Devil’s in the detail: Why is the film industry still so afraid of horror?

When it comes to scary movies, that thing that goes bump in the night is unlikely to be called Oscar, says Annabel Nugent. The disdain surrounding horror is such that even directors working in the genre reach for a prefix or two to muddy the waters

Shivers down your spine: (clockwise, from left) ‘The Exorcist’, ‘Us’, ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ and ‘The Silence Of The Lambs’ (Moviestore/Universal/Shutterstock)

There’s a horror film renaissance happening. Psychodramas on trauma, haunting commentaries on social issues, and new takes on the genre’s gothic roots are starting to change the landscape of a category critics have long turned their noses up at.

Year on year, despite horror being responsible for some of the highest-grossing films, it’s the biopics, war films and dramas that carry clout come awards season. This year’s Oscar nominations snubbed Jordan Peele’s pitch-black comedy Us. As a middle-class mother and her disturbed doppelgänger, Lupita Nyongo’o gave two of the best performances last year in one film – but she was overlooked for Best Actress, and the film didn’t get a look in for Best Picture either.

The Oscars’ dysfunctional relationship with horror is nothing new; ever since James Whale’s 1935 monster movie Bride of Frankenstein, seminal films have been continually passed over in the big categories.

Alfred Hitchcock broke the mould with Psycho. The epochal slasher was nominated for Best Director in 1960, marking the director’s fifth and final nomination in that category. Despite multiple nods, the anointed “master of suspense” did not win a single Academy Award in his lifetime. Rebecca (1940) was the only one of his 52 movies that took home Best Film, and that was claimed by the movie’s producer David O Zelznick instead.

Years later, Roman Polanski’s adaptation of the Ira Levin novel Rosemary’s Baby was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay but didn’t win. While it was a landmark nod for the underrated genre, film critics were quick to caveat their praise with a dismissal of horror, summoning as many multi-hyphen terms as needed to avoid it. Penelope Gilliat, film critic for The New Yorker, described it as a “gynaecological gothic”, while Charles Chaplin of the Los Angeles Times, said it was “too well done” to be a horror movie. Even in a 2018 retrospective of the film, Variety’s chief film critic Owen Glieberman wrote: “It doesn’t play like a horror film … Rosemary’s Baby is its own unique category of Goth new-Hollywood metropolis banality-of-evil nightmare.”

Glieberman’s comment that “it’s a more powerful film the more you get away from characterising it in a genre” does ring true – although probably not in the way he intended. Horror has long been thought of as a second-rate category – code for cheap and formulaic – so it makes sense that the more hyphens a movie maker can put between their work and “horror”, the better position it will be in for critical recognition.

After Polanski’s nomination, it was another 45 years before a horror movie was first nominated for the holy grail of Oscars: Best Picture. Although William Blatty’s The Exorcist (1974) didn’t win the coveted title, it did take home two awards – but only by hoodwinking the Academy. Steering clear of the H-word, Blatty called his work “a supernatural detective story”, and the film’s director described it as a “mystery of faith”. Linda Blair, the movie’s star, put the final nail in the thematic coffin when she declared, “Anybody who thinks this is a horror movie is wrong.”

But if The Exorcist – a film about a possessed child that traumatised audiences – isn’t a horror movie, then what is?

The following year, Steven Spielberg’s thrilling shark attack film Jaws was the second horror film (depending on how hard and fast your definition of horror is) to be nominated for Best Picture. It won three of its four categories, but lost Best Picture to Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

In 1992, The Silence of the Lambs became the first, and to this day only, horror movie to win Best Picture. Jonathan Demme’s horror-thriller, starring Jodie Foster as a young FBI cadet caught up with Anthony Hopkins’s cannibalistic psychologist, cleaned up at the ceremony. Again, though, be sure to read the fine print. Ted Tally, who picked up Best Adapted Screenplay, rejected the film’s classification as horror, favouring “detective movie” or “thriller” instead.

Nitpicking the iotas that make a film horror, thriller or even “gynaecological gothic” may be much of a muchness, but the ousting of horror does a disservice to its massive cultural impact. Reducing horror to escapism and jump-scares ignores its ability to explore politics and social issues, and its capacity to wrestle with psychology – and win.

On why we crave horror movies, Stephen King wrote that his ideas are born from the nightmares “that hide just beyond the doorway that separates the conscious from the unconscious”. The King of Horror’s observation is almost Freudian. The tropes of horror – the serial killer, the monster, the ghoul, the possessed child, et al – are moments in which the suppressed surfaces, threatening to puncture our realities with their unreality. The catharsis after watching a horror film is universal; they offer psychic relief in just two hours, and for a lot less money than a therapy session.

Even “trashy” horror, like Paranormal Activity and the never-ending Saw franchise, plays its part in King’s cultural function: “It is morbidity unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realised.” M Night Shymalan’s iconic twist in The Sixth Sense, the third horror film to be nominated for Best Picture, illustrates exactly this piercing of symbolic boundaries.

Modern cinema has managed to find a loophole in the genre problem with the term “elevated horror”. The prefix has been bestowed on recent critically acclaimed films like It Follows, Hereditary, Midsommar and The Witch, but the new-fangled sub-genre serves only to reinforce the very denigration it’s seeking to fight.

Social thriller is another. Jordan Peele used the term to describe his film Get Out, the fifth and most recent horror film to be feted with a Best Picture nomination. The biting horror-satire earned him a place in history when he became the first black man to win Best Original Screenplay in 2018.

The film somehow landed in the comedy and musical category when it was nominated for a Golden Globe in the same year. When presenting Peele with an award, screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher said that Get Out is as much a horror film as Jaws is a “beach movie”. But surely some black humour does not cancel out Get Out’s abundance of horror archetypes; body snatching, jump scares and gore.

“Social thriller” has been attributed to scary films that focus on issues of race, class, gender, sexuality or nationhood – basically everything a good horror movie does anyway (read Candyman and Dracula), rendering both it and its counterpart “elevated horror” null and void.

The same year as Peele’s nomination, The Shape of Water won Best Picture, and yet its origins in horror were brushed under the carpet by everyone but the director himself (the film is more commonly regarded as a drama sci-fi). When Guillermo del Toro accepted Best Director at the Golden Globes, his speech embraced horror with open arms as he spoke about his lifelong fascination with monsters.

From The Shape of Water to Us, modern cinema continues to prove horror’s ability to cross categories and explore social issues on par with the best dramas. But in 91 years of annual ceremonies, The Silence of the Lambs remains the only horror film to ever win the Academy Award for Best Picture – and of the handful that managed a nomination, zero were directed by women. Notably, Mary Harron’s acerbic adaptation of Brent Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, and Jennifer Kent’s 2014 psychological horror on childhood grief, The Babadook, were both snubbed despite earning critical applause.

Hope is not lost though; the development of horror at the helm of directors like Peele, Ari Aster, and Jennifer Kent is likely to make it difficult for critics to sideline the genre for much longer. And if all it takes for horror films to get the acclaim they deserve is a nonsensical prefix, then “elevated” may be precisely the four syllables needed to change the game.

Suffice to say, horror has come a long way from the likes of the fedora-wearing, claw-gloved Freddy Kruger.