10 Terrifying Horror Movies That Won Oscar10 Terrifying Horror Movies That Won Oscarss

If you visit certain corners of social media every awards season, you’re likely to see people bemoaning the fact that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences usually fails to recognize standout performances in the horror genre. You’re likely to hear people calling for justice for Toni Collette’s performance in “Hereditary,” and Lupita Nyong’o’s work in “Us,” and Florence Pugh’s turn in “Midsommar.” Occasionally, though, a horror movie does break through and manage to pick up some Oscars recognition. After all, in 2018, Guillermo Del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” took home Best Picture. Sure, it’s a love story, but it’s also a modern twist on classic Universal monster movies.

In fact, in that sentence alone, I’m doing the thing that film professor Adam Lowenstein told NPR always happens when horror gets discussed. “There’s often an argument that has to be trotted out that goes something along the lines of, ‘Well, it’s not just a horror film, it’s something else.’ It’s a way of erasing horror as a genre marker and saying this is actually something else,” he said. “It’s something more elevated, it’s something worth your attention as a potential award nominee.”

The films on this list managed to convince Oscar voters that they were worthwhile, even if their genres can also often be classified as “something else” too. These are horror movies through-and-through, and it’s important to acknowledge that just as we recognize these winners that broke the stigma.

Here are 10 terrifying horror movies that won Oscars.

Rob Reiner’s 1990 film “Misery” is one of the best Stephen King adaptations, according to Stephen King himself. Based on his novel of the same name, it tells the story of a writer named Paul Sheldon (James Caan) who’s rescued from a snowy car accident by his number one fan. Her name is Annie Wilkes, and in Kathy Bates’s hands, she’s a cinematic monster for the ages. Keeping Paul bed-bound over the course of many months, Annie forces him to write a sequel to her favorite book series just for her, one that revives her favorite character, Misery Chastain. When Paul starts to recover, Annie will do anything to keep him stationary … including wielding the most terrifying sledgehammer in all of horror.

The Oscars tend to ignore performances in horror movies, but Bates’s turn was undeniable. She won Best Actress in a Leading Role, taking home a golden statue for her deeply-unsettling delivery of iconically-manic lines like, “He didn’t get out of the cock-a-doodie car!” Taking the stage at the ceremony, Bates shouted out her co-star. “I would like to thank Jimmy Caan and apologize publicly for the ankles,” she said, referencing that sledgehammer scene. “And I would like to say that I really am your number one fan, Jimmy.”

For years, Bates regretted her acceptance speech, thinking somehow that she forgot to thank her mother. On “CBS Sunday Morning” in 2024, she learned that she had, indeed, thanked her mom. Bates’s eyes welled up with tears, and she breathed, “Oh, what a relief.”

Before he moved behind the camera, Jordan Peele was best known as one-half of the team behind sketch show “Key & Peele.” Alongside Keegan-Michael Key, Peele crafted some of the best television comedy that decade, and they’re certainly one of the best comedy duos of all time.

With his 2017 film “Get Out,” however, Peele’s career took a turn. The film is about a Black man named Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) who goes to visit the family of his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams). While they seem like well-meaning white people at first — her father (Bradley Whitford) would’ve voted for Obama a third time! – Chris learns that this family has a sinister secret. They’ve developed a method of capturing Black people and stealing their bodies, making them into a vessel for a white person’s consciousness.

The movie is funny, but it’s also terrifying, and Peele’s unique brand of socially-conscious horror won him critical raves and audience applause. He took home an Academy Award, too, winning Best Original Screenplay for the film’s script. In his acceptance speech, Peele confessed, “I stopped writing this movie about 20 times because I thought it was impossible. I thought it wasn’t gonna work. I thought no one would ever make this movie. But I kept coming back to it because I knew if someone let me make this movie, that people would hear it, and people would see it.” He was right, and he made a classic.

When “The Exorcist” was first released, there were stories of people fleeing theaters in droves, getting sick in the aisles, and even reportedly having heart attacks. The movie may not be quite that shocking anymore, but it’s still a terrifying experience with few equals. It’s perhaps the most respected horror film of all time. After all, it’s a timeless story about a young girl named Regan (Linda Blair) whose body begins to change in ways that scare her and her mother. She’s having unfamiliar bodily functions and experimenting with her sexuality, all while learning to push against the boundaries of her home life. These are all natural things for a teenager to experience, but there’s just one problem: There’s a demon making her do it.

