’s performance covered a wide range of capital-E Emotions, put her on the map, and landed her a Gotham nom. The Academy was unwilling to make the sacrifice to nominate her.
- Elisabeth Moss, The Invisible Man (2020): It seemed like Moss had a good chance of getting into the Best Actress race after the pandemic left a limited pool of films for the Academy to choose from. But even after winning a CCA for her performance, Moss (and the film at large) was completely invisible at the 93rd Oscars.
- Mia Goth, Pearl (2022): Ti West’s X trilogy turned Goth into a certified scream queen, with Pearl in particular serving as her most lauded performance. Many critics circles saw her as a star, and she nabbed an Indie Spirit Award nomination, but she failed to make the leap into the Best Actress Oscar race.
It wouldn’t be totally unheard of for a performance like Madigan’s to win the Oscar—the last horror performance to win Best Supporting Actress was Ruth Gordon’s in Rosemary’s Baby, which feels of a piece with Aunt Gladys. But Weapons and The Substance are genuinely scary films with some nasty body horror that you would not expect from an Oscar movie. That they managed to grab the Academy’s attention in consecutive years feels more indicative of a broader change in taste than just an out-of-the-blue occurrence. But we all know how Moore’s Best Actress campaign ended last year—after tearing through the precursors, she lost at the buzzer to Anora’s Mikey Madison. Madigan is in close competition with One Battle After Another’s Teyana Taylor for Best Supporting Actress in what is turning out to be the Oscars’ tightest race. The pendulum has swung back and forth between them a couple of times, but Taylor is currently the favorite after winning the Golden Globe. But even if Madigan is in for the same fate as Moore, could their nominations in succession signal that the Academy has room for an annual horror acting nom that’s genuinely horrifying?
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As for the other general field categories, Sinners looks like a lock for Best Original Screenplay. In the Best Supporting Actor race, Elordi won the CCA last month, but Sentimental Value’s Stellan Skarsgard remains the favorite—the BAFTAs later this month and the Actor Awards next month will be instructive. And despite Sinners’ record-breaking number of nominations, it’s yet to wrest Best Director and Best Picture from One Battle’s favor. Over the weekend, One Battle director Paul Thomas Anderson won the Directors Guild Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement, basically guaranteeing him an Oscar—the DGA Award–to–Best Director pipeline is one of the most reliable predictors on the awards circuit. And after collecting a handful of Best Picture–equivalent precursors, such as the CCA and the Golden Globe, PTA’s film remains the favorite for the Academy’s top prize. (Though oddsmakers have slightly narrowed the gap between One Battle and Sinners—FanDuel currently has them at –280 and +270, respectively. The latter was at +290 a couple of weeks ago.) With the Producers Guild Awards, a decisive Best Picture precursor, just a few weeks away, time is running out for Sinners to slow down One Battle’s momentum.
So a Silence of the Lambs–style horror sweep is probably not on the horizon for this year’s Oscars. But with a couple ceremonies in a row recognizing horror films that lean a little more schlocky than scholarly, another horror embrace in the future isn’t totally implausible. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Bride of Frankenstein flick, The Bride!, due out next month, is sure to be a big production—and each new detail that’s been revealed about it is more bonkers than the last. (Jake Gyllenhaal is in it playing a meta movie star, and also it’s kind of a musical?) David Lowery’s new psychological thriller, Mother Mary, set for April, isn’t explicitly being marketed as a horror movie, but its séance-filled trailer certainly suggests a spooky vibe. (It’s also part of what’s going to be a banner year for Anne Hathaway—expect her to turn the Academy’s head one way or another next year.) Then, slated for Christmas, Robert Eggers’s Werwulf could be on the Academy’s radar after the director’s last film, Nosferatu, unexpectedly earned four nominations at last year’s Oscars. Jordan Peele is allegedly working on … something, but whatever it is got pulled from Universal’s 2026 release calendar back in September. His films haven’t garnered any Oscar nominations since Get Out, but maybe the Academy’s softening stance on horror could bring him back into the mix.
Regardless, horror’s return to some of the top-line categories feels like part of the Academy’s broadening definition of an Oscar movie. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this spooky renaissance is happening soon after international films started making a serious impact at the Oscars and at the same time that a film like Hamnet, molded from the meatiest piece of ’90s Oscar bait, isn’t having the impact in the Best Picture race that many thought it would. An Oscar-worthy role today doesn’t necessarily mean throwing on a regency gown and calling it a day—body horror special effects are charting a new, bloody path to awards recognition. Which is great! I have one request, though: Can we do this for comedy next?
Stock Watch
To paraphrase one of cinema’s great stockbrokers: Nobody knows if an Oscar stock is going to go up, down, sideways, or in circles. In this section, we’ll evaluate who’s on the up-and-up and whose momentum is sputtering out as the competition across categories heats up.
Stock up: Paul Thomas Anderson continued his dominant awards season run with the DGA’s top prize—it’s looking likely that he’ll win his first Oscar this year. The American Cinematheque in Los Angeles is hosting a Stellan Skarsgard career retrospective series ahead of the Oscars, where he’s predicted to take home his first statuette as well. Only two Best Original Song nominees will be performed at the Academy Awards ceremony—KPop Demon Hunters’ “Golden” and Sinners’ “I Lied to You.” I guess there’s no point in pretending that those aren’t the top two contenders, anyway.
Stock down: Leonardo DiCaprio jetted from the DGA Awards to a Super Bowl pre-party on Saturday—perhaps he’s shifting his attention as his Best Actor campaign flames out? Meanwhile, Sentimental Value’s Renate Reinsve and One Battle’s Sean Penn were the only acting nominees who weren’t present for the Oscar luncheon on Tuesday. Honestly, it’s a long awards season—I don’t blame anyone who’s starting to check out.
