It’s long been held that horror movies have no place at the Academy Awards, but if you look at the history of the ceremony, it’s riddled with nominations and wins for the often maligned genre. Often, these accolades are limited to below-the-line aspects of the production, like makeup effects, musical score and visual effects, but every once in a while a horror or horror-themed movie came along that was so good it wound up in the upper echelons of the Oscars. Let’s take a look at those luminaries, the Top Ten Award-Winning Scary Movies.
Top 10 Award-Winning Scary Movies
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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (dir. Rouben Mamoulian,1931)
Best Actor, Fredric March
The Oscars invited the horror genre in with open arms in 1932, when the Academy awarded their Best Actor honor (tied with Wallace Beery for his performance in The Champ) to Fredric March for his portrayal of Robert Louis Stevenson’s iconic monster, who transformed from a proper English gentleman into an amoral sociopath. Fredric March went on to earn a second Academy Award for the decidedly less frightening post-World War II drama, The Best Years of Our Lives.
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The Old Mill (1937)
Walt Disney produced this experimental short film about wild animals attempting to survive the night in a battered old building during a terrifying thunderstorm, that earned the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1937. The Old Mill was a testing ground for new animation techniques, like multiplane cameras, the depiction of realistic weather and rotating three-dimensional objects in two-dimensional space, all of which would prove to be important elements of Disney’s future feature-length films.
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Rebecca (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)
Best Picture
Best Cinematography (Black & White), George Barnes
Alfred Hitchcock’s first American picture was also the only one of the maestro’s films to earn the Academy Award for Best Picture. An adaptation of a gothic romance by Daphne du Maurier (whose works also inspired the classic horror films The Birds and Don’t Look Now), the film stars Joan Fontaine as a woman haunted by the memory, and possibly the actual ghost, of her husband’s first wife.
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Gaslight (dir. George Cukor, 1944)
Best Actress, Ingrid Bergman
Best Art Direction (Black & White), Cedric Gibbons, William Ferrari, Paul Huldschinsky, Edwin B. Willis
Ingrid Bergman took home her first Academy Award for Gaslight, a shocking murder mystery about a young woman who fears for her sanity after moving back into the house where her aunt was murdered. What secrets does her new husband, played by Charles Boyer, hide? You’ll have to watch the film to find out, but know going in that the spooky thriller also won the Academy Award for Best Art Direction for its atmospheric sets.
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Black Orpheus (dir. Marcel Camus, 1959)
Best Foreign Language Film
This Brazilian adaptation of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice embraces the vibrant color of its then-modern setting to tell the story of a young ladies man who falls for a woman who believes that someone, dressed as Death himself, is trying to kill her. Are they reliving the fantasy or are they merely trapped in a romantic tragedy that parallels the myth to frightening degrees? Marcel Camus’s film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film revealing the answer.
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The Virgin Spring (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1960)
Best Foreign Language Film
Ingmar Bergman won his first Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film with The Virgin Spring, a disturbing revenge tale about a married couple who discover that their new lodgers raped and murdered their only daughter. The film’s questions about conventional morality made it very controversial in its day, but Wes Craven’s significantly less subtle 1972 remake, The Last House on the Left, probably remains more shocking to modern audiences. But that didn’t win an Academy Award now, did it?
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The Exorcist (dir. William Friedken, 1973)
Best Adapted Screenplay, William Peter Blatty
Best Sound Mixing, Robert Knudson and Christopher Newman
Although William Friedkin’s classic horror movie The Exorcist was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress and Best Supporting Actor, it only walked away with two, for Best Sound Mixing and Best Adapted Screenplay, accepted by William Peter Blatty, who also wrote the original novel (and who eventually wrote and directed The Exorcist III). Although, as we’ve seen, The Exorcist was far from the first horror movie to be honored by the Academy, this frightening tale of a single mother whose daughter may be possessed by the devil was the first straight-up horror movie to be nominated en masse, and remains one of the most popular scary movies ever made.
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Misery (dir. Rob Reiner, 1990)
Best Actress, Kathy Bates
Rob Reiner’s second Stephen King adaptation, Misery, chucks Stand By Me’s nostalgia out the window to tell a claustrophobic horror story of a successful writer, played by James Caan, bed-ridden and at the mercy of his biggest fan, played by Kathy Bates. Her discomforting adoration turns to horrifying torture once she discovers that he’s killed off her favorite character, “Misery Chastain,” and tortures him until he pens her resurrection. Bates won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal as the outwardly meek, secretly homicidal fangirl who these days would probably have been satisfied with online fan-fiction, but in 1990 was at the mercy of her favorite author’s whims.
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The Silence of the Lambs (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1991)
Best Picture
Best Director, Jonathan Demme
Best Actor, Anthony Hopkins
Best Actress, Jodie Foster
Best Adapted Screenplay, Ted Tally
The Silence of the Lambs didn’t just win five Academy Awards, it won the five Academy Awards, for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Screenplay (Adapted). Only two other films have pulled that off in the history of the ceremony: Frank Capra’s 1934 screwball comedy It Happened One Night and Milos Forman’s 1975 mental institution drama One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel finds FBI agent-in-training Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) seeking the assistance of an institutionalized cannibal psychiatrist (Sir Anthony Hopkins), to catch a serial killer who skins his female victims. Though Jonathan Demme’s film works as a high-functioning thriller, the real meat of the story is the film’s depiction of realistic women victimized by, and most importantly overcoming, traditional gender roles.
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Black Swan (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2010)
Natalie Portman won her Academy Award for Best Actress by starring in Darren Aronofsky’s psychological horror story Black Swan, about a ballet ingénue who loses her mind under the pressure of headlining a new production of “Swan Lake.” As her mind starts to go, so too does any semblance of reality, as the horrors she witnesses – including transforming into a bird-like creature and violent interludes with her seeming competitors – come to terrifying life, symbolizing the inner struggles with her own self-worth and confused sexuality.
