And the Oscar Goes to… Anything but Horror! : A Brief History of Terror Cinema and the Academy

Only a liar would deny that Oscar night is the cinematic celebration of the year, a time when millions tune in to revel in movies, the artists who make them, and the celebrities who star in them. Only a fool would believe that Oscar consistently rewards the best of the best. While not nearly as absurd as The Grammys or Emmys, The Oscars has a long-standing tradition of applauding professionally crafted, uninspired films that usually don’t take many artistic chances. There’s an odd middlebrow elitism to the Academy Awards. Terrible performances will warrant statuettes because the actors in question were “brave” enough to portray people with disabilities (Rain Man winner Dustin Hoffman, Scent of a Woman winner Al “Hoo-Ha!” Pacino, Forrest Gump winner Tom Hanks). Terrible movies will warrant them for dealing with such serious topics as suicide (Ordinary People), racism (Driving Miss Daisy, Crash), and disasters (Titanic), albeit in totally superficial and patronizing manners. Meanwhile, a certain genre is generally shunned because it is not what the punter who cried when Tom Cruise said “You complete me” considers to be “Art” with a big, dumb, capital “A”. Obviously, the genre I’m talking about is one of the focuses of this site: horror.

(Mild spoilers in the following paragraph…)

Despite a long history that has produced a parade of classics that all but the most blinkered critics agree are great films—from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Bride of Frankenstein, Psycho to Rosemary’s Baby, Jaws to An American Werewolf in London—horror gets little respect come Academy Awards night. That’s not to say that Oscar has never tossed the creeping skeleton a bone. In fact, this year is one of just eight since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences started handing out its little naked men in 1928 that a horror film has received multiple nominations in non-technical categories. Darren Aronofsky’s daring, messy, mad, and ultimately brilliant Black Swan is up for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress (as well as best cinematography and film editing) awards. In a more just world, Black Swan would sweep (and Mila Kunis wouldn’t have been robbed of a Best Supporting Actress nomination). The film was a rare explosion of imagination in a mostly unremarkable year, and a terrific opportunity to watch a filmmaker take crazy chances, perhaps not always succeeding. I’m still wondering if Portman’s transformation into an actual swan was completely necessary, but I was still impressed that Aronofsky had the guts to toss such a bizarre idea into his film’s climax and risk losing an audience that he’d already asked to go along with some pretty eccentric twists and turns.


It is that riskiness, that audacity, that commitment to an obtuse vision that guarantees Black Swan isn’t going to score a single award this Sunday night. It certainly won’t win the Best Picture or Directorial awards. It’s too “weird.” No, you can count on the Best Picture award going to The King’s Speech, which I have not seen but have it on good authority is perfectly competent and perfectly ordinary, or Facebook: The Movie!, which is almost vengefully unremarkable aside from being browner than a clogged toilet. Why this dreary tale of litigious assholes has received so much drooling praise is utterly beyond me.

Whatever the outcome Sunday night, it is nice to see Oscar give a little due credit to a really well made horror film, as it is not the academy’s inclination to do so. Over the past 82 years, only eight non-technical awards have been presented to actors, actresses, screenwriters, directors, and films trafficking in scares and monsters. Promisingly, the first horror film to receive a nomination won, but tellingly, it won with a catch. Just a few years into Oscar history, Fredric March grabbed the Best Actor award for his astonishing double-duty work in Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1932. This is pretty impressive considering the disdain and outrage that greeted most horror films to date, including the perennials Dracula and Frankenstein. The catch was that March had to share his award with Wallace Beery, who also won for playing a “washed-up boxer” cliché in King Vidor’s The Champ.


Also nominated that year were Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath for adapting Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella and pulling off the significant feat of improving greatly on the source material, which nursed its central metaphor at the expense of fully fleshed characters, relationships, and incidents. A tremendous achievement, their screenplay for Jekyll and Hyde lost to Edwin J. Burke’s for Bad Girl. Don’t worry; I’ve never heard of it either.

‘Bad Girl’ sez: "What am I?"


The mysterious Bad Girl also scored an award for director Frank Borzage in a category that didn’t even acknowledge that Mamoulian’s work on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was groundbreaking on nearly every level, from his use of first person point-of-view shots to establish empathy with the doctor, to his still stunning on-camera transformation trick shots.

During the ‘40s, a couple of nominations were tossed to actors in horroresque roles—Walter Huston for playing Lucifer in The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) and Angela Landsbury for playing a barmaid in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) —but neither resulted in a win. Nor did The Bad Seed, the second horror film to receive multiple nominations. Nancy Kelly and Patty McCormack may have gone home empty handed, but both could rest assured that neither Anastasia (featuring Best Actress winner Ingrid Bergman) nor Written on the Wind (with Best Supporting Actress Dorothy Malone) would ever inspire rabid cult followings or drag-queen homages.

