The Only Actors To Win Oscars For Horror Movie Performances

At the 82nd annual Golden Globes held on January 5, Demi Moore, who has been working steadily in Hollywood for decades, won her first ever competitive acting award thanks to Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror hit “The Substance.” 

Moore beat out some stiff competition to win Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy award, including Cynthia Erivo in “Wicked: Part One” and Mikey Madison in “Anora,” and her powerful speech about how women in the entertainment industry are constantly trying to measure up to a truly impossible standard was nothing if not deeply inspiring. Despite apparently being told that she would never be anything more than a “popcorn actress” by some foolish studio executive, Moore proudly stood on stage at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles, telling women all over the world, “In those moments when we don’t think we’re smart enough or pretty enough or skinny enough or successful enough or basically just not enough — I had a woman say to me, ‘Just know, you will never be enough, but you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick.'”

This is all to say that, thanks to her absolutely incredible performance as fading star Elizabeth Sparkle in “The Substance” and her galvanizing awards speech, Moore has a very real shot of earning an Academy Award nomination for her role. If she does, it would mean that the star of a horror movie could score this prestigious acting accolade, defying the Academy’s long-standing bias against horror. In recent years, incredible performances from Toni Collette in “Hereditary,” Lupita Nyong’o in “Us,” and Florence Pugh in “Midsommar” have all been completely snubbed.

If Moore does go on to win an Oscar for “The Substance,” she’d join a very small group of performers who won their statuettes for horror films. Here are the only six actors that have ever pulled off this very specific feat.

The Academy Awards held their first ceremony in 1929, and just a handful of years after that, the first-ever actor to win for a role in a horror movie took home an award. Specifically, Frederic March, a wildly versatile performer known for his roles in “A Star is Born” (the 1937 version alongside Janet Gaynor) and “Death of a Salesman” in 1951. Before either of those projects, though, March won his first of two Oscars for his lead role in 1931’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” a classic horror film directed by Rouben Mamoulian. (Technically, March tied for the Oscar with Wallace Beery, who appeared in “The Champ,” which is definitely a relic of the time.) 

If you’re a horror fan, you’re probably at least a little bit familiar with the tale of the mild-mannered Dr. Henry Jekyll, who works in Victorian England and strongly believes in the dichotomy between good and evil — and who also creates a terrifying potion that turns him into the vile, evil Mr. Edward Hyde. As Hyde, the good doctor commits all manner of awful, horrifying deeds … and there’s no question that March, who embodies both Jekyll and Hyde perfectly in the film, deserved an Oscar — for a horror movie, no less! — within the very first decade of the award ceremony’s existence.

Based on Ira Levin’s 1967 novel of the same name, “Rosemary’s Baby” — directed by the now-disgraced Roman Polanski — is undoubtedly one of the best and most important horror movies ever made, and it also features one of the only horror movie performances to ever win an Oscar. Mia Farrow famously stars as Rosemary Woodhouse, who moves into a luxury apartment building in Manhattan with her husband Guy (John Cassavetes) and finds herself surrounded by a cabal of people who seem very interested in Guy and Rosemary’s lives. That cabal includes husband and wife Roman and Minnie Castevet, played by Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon, who give Rosemary both a necklace meant to act as a talisman and some clearly drugged chocolate pudding that ends up allowing the coven to impregnate Rosemary with the devil’s child. 

Gordon is unbelievably creepy as Ruth, who hovers around Rosemary and pretends to be a maternal companion until her real, sinister game is revealed. Even though Roman ostensibly runs the coven, Minnie is the one who controls Roman and thus controls absolutely everything in the overall narrative. Gordon absolutely deserved this Oscar.

Kathy Bates is one of the most well-regarded actors in all of Hollywood, and there’s no denying that her role as Annie Wilkes — a deranged, obsessive fan of author Paul Sheldon (James Caan) — made sure that everybody knew exactly how good she is at her job. Rob Reiner and William Goldman, who previously worked together as director and screenwriter on “The Princess Bride” (a very different movie, to be sure), adapted Stephen King’s beloved 1987 novel of the same name to great effect, and the movie wouldn’t succeed if the performer playing Annie wasn’t top-notch. Thankfully, Bates is.

