Editorials
100 Years in Horror: Snubbed by Oscars
Tired of your favorite horror movies being denied Oscar nominations year after year? Sick of the genre being derided as inferior to “important” films like stuffy costume dramas and overblown, melodramatic weep-fests? Then check out B-D contributor Chris Eggertsen’s list of some of the greatest horror films through the years that did not receive proper recognition from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, in this fourth entry in the “100 Years in Horror” series. From the early talkies to the 21st century, the Academy has a long history of turning up their noses at quality horror films simply because they’re…well, horror films, and it’s high time they were brought to account for their ignorance. Read inside to check out the full list.
With those statistics in mind, I’m taking a look back at some of the biggest (“major” category) genre snubs in Oscar history, in Part Four of B-D’s “100 Years in Horror” series. To qualify, the films needed to meet the following criteria:
1) They must have received a significant amount of critical praise in their day;
2) They must have been high-profile and performed at least moderately at the box-office;
3) They must be generally accepted as classics (or at least near-classics) by modern-day film critics.
The reasoning behind these criteria is to illustrate the point that, had films of this level of artistic quality, critical admiration, and healthy box-office been a part of nearly any other genre (with the exceptions of sci-fi and, to a lesser extent, comedy), chances are much, much better that they would have garnered more recognition at the Oscars. Keep in mind that this is not a list of the best horror films ever made (although they are some of the best, as generally accepted by the greater film community), but rather the horror films that were passed over for inferior non-genre pictures that just happened to line up better with Academy voters’ largely conservative tastes.
Pretty much the original horror classic to be wholeheartedly snubbed at the Oscars – and a sad omen of things to come – James Whale’s Frankenstein failed to score a single Academy Award nomination, despite enjoying rave reviews and huge box-office at the time of its release. It was an injustice all the more egregious given that there were a total of eight films nominated for Best Picture that year, and that none of those – including big winner Grand Hotel – enjoy the same level of modern-day artistic credibility as Frankenstein. Sadly, the one category where Frankenstein would’ve virtually been assured a nomination – “Best Makeup” – didn’t even exist yet; if it had, Jack Pierce would have surely been recognized for his extraordinary work creating the Monster. Or would he?
Though producer David O. Selznick lobbied the Academy to give out a special award to Willis O’Brien for his then-groundbreaking stop-motion effects, he didn’t get his wish (the “Best Special Effects” category wouldn’t come to fruition until 1939). This meant that King Kong, generally regarded as one of the greatest horror (and adventure) films of all time, and the best “giant monster” film ever made, failed to receive any nominations at that year’s Academy Awards – though when you look at the field of sub-par Best Picture nominees, it certainly merited a slot. Those nominees included such minor, largely forgotten efforts as romantic drama Smilin’ Through; period piece The Private Life of Henry VIII, and stuffy “class” drama Cavalcade (which ended up winning the award).
Unlike its predecessor, Bride of Frankenstein did actually receive an Academy Award nomination…for Best Sound (it lost). But when you consider the film’s classic status, and the fact that it is generally regarded even more highly than the first film, its snubs in all the major categories seems downright shameful. Adding insult to injury, the field of Best Picture nominees was expanded to twelve films that year – yes, twelve – meaning it was crowded out of its rightful slot by such head-scratching choices as comedy-western Ruggles of Red Gap, glossy musical Broadway Melody of 1936, and musical romance Naughty Marietta. Needless to say, none of those films can hold a candle to Whale’s masterpiece.
The first of influential producer/screenwriter Val Lewton’s string of low-key horror classics (though it was directed by Jacques Tourneur, Lewton had a heavy hand in every production he oversaw), Cat People is also regarded by many as his best. Predictably, the subtle, intelligent film went right over the heads of the Academy’s voting members, who failed to recognize the film in any categories. At the very least it deserved nominations in some of the technical fields, most especially for its gorgeous black-and-white cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca – but its status as a “B-picture” (it was produced for around $140,000) likely hurt its chances with the spectacle-loving Academy, who chose to recognize films like WWII propaganda piece Wake Island instead. Yeah, I’d never heard of it either.
