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Considerations
Covering the annual film industry awards races, with sharp commentary on the pictures, the players, the money and the spectacle. by Tyler Coates
Considering the Horrific Possibilities of this Year’s Oscars
Demi Moore in The Substance Every Tuesday Tyler Coates publishes his new Filmmaker newsletter, Considerations, devoted to the awards race. To receive it early and in your in-box, subscribe here.
If there’s one topic more troubling to me than catfiegory fraud — something we’ll get into in a future newsletter, I guarantee — it’s the notion of celebrating Halloween in November. But since Halloween falls on a Thursday this year, I’m afraid I’ll lose this battle; it’s looking like we’ll have two consecutive Halloween weekends this year and there’s nothing I can do about it but throw a side-eye to my friends’ upcoming Instagram posts.
But since this newsletter hits inboxes on Tuesday, October 29 and will be on the Filmmaker site on Friday, November 1, I figured I might as well take advantage of this extended spooky season and dive right into how the Academy has embraced — or, really, avoided — the horror genre.
Understandably, people are squeamish about horror. Some people simply hate being frightened (my partner, who counts Halloween as one of his favorite movies, has all but avoided seeing scary movies in theaters over the last decade because he can’t stand to be jumpy around strangers) or just can’t sit with blood and gore (my mom asked if she could handle The Substance, I told her no).
I suppose there’s also the sense that horror isn’t artful. It’s cheap! It’s vulgar! Which sometimes can be true (I don’t see Terrifier 3 being embraced by voters this season despite its surprise box-office success), but the Academy has a history of honoring the craft of creating monsters. For example, Alien won best visual effects, while An American Werewolf in London and The Fly both won best makeup.
But it’s not like the Academy has shut horror out of the big categories: The Silence of the Lambs swept in 1992, taking best director, actor, actress and adapted screenplay, and most people consider it to be the only horror movie to win best picture. Which, of course, makes the definitions of the genre subjective. The best picture-winning The Shape of Water is by all accounts a monster movie, but falling in love with a humanoid fishman is less scary than a parasocial relationship with an actual human cannibal. Jaws is frightening, but I think of it more as a summertime thriller than a true horror movie despite its jump scares. Black Swan is also frequently counted as one of the six horror movies to be nominated for best picture (a number that leaves out The Shape of Water, but also includes The Exorcist, The Sixth Sense and Get Out), but I also think that distinction is a stretch. Then again, Can You Ever Forgive Me? personally terrified me as a writer about to enter middle age, so to each their own.
When it comes to campaigning, however, using the slippery definition of “horror” bodes well for awards strategists — particularly those handling MUBI’s The Substance, which could be a major awards player despite its body horror and buckets (and buckets and buckets) of blood.
First of all, the movie has done a lot of that work already: Writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s wild and audacious horror satire made a big splash at Cannes, winning Fargeat the best screenplay prize. Stars Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, who will be submitted as lead and supporting actresses, respectively, have also hit red carpets and late-night TV in promotion of the film and will continue to campaign over the next few weeks. (Supporting actor Dennis Quaid may have been relieved of his promotional duties now that he’s stumping for Donald Trump, an entirely different form of horror campaigning.) A hit with critics (a 91% Rotten Tomatoes score) and audiences (it’s already grossed nearly $40 million worldwide against its $17.5 million budget, and it received a surprising B-rating from Cinemascore polling), it’s poised to be a sleeper hit — the kind of left-field contender that stands apart from the typical prestige Oscar bait, of which there are many this season.
And then there are the Golden Globes. Normally I would not put much stock in the much-maligned awards show that is still attempting to rebuild its standing years after scandals plagued the now-disbanded Hollywood Foreign Press Association; while it’s the first televised awards show of the season and tees up the starry spectacles leading up to the Oscars, there’s no voter overlap between the Globes and the Academy. But The Substance’s submission into the musical or comedy categories — where it will compete against musicals Emilia Pérez and Wicked and comedies like Anora, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, A Real Pain and Thelma, and also Challengers, bizarrely submitted as a comedy rather than a drama — is a strategic move that could help its Oscar chances.
There’s precedence in horror films running as comedies: In 2018, Get Out earned a best picture and best actor nom in the comedy categories; it would go on to earn four Oscar noms and won Jordan Peele best original screenplay. Did focusing on the film’s satire rather than its horror elements boost its chances? I can’t make that call. It won’t hurt The Substance’s screenplay campaign to hone in on what the film has to say rather than the way it says it — and Hollywood does like to poke fun at itself in an effort to display some humility.
The comedy designation no doubt raises the chances for Demi Moore’s presumptive Golden Globe nom, which feels like a lock (the Globes expanded its number of nominees to six per category last year). But being one of 12 nominated actresses across two categories at the Globes is a lot easier to manage than being one of five Oscar nominees for best actress. The script’s sharpness works in her favor, however: that Moore’s role in The Substance is so metatextual solidifies her place as a hard-working and beloved industry veteran who is overdue for her flowers. And Moore’s star power — and some of the best reviews of her career —may encourage more people to see the film.
Moore’s distinction as a never-been-nominated veteran actress making her grand return to film prominence in a wacky, off-kilter genre feature could also follow the trajectory of Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis to their respective Oscar wins in 2023. Yeoh was considered a frontrunner (against Tár’s Cate Blanchett, who already had two Oscars) at the onset of the season; and clinched the Globe for best actress, musical/comedy. Curtis, however, gained momentum after the Globes, where she lost to Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s Angela Bassett, only to leave the Dolby Theatre months later with a statue in tow. Not bad for two A-listers who got their start not in arthouse features but in genre groundbreakers.
The Substance isn’t the only scary or unsettling movie in the mix this season; Netflix’s The Piano Lesson veers into the supernatural, and Searchlight’s Nightbitch also presents discomforting imagery of the female body. And then there’s Focus Features’ Nosferatu, written and directed by Robert Eggers who, for better or worse, is the filmmaker most emblematic of the “elevated horror” label. That film starts screening in November, and it could be a major crafts contender à la Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s footsteps as a major crafts contender (the 1992 adaptation scored three Oscars for its costumes, sound editing and makeup). Four-time nominee Willem Dafoe might possibly break through as a supporting actor contender, too; coincidentally, one of those noms was for playing Max Shreck in Shadow of the Vampire, a fictionalized behind-the-scenes look at F. W. Murnau’s classic Nosferatu in which the actor who first played Count Orlok is actually an undead bloodsucker. (Keep that fact in your pocket for your post-screening reception banter.)
