Horror at the Oscars (Part Four)

 

Oscar-Worthy Horror: Every Single Horror Film to Win (& Be Nominated for) Academy Awards

 

Part Four: Genre Diversification

 

I wasn’t sure what to call this fourth part at first, but looking at the next two decades, it’s really a trip through nominations for all kinds of different types of horror films, and a few wins for films that are fantasy or psychological thrillers at their core, with dressings of horror elements.

Three films from the first year of the 21^st century were nominated. Requiem for a Dream (2000) was nominated for Best Actress for Ellen Burstyn—her second nomination for a horror movie, after The Exorcist—and if someone says this movie isn’t a horror movie, I seriously question whether or not they’ve even seen it. Like The Exorcist, this one really messed me up, and unlike The Exorcist, I haven’t been able to watch it again. Nominated the same year was Shadow of the Vampire (2000). In my review I said it is equal parts horror movie remake, original horror movie, and biographical drama, but with it being about the making of the original Nosferatu, one of the most famous silent horror movies, it certainly has a place here. It was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Willem Dafoe, playing Max Schreck (in turn “playing” Count Orlok) and Best Makeup, primarily because of the makeup for Dafoe.

Hollow Man (2000) was nominated for Best Visual Effects. I didn’t previously mention any nominations for films from director Paul Verhoeven, such as Robocop, Total Recall, and Starship Troopers, because they are not really horror, nor do they contain enough elements on the whole to qualify as horror movie nominations, adjacent or otherwise, but all three of those aforementioned movies certainly have scenes that would fit a broad definition of horror, whether it’s a guy melting from radioactive waste, or giant alien bugs tearing through soldiers, or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s eyes bulging out of his head. Hollow Man, though, was Verhoeven’s first true horror flick, which is pretty much just a riff on The Invisible Man, but done with flashy CGI effects. You can already see even with these first three nominations for the 2000s that the genre lines are going to get blurred.

The Village (2004) was nominated for Best Original Score for James Newton Howard, and an M. Night Shyamalan movie has not been nominated for another Academy Award since…Do I really think that’s indicative of the quality of his films since The Village? Honestly, not really. I think Split deserved a Best Actor nomination for James McAvoy, but the Academy isn’t really a Shyamalan fan anymore. I’m glad that hasn’t stopped the guy from making movies, though. He still has his fans, his movies can still make money, so who really cares what the Academy thinks anymore? For the record, I think James Newton Howard is a great composer, and the music is probably the aspect I like the most about The Village.

War of the Worlds (2005) is classified as sci-fi, action, and thriller. It is definitely all of those things, but it is also very close to the realm of horror, just as the original novel and all other adaptations have been. This is the second War of the Worlds film to be nominated for visual effects, as well as the first time since Jurassic Park that Steven Spielberg has popped back up. It was also nominated for Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing, but lost all three to a juggernaut of a monster movie, that also happened to be a remake. King Kong (2005) was Peter Jackson’s love letter to the 1933 original, and just like the ’76 version, won more awards than the original—which is to say, it didn’t get completely snubbed. Kong ‘05 was also nominated for Best Art Direction, and to date, this version is the one with the most awards. Unlike the ’76 film, I think it deserved them all.  

The next few years saw more horror-adjacent movies get awards attention, and two of them were animated. Monster House (2006) and Coraline (2009) were both nominated for Best Animated Feature—and both are horror for kids, really, but Coraline is genuinely dark and unsettling. While I’m on the topic, I suppose I should acknowledge a parody of classic horror (namely the Hammer films of the 1950s) which also won the award: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005). With animation having evolved significantly since the 1990s and reaching out to more mature audiences beyond the typical family fare Disney made to set the standard of animated expectations, it’s interesting to see movies like this brought up in the conversation, given they had been completely absent in decades prior.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) is considered a dark fantasy film, but it was Guillermo del Toro’s breakthrough for Oscar-worthy filmmaking. Having started out in horror, he was nominated for Best Original Screenplay, and the film also got noms for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Score for Javier Navarrete. It won Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Makeup. Pan’s Labyrinth characterizes the state of horror at this point: the true, pure horror movies were not of exceptional quality on the whole; only films belonging to other genres using elements of horror got noticed come awards season.

The last award I’ll cover in this part is one of those token trophies usually given to someone who has been snubbed for many years, but in this case I think it was actually fitting and respectful. The Academy Honorary Award in 2009 went to Roger Corman, “For his rich engendering of films and filmmakers.” I don’t think Corman ever really made a movie worthy of winning any Oscars, but he was never trying to. He knew how to make the kind of movie that was going to get butts in seats and give those audiences as much entertainment as possible for as little cost as possible. He was a pioneer of low-budget filmmaking, of B-movies, and he shepherded very talented individuals to highly lucrative careers—in fact, Oscar winners like actors Jack Nicholson and Robert de Niro, or directors like Francis Ford Coppola and James Cameron, got their start thanks to Corman. One final note: Corman gave director Jonathan Demme his start in filmmaking, so Demme repaid his mentor by giving him a cameo in a little film he made that went on to be the only horror movie to win Best Picture. Next time you watch The Silence of the Lambs, keep your eye out for Corman’s cameo!  

In the final installment of this series, we will see a resurgence in the horror genre, and with it, a greater number of true horror films nominated, with some surprise winners along the way.