The 2025 awards season paid some long overdue attention to some of the best horror films of the last year.
“The Substance” racked up nominations among several awards bodies, including the Academy Awards, where it was recognized in the Best Picture and Best Actress categories. Its star, Demi Moore, won a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award, among other accolades. The film only took home Best Makeup and Hairstyling at Sunday’s Oscars ceremony, but there were several fans of the film rooting for Moore to take home the statuette for leading actress.
But perhaps Moore’s loss to Mikey Madison of “Anora” shouldn’t have surprised anyone who knows about the history of the Oscars. Since the birth of the Academy Awards nearly 100 years ago, the voting members have always treated genre films with disdain. The term “genre film” is used by critics and academics to describe films that exist in categories that have often been dismissed as lowbrow art. Horror, sci-fi and action movies all fit in the category.
Only seven horror films have been nominated for Best Picture, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Out of those movies, “The Exorcist” and “Get Out” are the only two that I’d classify as horror, and they both lost the prize to their respective nominees. The other four films (“Jaws,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” “The Sixth Sense” and “Black Swan”) all use horror tropes, but even the most squeamish cinephile might be able to view these films without covering their eyes.
“The Silence of the Lambs” became the first genre film to win Best Picture in 1992, but since then, it has felt like the Academy has relegated genre films to their ignored corner of the industry once more.
While genre films aren’t entirely ignored at various awards shows, they are often forced into the confines of technical awards and almost always miss out in the Acting, Screenplay and Picture categories. However, this year’s awards season saw a small shift, with awards campaigns for “The Substance,” “A Different Man” and “Nosferatu” suggesting that committees may be looking at these films differently. These three films have had major success in critics’ circles like the Gotham Awards, the Critics Choice Awards and the Dorian Awards. Now, they are rising to a spot that many genre films of the past have been unable to reach.
Awards voters love a timely film, and all three of these movies check that box. “The Substance,” a body horror that lays Hollywood’s treatment of older female actors bare, pokes and prods at its audiences. Moore’s stellar performance makes the film, and her comeback story in Hollywood had audiences rooting for her throughout awards season.
“The Substance” is undeniably the weirdest and most violent of the aforementioned films, which at their core are quite digestible. Though the story itself is easy for audiences to understand, the film slowly unravels into a smattering of bodies and fluids, creating some of the most disturbing images in film this decade.
Sebastian Stan won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy for his role in “A Different Man,” a film that would work as a great double feature with “The Substance.” “A Different Man” focuses on an aspiring actor who undergoes a medical procedure to drastically change his appearance. At the heart of both of these films is a story that audiences — and awards voters — can relate to: the feeling of being alienated in one’s body. While these films may be anything but traditional, beneath the gore and frantically kinetic performances are two characters who feel more human than other films that did well with awards voters this year.
“Nosferatu” is quite different from these other films, but the horror has an undeniably talented crafts team behind it. It secured its nomination in four separate categories at the Academy Awards: Best Production Design, Best Cinematography, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, and Best Costume Design. Yes, genre films tend to do better in these categories, but that’s three more nominations than Eggers’ last horror-thriller “The Lighthouse” managed to nab in 2020.
“Nosferatu” also managed to knock out front-runners “Nickel Boys” and “Conclave” for a Best Cinematography nomination. It’s shocking to see, but also well deserved, as the film’s use of lighting and compositions of vast landscapes triumph over many of its other aspects.
Enjoy HuffPost Entertainment — Ad Free
Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.
Judging from this year’s Oscar nominations, the academy’s voting body seemed to be embracing cinema that is weirder and more grotesque — finally catching up to what audiences have long embraced. With acknowledgment of these three films, awards season shaped up to be one of the more interesting in recent years for horror fans — not just because of these nominations, but also for what they could mean for the future.
While Moore didn’t go home with the Oscar, her nomination and those nods for “The Substance,” “Nosferatu” and “A Different Man” feel like some form of retribution for the years that horror films went overlooked at these ceremonies.
And frankly, it’s about time that tide changes.