William Friedkin’s film was based on a novel by William Peter Blatty, who also wrote the film’s screenplay. It was his first, which makes the fact that he won an Academy Award even more impressive. The film was nominated for 10 Oscars and ultimately took home two, including Best Sound in addition to Blatty’s win for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. In his acceptance speech, Blatty shouted out his parents. “I would like to thank … my late parents who came to this country on a cattle boat and whose love and whose courage have brought me to this moment and to this place,” he said. “You’ve honored them tonight and I thank you very, very much.”

Like Jordan Peele, John Landis was primarily known for comedies in the early part of his career. The man behind hits like “Animal House” and “The Blues Brothers” surprised audiences with “An American Werewolf in London,” a now-classic movie about backpackers in the United Kingdom. David (David Noughton) and Jack (Griffin Dunne) are buddies making their way across England; one misty, moonlit night on the moors, they are attacked by an animal. Before they can escape, Jack is torn to shreds and David’s been wounded, too.

As he recovers, David has terrifying nightmares of running naked in the moonlight. He also sees visions of his dead friend Jack, a ghastly, gory, gruesome apparition who begs David to kill himself before he becomes a wolf. The next time the full moon comes around, however, David does indeed transform, and it’s one of the most grotesque body-horror sequences ever captured on film. Rick Baker’s tremendous special makeup effects turn David’s transformation into a horrific, howling catastrophe of crunching bone, stretching skin, sprouting fur, and cracking knuckles. It all culminates in a disturbing shot where David’s snout and jaw push forward, and then the wolf is ready to go on the hunt.

Baker took home a well-deserved Academy Award for Best Makeup, the film’s only nomination. In his acceptance speech, he noted that this was actually the first Oscar that had ever been given out in the category. He said, “I’m very proud to be the first winner.”

If it’s rare for the Academy Awards to acknowledge leading performances in horror films, it’s even more rare for them to recognize a supporting actor. That’s not the case for “Rosemary’s Baby,” however, the 1968 classic about a woman named Rosemary (Mia Farrow) who realizes she might have been impregnated by a bunch of Satanists who live in her new apartment building. The worst Satanist of all is Minnie Castevet (Ruth Gordon), a sweet-seeming old lady with a secret. Gordon is so good, in fact, that she took home the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

The film wouldn’t work nearly as well without her. It’s a film choked with paranoia, a waking nightmare about a woman who becomes fearful of the support systems she’s supposed to be surrounded by as she prepares to bring life into the world. Even though Rosemary is right, and there’s something very evil happening in that apartment building, the people in her life refuse to help. Minnie’s the worst of the lot — a nice old lady who turns out to be positively demonic — and Gordon brings her to life brilliantly.

As she accepted the award, Gordon acknowledged what it meant to receive recognition so far into her career. “I can’t tell you how encouragin’ a thing like this is. The first film that I was ever in was in 1915 and here we are and it’s 1969,” she said. “Actually, I don’t know why it took me so long.”

A few years after Rick Baker took home the very first Best Makeup Oscar for “An American Werewolf in London,” the Academy awarded another horror film with the same honor. It went to Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis, the artists behind the visual effects in David Cronenberg’s remake of “The Fly.” Unlike “An American Werewolf in London,” where the most show-stopping makeup effects come into play in one explosive sequence, “The Fly” is a film about a slow transformation. That meant many opportunities for Walas and Dupuis to showcase their work, and it paid off.

Jeff Goldblum plays a scientist named Seth Brundle who believes he’s invented teleportation. One machine disassembles molecules, while the other across the room puts them back together. Unfortunately, when he tries to transport himself, a fly gets stuck in the machine, combining Brundle’s DNA with the insect’s. This kicks off a series of twisted mutations: Brundle’s skin becomes mottled, and his teeth become pointy, and his hair falls out and sprouts in new places, and he takes to vomiting up a greenish goop. Drawing inspiration from classic mad-scientist monster movies of the 1950s, “The Fly” is fun, but it’s way more goopy-gory-gross than its inspirations.

When Walas and Dupuis picked up their Oscars, they both praised Goldblum’s willingness and ability to perform this way. “[Thanks to] Mr. Jeff Goldblum for doing such an incredible performance being buried under five pounds of grotesque makeup,” Dupuis said. “Thank you, Jeffrey, for your patience.”