Not only is 1956’s Don Siegel-directed Invasion of the Body Snatchers generally considered the greatest of the four (so far) adaptations of the Jack Finney book, it’s also regularly cited as one of the greatest horror (and sci-fi) films ever made. And yet it received not a single Academy Award nomination, in an embarrassing year that saw the bloated, star-studded Around the World in 80 Days go home with the Best Picture statuette. Body Snatchers at least warranted a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay…but then it was just a horror film. One can only wonder whether the Academy was simply too moronic to recognize how intelligent the film was…though the more likely scenario is that they were too afraid of backlash for rewarding a film with such strong anti-McCarthyism themes.
Alfred Hitchock’s horror masterpiece was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Supporting Actress (Janet Leigh), but the fact remains that it was completely robbed of a Best Picture nomination, in a field of five nominees that included dry literary adaptation Sons and Lovers; overblown John Wayne historical epic The Alamo; and a film adaptation of the novel Elmer Gantry starring Burt Lancaster. The conservative Academy likely saw the film as too edgy and violent to merit a Best Picture nod, with their nomination of Hitchcock for Best Director (which he lost) functioning as something of a consolation prize. It was an early example of a tactic the Academy still uses today when faced with a film that doesn’t fit the normal Oscar mold – give the director a nod so they don’t look totally out of it, but ignore the film in the Best Picture category.
This 1963 adaptation of the brilliant 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson had all the trappings of an Oscar-worthy film – an esteemed literary source, an Oscar-winning director (Robert Wise), an artistic sense of restraint – except for that whole horror thing. And so it goes that possibly the greatest haunted house film ever made garnered not a single Oscar nomination – not for Wise’s elegant direction; not for Julie Harris’ disturbing turn; not for Claire Bloom’s seductive performance; not even for those spine-tingling, expertly calculated sound effects. Nope, not for any of it. Instead, the Academy chose to reward the distended mess that was Cleopatra (a film that practically bankrupted Twentieth Century Fox) with nine nominations, including Best Picture of the year. For shame!
Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby seemed to straddle the line between the old Hollywood films of the previous generation and the new auteur-driven cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s; shot in elegant strokes, it also boasted genuinely disturbing elements that were decidedly not of the old-school variety (think the startling, dreamlike scene where a drugged Rosemary is raped by the Devil). In the Academy’s eyes it probably erred too much on the side of the latter sensibility, for while Polanski was nominated for best Adapted Screenplay and Ruth Gordon won an Oscar for her supporting performance as nosy, Satan-worshipping neighbor Minnie Castevet, as a film it apparently it skewed too close to the generational borderline to be considered for Best Picture, or even Director. But it should have been nominated in at least one of those categories – especially when you consider that over-praised musical Oliver! was the film that went home with the big prize that year.
Artistic filmmaking, critical acclaim, big box-office, intelligent scripts – so what was the problem with Ridley Scott’s Alien and George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead that both films were shut out of every major category? Sure, Alien was justifiably nominated for Art Direction (it lost) and Best Visual Effects (it won), but Alien wasn’t just a great-looking film, it was a great film, period. So was Romero’s sequel, which unlike its predecessor broke out of the midnight-movie circuit on its release to become a genuine mainstream success. Leave it to the shortsighted, eternally cautious Academy members to find themselves unable to look past both films’ grislier qualities and see the true masterpieces they had before them. Sure, tearjerking Best Picture winner Kramer vs. Kramer was a very good movie, but is it really better than either of these films? Has it been inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” (as Alien has)? Is it half as memorable as Dawn‘s potent brew of black comedy, social critique, and visceral horror? I think not – on both counts.
The Fly, a remake of the rather cheesy 1958 Vincent Price film, probably didn’t sound like a shoo-in for Oscar contention in its development stages, but director David Cronenberg managed to transform the original story into an emotionally poignant, genuinely disturbing film featuring top-notch performances from stars Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. Similarly, James Cameron’s Aliens, a sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror/sci-fi classic, surpassed expectations by also becoming one of the year’s most critically acclaimed films, with some even calling it superior to its predecessor. Ironically though, while both films’ grisly effects would win awards at that year’s Oscars – Aliens in the “Visual Effects” category and The Fly in “Best Makeup” – they are also what probably kept them from achieving nominations in any of the major categories, save for Sigourney Weaver’s shocking (given that she received it for a blockbuster action/sci-fi/horror film) but well-deserved Best Actress nod. The fact is that both films proved major critical successes and box-office hits, and yet the Academy was clearly unwilling to look past their gruesome surface aesthetics.
