Editorials
[Editorial] A History of Horror at the Academy Awards
Being a fan of horror movies can be a remarkably thankless experience. Many people misunderstand or even actively dislike our appreciation of the darker side of film, with some simply considering the genre to be intrinsically inferior based on a few bad experiences. However, one of the least pleasant aspects of being a horror enthusiast is dealing with the inevitable snubbing of our favorite scary movies year after year when awards season comes around.
That’s not to say that we (or filmmakers) need validation from mainstream festivals and golden statuettes in order to respect the horror genre, but the yearly snubbing of amazing horror films is doing a disservice to the careers of the artists that make the genre worth watching in the first place. Some less-informed critics might argue that the reason horror movies remain absent from the spotlight is that ‘modern horror’ isn’t as good as it used to be, but anyone who’s kept up with the genre in the last few decades knows that these critics just haven’t been watching the right movies.
From the amazing performances in Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects to the flawless cinematography of David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, you’ll have a hard time finding a single year without at least one Oscar-worthy horror film that didn’t get the recognition it deserved. There was, in fact, a time when the genre was more present at the most prestigious of awards ceremonies, even if most of the nominations were relegated to minor technical awards.
That’s why I’ve compiled this history of Horror at the Academy Awards, in an attempt to recall a time when Hollywood took our favorite genre a little more seriously. While there are a great many films from several genres that regularly get snubbed at the Oscars, there’s a certain stigma attached to the more gruesome productions out there, one that both audiences and critics might benefit from getting rid of.
At this point, it’s common knowledge that only two “pure” horror films have ever been nominated for a Best Picture award: William Friedkin’s The Exorcist and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs. Only the latter managed to actually nab the illusive statuette (not to mention the Best Actor, Actress, Director and Adapted Screenplay awards on that same evening), but the nominations alone were enough to attest to the seriousness of these films. While these run-ins with the Academy can be considered some of the genre’s crowning achievements, they’re far from the first time horror has left its mark on the event.
A face that only the Academy could love.
As far back as 1932, when the awards were still a private ceremony, Rouben Mamoulian’s adaptation of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde was already an Academy favorite, accumulating nominations for Best Cinematography, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor in a Leading Role. While Mamoulian’s film only managed to win in that last category (and even then, tied with Kidor’s The Champ), it’s still largely considered to be the first horror film to garner mainstream attention during the awards season.
Sadly, the Motion Picture Production Code would soon deliver a serious blow to the horror genre, as the censors would routinely butcher scary movies in order to make them more palpable for Christian audiences, often with disastrous results. James Whale’s Frankenstein is a notable example of a film bogged down by censorship, with the state of Kansas memorably demanding that nearly half the film be cut in order to be distributed. All this moral hullaballoo contributed to the demonization of horror movies, which no doubt influenced Hollywood’s decision to keep them out of the awards ceremonies.
With a few exceptions in minor technical categories, it would be decades until the Academy would once again honor a horror movie. Thankfully, with the sudden rise of Hitchcock, scares became fashionable again, and his groundbreaking 1960 film, Psycho, was nominated in four categories: Best Actress, Best Director, Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction. Ultimately, the film didn’t win any of these nominations, but it was a return to form for the genre, proving in the public eye that horror could be so much more than just schlock and supposed anti-religious propaganda.
Hitchcock’s next film, The Birds, would receive a single nomination in the special effects category, and we would only see the Academy recognize another serious horror movie at the end of the Motion Picture Production Code, with Roman Polanski’s 1968 thriller, Rosemary’s Baby. Polanski’s film would go on to be nominated for Best Supporting Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay, winning the former. It can be said that this ushered in a new era for horror movies, as they would receive much more positive mainstream attention in the years to come than they ever had before.
“What an excellent day for an Oscar.”
With movies like the aforementioned Exorcist, Spielberg’s Jaws, Brian De Palma’s Carrie, and Ridley Scott’s Alien, the 1970s cemented horror filmmakers as serious masters of the craft in the Academy’s eyes. So far, this is arguably the best decade of horror on nearly all fronts, and possibly the last time that the genre was rightly perceived as an equal. Nevertheless, these nominations helped further the career of many talented artists who are now considered Hollywood legends, and helped shape the landscape of everyone’s favorite decade of entertainment.