Four years later came the third horror film to receive multiple nominations, and most will agree that the recipient is a cinematic milestone. Alfred Hitchcock was up for Best Director and Janet Leigh was up for Best Supporting Actress for their work on Psycho. Both lost, and as is well known, Hitchcock never won a directing Oscar despite being arguably cinema’s greatest director. At least the award went to a deserving Billy Wilder for The Apartment that year.


Despite its lack of acclaim from the Academy, Psycho played a major part in improving horror/critic relations, and made room for more artistic achievements in the genre. During the ‘60s, human-monster Roman Polanski proved to be one of the most innovative and artful horror filmmakers, creating a tour de force of sexual paranoia with Repulsion in 1965, then doing the same for maternal fears three years later with Rosemary’s Baby, the film that fully made good on the promises mapped out by Psycho. Exceptional direction, acting, and writing convene in a truly great film distinguished by both oppressive terror and deliciously perverse humor largely by way of Ruth Gordon as officious neighbor and fun-loving Satanist, Minnie Castevet. Gordon wrangled the Oscar for her tremendous performance as a woman who never stops being lovable, even after she orchestrates a demonic rape. Polanski, however, failed to win the Best Adapted Screenplay award for which he was nominated and failing to garner a nomination for his directing.

The demon infant of Rosemary’s Baby blossomed into the demonically possessed adolescent that would crack through Oscar’s anti-horror façade more assuredly than any previous contender. The Exorcist only won a single award (a Best Adapted Screenplay statuette for William Peter Blatty), but its level of nominations was unprecedented for a horror film, particularly a full-blooded horror film that doesn’t straddle any lines as stuff like The Bad Seed, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (which scored acting nominations for Bette Davis and Victor Buono in 1962), and Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (featuring 1964 Best Supporting Actress nominee Agnes Moorehead) do. The Exorcist was also up for Best Actress (Ellen Burstyn), Supporting Actress (Linda Blair), Supporting Actor (Jason Miller), and Best Picture; a first for a horror film.


Whether or not there is some connection between the Exorcist phenomenon and the relatively plentiful horror nominations that followed almost immediately (a Best Picture nod for Jaws in 1975; Best Actress and Supporting Actress nods for Carrie’s Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie, respectively, in ’76), that flame burned out quickly. Aside from a Best Actress nomination honoring Sigourney Weaver’s performance in Aliens (1986), horror was relegated to the back of Oscar’s bus for fourteen years. Then in 1990, Kathy Bates became the first actress to win an Oscar for a horror performance when she scored one for playing psychotic Annie Wilkes in Misery. Horror was back on the Oscar map and about to make its greatest splash in the Academy’s fetid pool.

Oscar sweeps are rare. Oscar sweeps by horror films are less common than two-headed calves. However, both happened in 1991 when Silence of the Lambs trounced the competitors, raking in the statuettes with greedy talons. Congratulations, Best Actress Jodie Foster! Congrats to you, too, Best Actor Anthony Hopkins! Way to go, Best Adapted Screenplay writer Ted Tally, and we can’t forget you, Jonathan Demme! You’re the first director to win an Oscar for a horror film, and the horror film for which you won was the first to be named Best Picture!

Creeps and ghouls rejoice, but don’t get too comfortable. Despite a strong start, the ‘90s proved to be an unremarkable decade for horror, overly dominated by mediocre “The Crazy ______” movies (as in: “The Crazy Roommate,” “The Crazy Tenant,” “The Crazy Nanny,” etc.). That also meant Oscar wasn’t going to be knocking on horror’s door again anytime soon. Still, it is not utterly meaningless that Martin Landau was able to nab a well-deserved 1994 Best Supporting Actor award for his miraculous transformation into horror star Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood and Sir Ian McKellen got a nomination for playing legendary horror filmmaker James Whale in the 1998 film Gods and Monsters. Though both actors surely did extraordinary work in both films, one might also view these awards and nominations as belated posthumous tributes to the men portrayed.

If one is still looking for some sort of pattern regarding the Oscars’ uncomfortable relationship with horror at this point, one is probably jerking off into the breeze. Like a derelict dad deciding its time to come home and visit the kids for a spell, horror strolled back onto the Oscar stage in 1999 with The Sixth Sense, another multi-nominated film, yet also the least potent horror film to make its way onto the Academy’s docket yet. A predictable script and way too much pseudo-creepy whispering notwithstanding, The Sixth Sense managed nominations for its director (“emperor’s new clothes” exemplar M. Night Shyamalan), screenplay (Shyamalan again), Supporting Actress (Toni Collette), Supporting Actor (Haley Joel Osment), editor (Andrew Mondshein), and itself (that means it was nominated for Best Picture). It won nothing.