Apparently AMPAS felt they’d fulfilled their serial killer-movie quota four years earlier by showering The Silence of the Lambs with Oscar gold, seeing as Seven was snubbed in all the major categories despite New Line’s re-release of the film right around Christmas 1995 to give it an awards-season push. While Richard Francis Bruce was rightly nominated for Best Film Editing (he lost), none of the actors – not even Academy favorite Morgan Freeman (who perhaps would have been nominated for his performance had the film itself been a tad less grim, i.e. more to the Academy’s liking) – received any recognition. Nor did Fincher, who’d managed the impressive feat of winning over critics and audiences after helming the rather poorly-received, studio-butchered Alien 3 three years earlier. Instead, the Academy chose to shine a spotlight on more predictable fare like Ron Howard’s feel-good Apollo 13 and Ang Lee’s glossy adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. The fact that Seven was an even darker film than The Silence of the Lambs, though, is what really killed its Oscar chances.
After winning across-the-board raves for his previous film Trainspotting, director Danny Boyle must have surprised many in the stuffier contingent when his next project turned out to be (gasp!) a horror movie. In a year in which the highly overrated musical Chicago took home Best Picture, it’s practically a crime that Danny Boyle’s instant classic 28 Days Later wasn’t nominated for a single Oscar, given that the film had more depth, nuance and genuine human feeling in a frame of film than Rob Marshall’s movie had in its entire running time. At the very least, it deserved nominations in technical categories such as Best Sound Editing/Mixing, Cinematography (Boyle and director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle made stunning use of their digital camera), or its amazing and heartrending score. But no matter; whereas a film like Chicago has probably already slipped the minds of most cinema-lovers, the stature of 28 Days Later has continued to grow in the intervening years.
In conclusion, I’d like to address a couple of things that I feel might come up in the comments (just thinking ahead):
1) Dawn of the Dead is generally cited as a 1978 film, but it was not actually released in the U.S. until April 1979. Therefore, it would have qualified for the Oscars in 1980, the same year as Alien.
2) Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining might seem like a glaring omission, and I originally planned on including it before realizing it was, in fact, not a big critical success on its initial release.
3) I left foreign horror films off the list because they do not generally enjoy the same level of cache with Academy members as American-made movies.
All of that being said, if you feel I left a film off the list that genuinely merited a spot – or if you think one of the films here does not qualify for whatever reason – by all means, call me out.
In a world where over-polished corporate products dominate the media landscape while the ever-growing threat of AI-generated “art” haunts the horizon, I can’t help but remember a story about how Wes Anderson insisted on using real fur on the stop-motion puppets of his animated opus, Fantastic Mr. Fox. When the animators complained that using fur would result in obvious thumbprints and erratic hair movement that would ruin the “illusion” of lifelike movement, the filmmaker explained that these imperfections were the point.
Why am I bringing this up on a horror website? Well, I’ve always been of the opinion that low production value is simply part of the appeal of independent cinema, and nowhere is this more evident than in the horror genre. Rubber monster suits and watery blood effects are a big part of what make even the cheapest scary movies so endearing, and horror fans are uniquely predisposed to look beyond technical limitations in order to appreciate a good story.
One of my favorite examples of this is a certain micro-budget duology that kicked off one of the scariest film series of all time despite some undeniably janky presentation. And as a lifelong fan of low-budget scares, I’d like to invite you to join me down a J-Horror rabbit hole as we explore the criminally underrated origins of the Ju-On/The Grudge franchise.
While most of you are likely already familiar with 2002’s Ju-On: The Grudge, the film that helped to kick off the J-Horror craze and established Takashi Shimizu as a master of the craft, a lot of folks don’t realize that this was actually the filmmaker’s third attempt at telling the Saeki family story. In fact, the very first appearance of Kayako and her ghostly son occurred in a couple of 1998 short films made by Shimizu while he was still in film school.
Part of a made-for-TV anthology showcasing the work of up-and-coming Japanese filmmakers (Gakkô no Kaidan G), the shorts attempted to update classic Japanese folk tales for a new generation by incorporating modern elements like helpless high-schoolers and cellphones into old-fashioned ghost stories.
The original Toshio!