The 1980s started off well, with Rick Baker’s phenomenal work on John Landis’ American Werewolf in London being recognized with a nomination in the brand new Best Makeup category. In fact, the horror genre would soon become quite familiar with this category, as most of this decade’s nominated horror movies would end up winning that award. James Cameron’s Aliens would break the mold with its seven nominations and two technical wins, but Hollywood’s love affair with horror movies was dissipating.
Fortunately, the 1990s had quite a few notable wins and nominations, with Rob Reiner’s Misery starting the decade off on a good note, providing Kathy Bates with the coveted Best Actress award. This was soon followed by Silence of the Lambs’ historic win, but the line between thriller and horror was starting to blur, and the Academy had an obvious preference for the former rather than the latter. Strangely enough, it was a great period for vampire films, with Francis Ford Coppola’s peculiar adaptation, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, garnering four nominations (and one win), and Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire garnering two.
This was also the decade that introduced us to M. Night Shyamalan and his breakout feature, The Sixth Sense, which just so happened to be nominated in six categories. These included Best Editing, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Screenplay and even Best Picture. While this is a feat in and of itself, it also marks the last time that a conventional horror film would ever take home so many nominations. The worst part is that this was almost two decades ago!
I’m glad the we can go back to appreciating Shyamalan now!
Although some debate that Aronofsky’s Black Swan is the Academy’s last true horror sweetheart, that ultimately depends on your definition of a horror movie. Either way, that’s one hell of a gap between award-winning scary movies, so what happened? The 2000s may have initially been saturated with remakes and a few duds, but for every generic ghost story there was an artistically inspired production like Mary Harron’s American Psycho or even Ti West’s House of the Devil. That’s not even mentioning the amazing horror movies produced outside of the United States that could have easily populated the Best Foreign Picture category.
In these last couple of years alone, we’ve already been gifted with extraordinary cinematic gems like Robert Eggers’ The Witch and Fede Álvarez’s Hitchcockian Don’t Breathe, and there’s simply no excuse for these films not to be appreciated by the Academy. That being said, I’m well aware that the Oscars aren’t as important an event as the media makes them out to be, but it’s still disrespectful to exclude the countless men and women working in the horror genre from these events due to outdated notions that they only produce ‘B’ movies.
Of course, there’s a lot of politics going on behind the scenes at these awards ceremonies, so artistic merit isn’t the only thing to be considered. Nevertheless, we now live in a world where Suicide Squad has won more Oscars than most of our favorite horror movies, and you can’t fault someone for getting pissed off about that. In time, as more and more amazing horror films hit the big screen, perhaps we’ll get lucky and the Academy will realize the error in its ways. Until then, all we can do is support and enjoy our favorite genre until Hollywood respects it as much as we do.
Auteur Filmmaking is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days in reference to big name directors like Quentin Tarantino and even Wes Anderson, but the truth is that film is a collective medium, and no one person can be responsible for every single aspect of a particular production. However, the smaller a film’s budget, the bigger the individual impact of every creative decision behind it – and the easier it becomes to identify a genuine auteur.
This isn’t necessarily a judgement of value, as blockbuster filmmaking comes with its own challenges and a good movie remains a miracle regardless of how big the crew is, but I’ve always been more interested in soulful b-movies produced by handfuls of passionate artists than blockbusters backed by creative armies.
That’s why I love exploring low-budget franchises that never left the hands of their original creators, as you really get to know the artists involved with these flicks and can accompany their evolution over a period of time. With that in mind, I’d like to invite readers to join me in this multi-part series as we look into a vampire saga helmed by one of the most fascinating auteurs of the 1990s. Naturally, I’m referring to Ted Nicolaou’s criminally underrated Subspecies!
The Birth of an Unlikely Horror Franchise
A proud graduate of the University of Texas’ Film program, Nicolaou got his start in the industry as a sound technician working on Tobe Hooper’s original Texas Chain Saw Massacre. From there, the filmmaker would go on to work for notorious indie producer Charles Band, the founder of both Empire Pictures and Full Moon Productions. According to Nicolaou, Band would usually contact him with an offer to direct a feature after more prominent filmmakers, such as the late, great Stuart Gordon, had already refused, meaning that his projects tended to have lower budgets and more inexperienced crew members.