Then the ‘00s, another fairly fallow period for horror as far as the Academy was concerned. It only lowered itself to bestow non-technical nominations on three horrors during the decade: the first for Willem Dafoe, so marvelous as Max Shreck in the ingenious collision of fact and fiction Shadow of the Vampire (2000); the second for Guillermo Del Toro’s sumptuous and profound grim fairy tale Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), nominated for Best Screenplay and Best Foreign Film; the third for Johnny Depp, very good in Tim Burton’s terrific, gruesome musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007).

And now the pendulum shutters back into horror’s Gothic manse once more. Last year Oscar finally acknowledged that horror was worthy of one of its cheesy little tribute montages. That a pair of stars from the juvenile Twilight movies were chosen to introduce the montage, and that the tribute spends so much time humping the legs of celebrities like tabloid-fave Jennifer Aniston rather than presenting a comprehensive, rich overview of the genre, reveals that horror still hasn’t crawled out of Oscar’s fruit cellar of shame.

If Black Swan does win anything this Sunday, it will be joining a most exclusive society of horrific Oscar winners: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Rosemary’s Baby, Misery, and Silence of the Lambs. Feel free to wish it luck, but don’t hold your breath, lest you end up like one of the wan corpses that litter so many films deemed unworthy of the Academy’s chintzy statuette.

Review: ‘The Ghoul’ (1933)

Just two years after scoring a pair of monster smashes with Dracula and Frankenstein, Universal Pictures was already experiencing hard times. The studio all but ceased functioning throughout the first months of 1933, laying off employees and putting contracts on hold (though the studio would get itself together in time to release the summer-season hit Invisible Man). Despite the overseas situation, Gaumont Studios was making Britain’s first significant bid to capitalize on America’s horror fad. The result is a false start; it would take England 25 years to fully establish a unique horror vision and set the genre’s standard for the subsequent decade. Nevertheless, The Ghoul is a good movie, though one that might have been terrific with better orchestrated acting and crisper editing.

Director T. Hayes Hunter follows the Universal format pretty faithfully, using several of the studio’s stars on loan, fashioning a fairly memorable creature in the speechless Frankenstein Monster tradition, appropriating the Egyptian iconography of the previous year’s Mummy, and indulging wholeheartedly in the kind of German-Expressionist shadow play that distinguished all of Universal’s horror efforts to date. Professor Morlant (Boris Karloff) is a dying Egyptologist who insists on being entombed with a rare jewel, the “Eternal Light”. He vows to his servant Laing (Karloff’s recent Old Dark House co-star Ernest Thesiger) that he will return from the dead if anyone swipes the jewel from his dead paw. Naturally, someone does, otherwise there wouldn’t be a movie.


The premise is pretty decent, refurbishing bits of Universal’s past hits, as well as paying homage to classic ghost stories such as “The Golden Arm”. The talky, lumpy script by Frank King, who also wrote the novel and co-wrote the play on which this film was based, is no great shakes. The long stretch between Karloff’s entombment and his inevitable return is bloated with a lot of gabbing from grating characters. A product of the silent era, Hunter apparently had trouble adapting his style to sound film. The actors all bellow their lines as if they’re playing to the balcony.

The director’s way with a camera, however, is beyond reproach; his work is more inventive, fluid, and purposefully gloomy than that of Browning in Dracula or Whale in Frankenstein. His use of dancing shadows and bold framing is remarkable. His experiments with darkness are audacious, even if they’re not always completely successful: some images are so black it’s impossible to figure out what’s happening on screen.

There are also some nice, signature touches scattered throughout that puff life into even the saggiest passages, such as Harold Huth preparing himself an absinthe cocktail, the way the bursting of roasting chestnuts creates a bit of tension in an otherwise innocuous scene, and an effectively gruesome self-mutilation late in the picture. Karloff is underused, but Thesiger does an admirable job of picking up the slack with his typical impudence and wholly unconvincing Scottish brogue. It’s always fun to see him working with Karloff regardless of the quantity or quality of their screen time together. The Ghoul also deserves props for being one of the few films with the guts to explore the S&M possibilities of coffee making.

Richard Matheson On Screen: 10 Essential Works

Throughout 20th century horror’s Pre-K era (i.e.: pre-King), Richard Matheson dominated. Matheson is a tough, clean writer who has composed some of our most unforgettable works of terror and imagination. Without the ornateness of plot and/or language that distinguished his major horror peers—Poe and Lovecraft, Bradbury and King—Matheson writes tales with the punchy immediacy of campfire ghost stories. A scant phrase can instantly conjure one of the many indelible images he created: a man shrinks toward oblivion, a gremlin terrorizes a man from the wing of a plane, a murderous fetish doll stalks a woman through her apartment, a monstrous big-rig hunts a motorist, the last man on Earth fights to survive a plague of vampires.