We first meet Annie after Paul, who’s traveling through hazardous weather from Colorado to New York City after working on his latest book — he’s known for a series of romance novels centering around a character named Misery Chastain — ends up crashing his car. Annie, who’s a nurse, takes him in and promises she’ll help him get better soon. Unfortunately for Paul, Annie reads his latest Misery Chastain manuscript and realizes he’s killing the character off in hopes of transitioning to more “serious” work. Outraged, she holds him prisoner and forces him to revive the character and write a new book. Bates’ performance as Annie is genuinely the stuff of legend, making it relatively unsurprising that she won an Oscar for the role — even though it was in a horror movie.

Anthony Hopkins pulled off a total upset in 2021 when he won an Oscar for his role as an aging man suffering from cognitive issues in “The Father,” but that wasn’t his first Academy Award. He won that award for a much more offbeat role. In Jonathan Demme’s 1991 horror masterpiece “The Silence of the Lambs,” Hopkins plays psychiatrist turned serial killer (and cannibal) Hannibal Lecter, who agrees to sit down with FBI agent-in-training Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster, and we’ll return to her in just a moment) to discuss the new serial killer on the block. The new guy, Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb, is based on Ed Gein, and if you’re at all familiar with Gein, you’ll know just how depraved Buffalo Bill is even if you somehow haven’t seen this movie.

Hopkins is undeniably brilliant as Hannibal, a calm, cool, and collected man who’s able to read Clarice like a book. After another inmate attacks her during her prison visit, Hannibal becomes strangely protective of Clarice, and even confides in her after he manages to escape incarceration. Hopkins went on to play Hannibal again in 2001’s “Hannibal” and 2002’s “Red Dragon” — which, along with “The Silence of the Lambs,” were based on Thomas Harris’ novels — but he only won the Oscar for “The Silence of the Lambs,” and it’s easy to understand why.

Anthony Hopkins is undoubtedly great in “The Silence of the Lambs,” but he’s lucky to have a pretty phenomenal scene partner in Jodie Foster, who took home the award for Best Actress the same night that Hopkins won Best Actor. I already explained that Clarice begins the movie by sitting down with Hannibal Lecter while he’s in prison to try to get some insight into the mind of a killer, and even though a lot of viewers might associate the film with Hopkins and Hopkins alone, the guy only appears on screen in Jonathan Demme’s movie for about sixteen minutes. This is truly Foster’s movie.

Foster has been acting since she was three years old — making her debut in a wholesome Coppertone ad — and with “The Silence of the Lambs,” she cemented her place in Hollywood history and ensured that nobody would ever doubt her immense talent. As Clarice, Foster serves as the audience surrogate and the story’s hero, ultimately finding and bringing down Buffalo Bill, and even saving his latest victim in the process. Foster actually won a Golden Globe for “True Detective: Night Country” on the same night that Demi Moore took home her award, proving that the actress is as well-regarded as ever. Perhaps Moore will join Foster in the exclusive club of actors who won Oscars for horror movies.

The most recent horror performance to win an Oscar is also one of the most unsettling — and if I’m being honest, Natalie Portman’s stunning turn in the 2014 film “Black Swan” paved the way for roles like Elizabeth Sparkle in “The Substance.” In Darren Aronofsky’s deeply disturbing ballet thriller, Portman plays Nina Sayers, a prima ballerina desperate to play the dual lead role in the New York City Ballet’s latest production of “Swan Lake.” Unfortunately, the company’s artistic director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) doesn’t think she can pull it off. As he tells Nina, she’s perfectly capable of dancing Odette, the gentle, graceful White Swan, but he doesn’t think she has the darkness required to play Odile, the devious and cunning Black Swan.

Nina throws herself into training like a madwoman — spurred on by her ambitious stage mother Erica (Barbara Hershey) — but when new dancer Lily (Mila Kunis) joins the company and Thomas immediately praises Lily’s uninhibited style of performing, it puts Nina on edge. She starts experiencing frightening visions and hallucinations, especially after a wild night out with Lily. In case you haven’t seen “Black Swan’s” surreal ending, I won’t spoil it here. Suffice to say that Portman, a Hollywood veteran, absolutely deserved an Academy Award for her gripping performance.