Horror movies have never gotten much love at the Academy Awards. And even when they do get some attention, it’s rarely in the Best Picture category. To date, only nine films in the genre have been nominated for the highly coveted award: The Exorcist, Jaws, The Silence of the Lambs, The Sixth Sense, Black Swan, Get Out, The Substance, the 2025 version of Frankenstein, and Sinners. To make matters worse, just one of those actually went home with the Oscar.
The lone winner in question was The Silence of the Lambs, which pulled off another extremely rare feat at the 1992 Academy Awards: it swept the so-called “Big Five” categories. For the record, that includes Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay. That evening, the Jodie Foster-Anthony Hopkins classic became the third film in history to accomplish that. It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had done so previously (in 1935 and 1976, respectively).
The Oscars Have Snubbed Horror for Decades, but One Movie Broke the Curse
But while the members of the Motion Picture Academy have shown a significant lack of interest in horror over the years, it isn’t the most snubbed genre there is, believe it or not. For instance, no animated or comic book film has ever won Best Picture, though three movies of each kind have received nods. And as far as disaster films go, Titanic remains the single, solitary Best Picture winner. That’s more than we can say for documentaries, which haven’t even been given the opportunity to walk away with the sought-after trophy.
Why Oscars are so elusive for certain genres is unclear. Circling back around to scary movies, it seems like a huge oversight that films like Psycho and The Shining weren’t major winners—in fact, The Shining was nominated for a whopping zero Academy Awards. At the end of the day, very few horror movies have won Oscars since the ceremony began in 1929—some of the more notable examples being Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, and Alien. However, this past year Frankenstein, Sinners, and Weapons were all surprisingly victorious, so maybe things are finally starting to change.
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