Matheson’s lean, pointed stories were absolutely ripe for adaptation. His short stories resulted in several of the most beloved episodes of “Twilight Zone”, although oddly enough, there has never been a truly great version of what may be his definitive work, the apocalyptic vampire novel I Am Legend. Be that as it may, there are still plenty of wonderful examples of Matheson on-screen. Here are ten essentials.

(For the purposes of this article, I steered away from Matheson's adaptations of other writers' work, but his scripts for Poe's Fall of the House of Usher and Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out are pretty essential viewing, too)

1. The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

20 Things You May Not Have Known About Lon Chaney, Jr.

Born 105 years ago today, Lon Chaney, Jr., was the last of Universal Studios’ great monster stars, succeeding his frequent co-stars Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff and completing horror’s holy trinity when he first played Larry Talbot the Wolf Man in 1941. Along with the film for which he was most famous, Chaney acted in nearly 200 other film and television roles. That alone is the stuff of an eventful life. Here are twenty trivia tidbits that may give you an even greater appreciation for and understanding of one of monsterdom’s great icons. So sit back, sniff a sprig of wolfsbane, and dig 20 Things You May Not Have Known About Lon Chaney, Jr.!

1. On February 10, 1906, Creighton “Lon” Chaney was born to mother, Frances Cleveland Creighton Chaney, and father, Lon “Man of 1,000 Faces” Chaney, while his performing parents were on tour in Oklahoma City. Born prematurely, Junior was not breathing upon his entry into the world and the doctor declared him stillborn. His father rushed him out into the frigid environment, kicked through the surface of an iced-over lake, and plunged his infant son into the water. According to this tale—tall or not—the cold shock started the boy breathing.

Review: The Criterion edition of 'The Night of the Hunter'

In 1955, actor Charles Laughton directed his first and final film and Robert Mitchum embodied one of the cinema’s most relentless, frightening, and oddly humorous bogeymen. Mitchum is Harry Powell, a psychotic Big Bad Wolf in preacher’s clothing on the hunt for a pair of children who know the location of a cache of cash (and how relevant is that theme of a predatory priest today, kids?).

Farewell, Tura Satana

Russ Meyer often gets a bad rap for his famously boob-centric body of work, but it's tough to not recognize that his masterpiece Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! featured a trio of female characters completely unlike any the cinema had yet to see. Sure, there's no shortage of cleavage, but the film's three stars were groundbreakingly powerful in a way that no non-50 foot woman had been before. Lori Williams may have gotten all the best lines as the eternally wisecracking Billie, but it was Tura Satana's iconic performance as the psychopathic, mighty Varla that commandeered the film.


Sadly, Satana died yesterday of heart failure (her age has been reported as 72 or 75). Born in Hokkaido, Japan, Satana (born Tura Luna Pascual Yamaguchi) was the daughter of a silent film actor. She fought her way through some extremely difficult early years to achieve cult stardom as Varla in 1965. In 2008, she told Entertainment Weekly of her most famous role:

"A woman, like my character, was able to show the male species that we’re not helpless and not entirely dependent on them. People picked up on the fact that women could be gorgeous and sexy and still kick ass."

Hear, hear!

As well as Pussycat, Satana appeared in a less prominent role in the more prestigious (though, let's face it, not nearly as good) Billy Wilder film Irma La Douce (1963), the horror flick Astro Zombies (1968), and Rob Zombies's cartoon The Haunted World of El Superbeasto (2009) in which she revisited Varla.

And come to think of it, Billie had the bulk of the film's great lines, but Satana did, indeed, have the best one.

Sundazed reissues The Pretty Things' 'S.F. Sorrow' on clear green vinyl

Getting in on the recent upsurge in Pretty Things product, Sundazed Records is issuing their landmark 1968 rock opera S.F. Sorrow on clear green vinyl. This limited edition will also feature the original U.K. sleeve art.



Visit Sundazed.com to order the L.P., view a neat slide-show of the record-pressing process, and stream samples of the marvelous music contained on Psychobabble's bid for the '60s' greatest album by a band that never caught on in the states.

Review: 'Danse Macabre' (aka: 'Castle of Blood')

Beloved it may be, but Italian horror cinema of the ‘60s is something of an acquired taste. More deliberately paced than Val Lewton’s decidedly deliberate films of the ‘40s, sometimes impenetrably dark, and tossed off-kilter by that weird method of dubbing all films regardless of language, Italian horror films often require multiple viewings to truly seep into the consciousness. Does that mean I should wait until a second viewing to offer an opinion of Antonio Margheriti’s 1964 film Danse Macabre (aka: Castle of Blood)? Perhaps, but that’s not going to stop me.