15 Best Horror Movies That Deserved To Win Oscars

Horror movies have notoriously been snubbed by the Academy Awards, even though so many scary movies clearly deserved to win Oscars. This has become especially apparent with the power of hindsight, as years later, many of the actual Oscar winners have mostly been forgotten by viewers while these horror releases have endured through the ages. The sheer terror and emotion on display in horror movies were also ripe territory for fantastic performances that never got the accolades they deserved.

Many of the best horror movies of all time came out of awards season Oscar-less, and even though most viewers would agree they deserved the award, it seemed the Academy thought differently. Even the technical achievements of horror movies rarely got their due, as categories related to makeup, visual effects, and cinematography have been continually passed over in favor of more Oscar-friendly films. While it’s impossible to go back and change the past, all of these horror films deserved Academy Awards.

15 The Birds (1963)

Deserved Best Special Effects

The Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, was widely lauded for revolutionizing horror movies in 1960 with Psycho, but his follow-up film The Birds was just as terrifying. This shocking story saw a wealthy socialite’s small town gradually overtaken by birds as they began to infest and overrun every aspect of her life before swarms of birds attacked to the point that military intervention was required. With impressive special effects and over $200,000 ($2 million in today’s money) spent on mechanical birds (via Collider), this trailblazing and iconic horror still lost out on the Oscar to Cleopatra.

The Academy Award for Special Effects changed its name to Best Special Visual Effects in 1964 and its current name, Best Visual Effects, in 1977.

14 The Babadook (2014)

Deserved Best Original Screenplay

Horror screenplays rarely get their due for their rich psychological resonance and their deep probing into the heart of human anxieties. This was unfortunate because The Babadook highlighted innate issues of depression and grief as the terrifying creature at the heart of this story represented the need to address these problems through acceptance rather than burying negative emotions. While this strong script from the writer and director Jennifer Kent deserved accolades, it was snubbed entirely at the Academy Awards. Instead, the prize went to Birdman, a movie whose themes around acting and the film industry likely connected with Academy voters more.

13 A Quiet Place (2018)

Deserved Best Sound Editing

Despite being a horror entirely based around sound, or the lack thereof, A Quiet Place did not win its nomination for Best Sound Editing at the Academy Awards. Instead, it went to the by-the-numbers music biopicBohemian Rhapsody. However, the way sound was utilized to build suspense and tension in A Quiet Place was truly extraordinary. By taking one of the most innate human senses and exploring the deathly consequences of a baby’s cry or an unintentional shriek, A Quiet Place became truly frightening, as when faced with death, screaming and sound become inevitable.

12 The Witch (2015)

Deserved Best Cinematography

The Academy tends to be extra harsh on horror movies, and only truly astounding releases manage nominations, while far less superior dramas often get a pass. This felt truly for Robert Eggers’ extraordinarily accomplished debut, The Witch, a mature horror that powerfully depicted a Puritan New England family encountering evil forces in a forest during the 1630s. What was most impressive about The Witch was its stunning cinematography from Jarin Blaschke, who perfectly captured the dark tension of its period. While the 2015 winner, The Revenant, also looked astounding, the fact The Witch was not even nominated was a travesty.

11 A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Deserved Best Visual Effects

Few horror movies have endured quite like A Nightmare on Elm Street, a true classic of horror that went on to become one of the biggest slasher franchises of all time. From the creepy characterization of Freddy Krueger to the dark intensity of its dream sequences, A Nightmare on Elm Street broke new ground in horror movies and still lingers in the subconscious of viewers four decades after it was first released. While the award for Best Visual Effects went to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Freddy’s nightmarish intensity surely deserved this accolade.

10 Mandy (2018)

Deserved Best Cinematography

Throughout the 2010s, it felt like Nicolas Cage’s career was far from his acclaimed Oscar win for Leaving Las Vegas in 1995. However, Cage proved his talents once again with an extraordinary performance in the surreal and horrific revenge story Mandy, a film that looked so spectacular it should have taken home an Oscar for Best Cinematography. Unlike the dark, underlit aesthetics of so many horror films, Mandy was bright with color as the true horror of Cage’s character’s grief and pain was brought to the forefront in a fury of emotion and imagery.

9 American Psycho (2000)

Deserved Best Adapted Screenplay

The screenplay for American Psycho was co-written by Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner and perfectly captured the satirical essence of Bret Easton Ellis’s extraordinary novel. As the story of the yuppie serial killer Parick Bateman, Christian Bale perfectly embodied the excesses of 1980s culture and consumerism as he delivered the script’s razor-sharp dialogue with ease while murdering his way through the elite of New York City’s upper echelon. Shockingly, American Psycho was not nominated for any Academy Awards despite enduring for decades as a cult classic.