Despite some cheap camerawork and drama class make-up effects, Shimizu’s Katasumi and 4444444444 (so titled because the Japanese pronunciation of the number 4 is similar to that of death) were the clear highlights of the spooky collection despite being much shorter than the other segments. That’s why it was only natural that the director’s next project would be a feature-length expansion of these ideas produced for the direct-to-video market.
Coming up with an extensive mythology surrounding his murderous ghosts and realizing that he had a potential hit on his hands, Shimizu ended up making the risky decision to split his original two-hour story into two smaller films shot back-to-back. And while the sequel would suffer from this decision, the focus on serialized storytelling is what would ultimately turn this indie experiment into a global phenomenon.
Released in 2000, the first entry in this duology, simply titled Ju-On: The Curse, weaves an interconnected web of paranormal incidents surrounding a cursed house and the ill-fated families that inhabit it. While the film would actually reference the events of Shimizu’s shorts, it’s here that audiences were first introduced to the iconic opening text explaining how a violent death may spawn an infectious curse that self-perpetuates by causing even more deaths in a never-ending cycle of violence.
At first glance, The Curse feels a lot like an anthology meant to repurpose Shimizu’s existing ideas for ghostly short films into a feature format, but narrative details eventually add up as worried teachers, unsuspecting teenagers and psychic realtors unravel bits and pieces of the Saeki family history in a tragic tapestry of death. Curiously, this attempt at crafting a complex narrative puzzle would become a staple of the franchise as future entries (and even the video game) used non-linear storytelling to breathe new life into familiar yarns.
Of course, it’s really the scares that put this franchise on the map, and that’s why you’ll find plenty of expertly orchestrated frights here. Sure, the pale makeup effects and stock sound design aren’t that much better than what we saw in Gakkô no Kaidan G, but the suspenseful execution of moments like Toshio’s slow undead reveal and Kayako’s first contortionist crawl down the stairs – not to mention the incredibly disturbing sequence with a baby inside of a trash bag – are the stuff of horror legend regardless of budget.
I’d even argue that the low production value actually adds to the experience by making everything feel that much more down to earth. The Saeki house isn’t a stylish haunted manor from the Vincent Price era, it’s just a regular Japanese home inhabited by regular people, making it easier to believe that this modern urban legend could also happen to you. Hell, I even think Toshio is scarier when he can pass as a living kid even if the screaming cat effects aren’t as good as the sequels.
Cheap can still be scary.
Unfortunately, quality scares can’t solve everything, and that’s where Ju-On: The Curse 2 comes in. Released the same year as its predecessor, this bizarre sequel only features about 45 minutes of new footage, with the rest being recycled segments from the first film meant to pad out the runtime. While this is a surprisingly dishonest move on Shimizu’s part, with the decision likely resulting in confused viewers thinking that there was something wrong with their rented videotapes, it’s still pretty hard to call this a bad movie.
That’s why I’ve come to respect the flick as a rare instance of a cinematic expansion pack, as the first film didn’t really need to be any longer, but the new segments still do a great job of adding to the existing mythology. This time around, we learn that you don’t even have to come into direct contact with the haunted house in order to be affected by the curse, with characters only tangentially connected to the Saeki tragedy still meeting terrible fates.
That final shot featuring multiple Kayakos is also one of the most incredibly chilling moments in the entire franchise, with the amount of care put into these scenes suggesting that this was probably all meant to have been included in the first film before Shimizu decided otherwise. Either way, I’d still recommend watching this one immediately after Part I in a condensed double-feature – so long as you skip the first thirty minutes.
Despite their humble origins, these low-budget scare-fests would go on to inspire a ghostly media empire, with Shimizu eventually being given the chance to bring his creations to the big screen with one of the best J-Horror flicks of all time. And while I won’t argue that these direct-to-video precursors are necessarily better than 2002’s Ju-On: The Grudge (or even the American duology which was also helmed by Shimizu), I still think that something special was lost each time the series was tasked with pleasing a wider audience, as the story slowly became glossier and less real.
That’s why I’d urge hardcore horror fans to seek out Shimizu’s early experiments, as his creative fingerprints are the duct-tape that keeps this janky collection of horrific vignettes together. It may not always be pretty, but I’ll take the grimy actors caked in cheap blood and white clown makeup over corporate-approved movie monsters any day of the week.
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