In the wake of “The Exorcist,” a number of religious horror movies hit the box office hard. One of the best is “The Omen,” a film about well-connected political couple Robert & Katherine Thorn (Gregory Peck and Lee Remick). As their son grows up, they realize he seems … different. In fact, he’s not really their son. Unbeknownst to Katherine, their actual son didn’t survive his birth. Instead, Robert agrees to raise an orphan named Damien (Harvey Stephens) as his own, unaware that the boy might just be the spawn of Satan. As his parents become aware that the boy sure seems evil, people around them start to die.

It’s a frightening film featuring some excellent performances and some iconic death scenes, but one of its most memorable aspects is that deeply-unsettling score. In fact, Jerry Goldsmith was a double-nominee at the Academy Awards that year, where his ominous original composition “Ave Satani” was nominated for Best Original Song, but it was the overall score that got him the gold. After thanking director Richard Donner and a number of people involved in recording the score, he offered a beautiful send-off to his wife. “The piper’s dream did come true, dear Carol,” he said. “Thank you.”

Half a century before “An American Werewolf in London,” one of the most frightening on-screen transformations in all of horror came in the 1931 adaptation of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The classic horror novel is about a good-natured scientist who develops an elixir that turns him mad. At night he prowls the streets of London as the animalistic Mr. Hyde. In this adaptation, Fredric March was cast in the dual role. The transformation sequence is still effective, not least because of the “how did they do that?!” factor. March truly seems to transform on camera, his face becoming monstrous right before our very eyes.

To shoot the scene, cinematographer Karl Struss developed a technique that involved applying colored makeup that was only revealed on the black-and-white film when colored filters were placed in front of the lens. It’s a brilliant innovation that earned the film an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography, though Struss lost to the Marlene Dietrich film “Shanghai Express.”

March, however, walked away with the Best Actor win — though he shared it, in a rare ties at the Oscars, with Wallace Beery for “The Champ.” Under the Academy’s rules at the time, Beery was named a co-winner because he’d only gotten one less vote than March. The ceremony wasn’t televised in those days — the television had only been invented a few years earlier, after all — so we’ll have to just imagine how shocking the moment must’ve been in the room.

Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film “Black Swan” is about a ballerina who’s willing to risk it all. Nina (Natalie Portman) is desperate to get the lead role in a production of “Swan Lake,” and as she spirals into a deepening obsession, her reality comes apart at the seams. Nina falls into a mad rivalry with another dancer named Lily (Mila Kunis) and a relationship with her director Thomas (Vincent Cassell), and all the while she comes to believe that she herself is turning into the swan, her body sprouting feathers and her bones becoming brittle and breaking.

It’s a visceral experience, and it all lands thanks to Portman’s bravura performance. She’s a barely-masked live wire of anxiety and anguish, and all we need is a closeup on her terrified face to feel the fear coursing through her veins. It’s a fitting match of performer and material, because Portman herself waited a decade for her “Black Swan” role. Yes, that’s how long it took the movie to get made after Aronofsky first pitched it to her. Like her character, she waited and she trained. 

Though she was up against a field that included heavy-hitters like Annette Bening and Nicole Kidman, Portman walked away from the Academy Awards with a Best Actress statue in hand. Still, she shouted them out in her acceptance speech, gushing, “This is insane and I truly, sincerely wish that the prize tonight was to get to work with my fellow nominees. I’m so in awe of you.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Academy Awards could do a better job of recognizing horror movies, but in 1992 at least, a horror film won the so-called “Big Five” awards. Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence of the Lambs” had an incredible showing at the ceremony, walking away with Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress in a Leading Role, Best Actor in a Leading Role, and the award that was then called “Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published.”

Those are all very well-deserved, because “The Silence of the Lambs” is one of the most unsettling films to ever win an Oscar. The movie tells the story of an FBI student named Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), an incisive young woman who is sent to interview a cannibalistic serial killer named Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins). All the while, she’s working on a series of disappearances, hoping the insights she learns from Hannibal will help lead her to a serial killer named Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine).

“The Silence of the Lambs” belongs in the annals of Oscar history not just because it’s the only horror movie to win the Big Five. Hopkins’ performance is the shortest ever to win Best Actor, having appeared on screen for only about 16 minutes (though not the shortest of all time). Hopkins seemed as surprised as anyone, gushing, “My God. I can’t believe it. This is really unexpected … I am greatly honored and tremendously moved. And I — God bless you all.”