10 Horror Films That Actually Won Oscars
Who says the Academy doesn't like a jump-scare?
Since the first Academy Awards in 1929, horror and the Oscars have made for strange bedfellows, which perhaps accounts for the number of smaller ceremonies that recognize talent within the genre.
It’s there of course, but you wouldn’t know it from a casual perusal of the list of Oscar winners over the decades. The awards given out to scare pictures mostly honour technical achievements and even then only in “safe” studio movies. In nearly ninety years, only one horror movie has won Best Picture (more on that later).
The Academy’s judgment has sometimes come back to haunted its members, such as when Emil Jannings won Best Actor in 1929. The only German to have won the accolade, Janning’s heavy accent meant that the coming of sound effectively destroyed his career in Hollywood and sent him back to his native land, where he earned a crust by appearing in Nazi propaganda films.
As Hollywood gears up for its 89th Academy Awards, nominations for horror filmmakers are as sparse as ever, with not even Train To Busan being honored in the Foreign Film category. Here, then, are ten reminders of when horror did matter to the Academy, and while it’s good to see the films honored for their contribution, note how few of them proved to be controversial choices.
10. An American Werewolf In London
Won: Best Makeup
One of the first films to prove that a horror movie could have a sharp sense of humour and deliver a few shocks, John Landis' An American Werewolf In London works on so many levels that several contemporary critics were wondering if the film had a split personality.
The Chicago Reader called it “a lot of dissociated segments left hanging in midair” while Roger Ebert complained that “Landis never seems sure whether he’s making a comedy or a horror film….the laughs and the blood coexist very uneasily.”
Neither credited Rick Baker with creating some of the best transformation sequences ever put on celluloid, nor did they credit him with making werewolves scary again after all those old Hammer and Universal movies. If the movie has a hero then Baker is it, and his Oscar was richly deserved.