8 Coraline (2009)

Deserved Best Animated Feature

While kid’s animation and horror movies don’t generally go hand-in-hand, occasionally, a child-friendly horror film breaks through and introduces a whole new generation of viewers to spooky movies. This was certainly the case for the excellent stop-motion adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, a movie that utilized the idea of doppelgängers to showcase the importance of courage and appreciation. While Pixar’s Up would claim the Animation Oscar in 2009, Coraline was a truly spectacular film whose creepy alternative universe deserved far more accolades than it received.

7 Under the Skin (2013)

Deserved Best Original Score

Although Jonathan Glazer’s spectacularly strange sci-fi horror Under the Skin was entirely snubbed by the Academy, it has since built up a reputation as among the most enduring cult classics of the 21st century. With Scarlett Johansson as an otherworldly entity luring rural Scottish men to their own demise, the foreboding nature of Under the Skin worked so well due to the incredible score by Mica Levi. With music tightly woven into its minimalist atmosphere, it was impressive how Under the Skin’s score became part of its very nature and added to the ominous presence of the film.

6 The Thing (1980)

Deserved Best Visual Effects

John Carpenter’s incredible presentation of a shapeshifting alien entity in The Thing was a truly astounding piece of horror filmmaking that was wholly ignored by the Academy. The visual effects in The Thing were a central reason the movie has endured so well over the decades, as this, paired with the paranoid isolation of its Alaskan setting, made for truly nail-biting viewing. While the award understandably went to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, it’s a crying shame that The Thing was at the very least not considered in the nominees alongside Blade Runner and Poltergeist.

5 The Shining (1980)

Shelley Duvall deserved Best Actress

One of the greatest travesties in Hollywood history was the reception to Shelley Duvall’s performance in The Shining. Despite enduring unimaginably difficult onset circumstances that seriously strained her mental health and being controversially nominated for Worst Actress at the Golden Raspberry Awards, Duvall still managed to give a trailblazing performance as Wendy Torrence in The Shining. Duvall perfectly captured the terror and fear of life in the Overlook Hotel and powerfully held her own against the intensity of Jack Nicholson’s murderous performance. While Duvall’s performance may not have been appreciated then, looking back, it’s clear she deserved an Oscar.

In 2022, The Golden Raspberry Committee rescinded Shelley Duvall’s worst actress nomination for The Shining, and the Razzie’s founder, Maureen Murphy, stated (via

Variety

): “
Knowing the backstory and the way that Stanley Kubrick kind of pulverized her, I would take that back
.”

4 Psycho (1960)

Alfred Hitchcock deserved Best Director

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was among the most influential horror movies ever made, as its powerful suspense laid the groundwork for the slasher genre and gave horror movies a real sense of artistry. Hitchcock should have been honored with a Best Director Oscar for this achievement. However, it must be admitted that 1960 was a tough year in terms of competition, and director Billy Wilder’s win for The Apartment remains a worthy accolade. While both movies have truly stood the test of time, when all is said and done, it’s clear that Psycho has had more of a hold on popular culture in the decades since.

3 The Sixth Sense (1999)

Deserved Best Original Screenplay

The Sixth Sense laid the groundwork for writer and director M. Night Shyamalan’s entire career, as its twist ending was so impactful that he would forever be associated with confounding audience expectations. While The Sixth Sense has been primarily remembered for this reason, the truth was it only worked so well because everything that came before it was a masterclass in slow-building tension and impressively mature storytelling. Disappointingly, The Sixth Sense lost out on the Oscar to American Beauty, a film that has aged extraordinarily badly in hindsight.

2 Hereditary (2018)

Toni Collette deserved Best Actress

While Ari Aster’s directional debut, Hereditary, signaled the dawning of a new major voice in horror, this was practically overshadowed by the sheer power and intensity of Toni Collette’s extraordinary performance. As the grieving mother Annie Graham, Collette captured the raw emotion and psychological destruction at the heart of the Graham family’s horrific circumstances. This was truly a tour de force in acting and one of the best performances in modern movie history, and it was a travesty that Collette not only didn’t win the Oscar but was not even nominated for Hereditary.

1 The Shining (1980)

Deserved Best Picture

Although Ordinary People won Best Picture in 1980, two movies deserved it more: Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. In an incredibly competitive year, Kubrick came out on top for proving the artistry of horror films and raising the bar for the entire genre. The Shining was a fundamental release in the quest for horror movies to finally be taken seriously. Without Kubrick’s laying the groundwork with The Shining, horror movies may not have finally gotten their due more than ten years later with the Best Picture win and ceremony sweep of The Silence of the Lambs.

Sources: Collider, Variety