The plans for Subspecies began almost immediately after the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, with screenwriter David Pabian turning in an initial draft of the film after a Romanian producer contacted Band and explained that Romanian tax incentives could cover the cost of film production there so long as Full Moon took care of the post-production process. Since Stuart Gordon was unwilling to travel to Romania, Ted Nicolaou ended up taking over the picture.
However, while the financial incentives meant that this Romanian-American co-production could look and feel much more expensive than it really was, with Nicolaou scouting for locations in advance and selecting real castle ruins to be featured in the movie, the director was soon faced with an incredibly difficult shooting process. In interviews, Nicolaou would later describe the experience as something of a nightmare, with language barriers and the generalized distrust of capitalist outsiders sabotaging many of the team’s plans for the film.
In fact, the script, which had already been altered by Band, ultimately had portions of it rewritten by both Jack Canson and Nicolaou himself in an attempt to adapt the story to their unique limitations.
Radu Is One of Horror’s Greatest Underrated Villains
In the finished film, which was released directly to video in 1991, we follow a pair of American anthropology students, Michelle (Laura Mae Tate) and Lillian (Michelle McBride), as they reunite with their Romanian colleague Mara (Irina Movila) in her native land. The group intends to study the folklore surrounding the secluded town of Prejmer, but their research is cut short by the return of Radu Vladislas (Anders Hove) – the evil son of a vampire king (Angus Scrimm) who had previously established a truce with the region’s human residents. It’s now up to Radu’s human-loving half-brother Stefan (Michael Watson) to protect the girls from a fate worse than death as the power-hungry vampire seeks to control a magical artifact known as the Bloodstone.
Right off the bat, you may have noticed that the film’s premise sounds decidedly old-fashioned when compared to other vampire movies from around the same time. While the 1990s saw the rise of cool-looking bloodsuckers with badass elements borrowed from Westerns, as well as the sexy aristocrats of Anne Rice’s stories, Subspecies has a lot more in common with Nosferatu and the Hammer Horror series than any of its contemporaries.
This is both a blessing and a curse, as the film falls victim to overly familiar genre tropes while also standing out as a rare example of a ’90s vampire flick that isn’t afraid to flex its muscles as a Creature Feature. In fact, I’d argue that the presence of age-old clichés is a small price to pay when confronted with one of the most compelling vampire antagonists in all of cinema.
Named after Vlad the Impaler’s real-life brother, Anders Hove’s Radu is such a fascinating character and the main reason why Subspecies is still worth watching 35 years later. From his animalistic mannerisms to the joy he feels in simply existing as a chaotic creature of the night, and that’s not even mentioning the iconic makeup that almost certainly inspired the undead from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Radu is a hypnotic presence harkening back to a time when audiences didn’t mind purely evil villains that couldn’t be redeemed through tragic backstories or sex appeal.
Gothic Atmosphere on an Indie Budget
Of course, the film’s Romanian setting and authentic art direction do a lot of the heavy lifting whenever Radu isn’t around. From the masked festivals of the village to the visually interesting selection of local extras, Subspecies’ multicultural elements help it to stand out when compared to similar flicks from the ’90s.
That being said, Nicolaou’s unique eye for special effects and exciting action sequences – as well as Vlad Paunescu’s excellent cinematography – make the movie a delight for fans of expressionist cinema and old-timey gothic horror. While the crew is obviously dealing with limited resources, many of the flick’s blemishes (such as the odd stop-motion demons that serve Radu) end up feeling more like charming idiosyncrasies than actual flaws.
I’d argue that the only real issue here is pacing, as there are long stretches of film where the protagonists are simply bumbling around without realizing what’s really going on around them. Thankfully, the gorgeous visuals and surprisingly effective soundtrack usually make up for this. Besides, how can you dislike a movie where shotgun shells are loaded with rosary beads and our lead vampires duke it out in a dramatic swordfight that would feel out of place during the golden age of Hollywood?
Your overall enjoyment of Subspecies will mostly depend on whether or not you find low-budget corner-cutting and janky practical effects charming rather than distracting, but I know I’ll keep coming back to this Full Moon feature again and again in the future.
That being said, while this first movie is worth revisiting by its own merits as the birth of an indie horror icon, I’d like to invite you to join us as we look into the cult sequel Bloodstone: Subspecies II soon.
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