News

Horror Didn’t Just Show Up to the Oscars This Year, It Moved In.

Published

1 month ago

March 16, 2026

Every year, horror fans do a thing at the Oscars. We check the nominations, calculate the exact number of genre films represented, divide by the total field, and arrive at a percentage that we then describe as “progress” before watching everything lose to a tasteful period drama about grief. It is a ritual. It is tradition. It is our cross to bear.

This year was different.

This year, a vampire movie set in Jim Crow-era Mississippi walked into the Dolby Theatre with sixteen nominations, the most of any film in the history of the Academy Awards, ever, including Titanic, including La La Land, including everything, and left with four Oscars. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein picked up three.

A horror-comedy about a woman named Aunt Gladys opened the night by winning Best Supporting Actress, and Conan O’Brien hosted the entire ceremony dressed as her, which is either the best or the most chaotic thing that has ever happened at the Oscars and possibly both.

I would like to formally announce that we have arrived.

Sinners Did What It Was Always Going to Do

Let me be clear about what sixteen Oscar nominations means. All About Eve had fourteen. Titanic had fourteen. La La Land had fourteen. Ryan Coogler’s gory, gorgeous, deeply American vampire film walked past all of them and kept going. The Academy looked at a movie where people get their throats torn out to a Delta blues soundtrack and said: yes, actually, this is the most nominated film we have ever produced as an institution.

The wins were essential rather than consolatory. Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor for his dual performance as twins Smoke and Stack. Which, for context, means a horror movie actor beat Timothée Chalamet, which is a sentence I did not expect to be writing in this lifetime, and I am writing it with enormous pleasure. Ryan Coogler won Best Original Screenplay. Ludwig Göransson took Best Original Score, his third Oscar win.

Sinners did not win Best Picture. It lost twelve categories total, which technically makes it the biggest single-night loser in Oscar history, a distinction that feels both meaningless and slightly funny given that it is also, simultaneously, the most nominated film in Oscar history. The paradox is very on-brand for a movie about twin brothers in 1932 Mississippi who open a juke joint and get immediately besieged by vampires. Nothing about Sinners was supposed to work as well as it did. That was always the point.

Guillermo del Toro Continues to Be Correct About Everything

Frankenstein took three Oscars. Best Costume Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, and Best Production Design. Which is the correct distribution of awards for a del Toro film, because if you have seen anything del Toro has made in the last thirty years you know that the craft categories are where he lives. The man builds worlds from the seams outward. The costumes and the creature work and the sets are the argument. Getting three Oscars for exactly that feels like the Academy finally reading the room on how his particular genius actually operates.

Jacob Elordi was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for the film and did not win, which is fine, because the real winner of that category was everyone who got to watch him play the creature and had to reconsider several things about themselves afterward.

Aunt Gladys Won an Oscar and It Is the Best Thing That Happened

Amy Madigan has been working in film for nearly forty-five years. She earned her first Oscar nomination in 1985. She was in Field of Dreams in 1989, which means she has been a part of cinematic history for longer than several of the people reading this have been alive.

Then Zach Cregger cast her as Aunt Gladys in Weapons, described in every piece of press as “diabolical,” “chillingly cartoonish,” a witch of a woman operating at a frequency that exists somewhere between menacing and hilarious, and she won Best Supporting Actress, her first Oscar, at an age when most actors would consider the window closed.

Madigan cackled with delight as she accepted the award. She thanked Cregger for the “dream part.” She named every one of her fellow nominees individually. And Conan O’Brien had spent the entire evening dressed as her character, which means the host of the Academy Awards spent three-plus hours in a horror-comedy costume, and nobody seemed to think this was strange, because it wasn’t. It was correct.

What This Means for the Rest of Us

The last time horror genuinely dominated the Oscars was 1992, when The Silence of the Lambs swept Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay in a single night. A record that stood as a monument to how rarely the Academy takes the genre seriously. Jordan Peele won Best Original Screenplay for Get Out in 2018. Nosferatu picked up a couple of technical awards last year. And then there was everything else: decades of horror films nominated in craft categories or not nominated at all, showing up to a party that was never quite sure they were invited.

This year the genre showed up with sixteen nominations and the most decorated single performance of the night and three Guillermo del Toro craft wins and a supporting actress winner who cackled at the podium and a host who dressed as a witch. The conversation about whether horror deserves to be taken seriously as an art form, a conversation horror fans have been having with the rest of the culture for years, with the patience of people who know they are right and are simply waiting for everyone else to catch up, is over.

We won. Not Best Picture, technically. But we won.

Click to comment

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Related Topics:Frankenstein Oscar Sinners weapons

News

[Exclusive Clip] ‘From the Beyond: High Strangeness in the Bennington Triangle’

Published

1 day ago

April 26, 2026

Ryan T. Cusick

Audiences are invited to explore one of Vermont’s most mysterious regions in From the Beyond: High Strangeness in the Bennington Triangle, arriving later this month on streaming platforms and DVD.

The documentary will debut on April 28, 2026, on platforms including Apple TV, Prime Video, and Google Play. DVD editions will be available exclusively through the Small Town Monsters online shop.

Directed by Seth Breedlove, the film continues the company’s exploration of folklore, cryptids, and unexplained phenomena. Breedlove’s previous work includes The Mothman of Point Pleasant, On the Trail of Bigfoot, American Werewolves, and more than two dozen feature-length productions. In total, Small Town Monsters has released more than thirty films, along with investigative programs, web series, books, podcasts, and exclusive membership content.

From the Beyond: High Strangeness in the Bennington Triangle was made possible through the support of backers from the company’s 2025 Kickstarter campaign.

Set in rural Vermont, the documentary examines the legend of the Bennington Triangle, an area associated with reports of UFOs, ghosts, phantom lights, mysterious creatures, and a series of unexplained disappearances. At the center of the mystery is Glastenbury Mountain, where decades of unanswered questions continue to inspire speculation.

Going beyond folklore and campfire tales, the film asks a chilling question: Why is Glastenbury Mountain so inexplicable, and what happened to those who went missing?

Check out our exclusive clip below.

News

This Week in Horror: DC Goes Full Body Horror, A24 Has Its Chainsaw Man, and The Bone Temple Is Finally Yours

Published

2 days ago

April 24, 2026

Luna Gray

Good week. The Clayface trailer dropped and made DC relevant to this website for the first time in a while, A24 put a director on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre reimagining, and we got some interviews worth reading. Here is all of it.

Clayface Has a Trailer, and It Is Exactly What You Want

The Clayface trailer landed Wednesday, and it is DC’s first real horror film. Not horror adjacent. Not dark. Horror. Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt Hagen, an actor whose face gets disfigured by a gangster. He turns to a scientist, played by Naomi Ackie, who transforms his body into clay. Then the body horror starts.

James Watkins directed, which is the right choice. He made Speak No Evil and before that The Woman in Black, and he understands how to make dread feel physical. The screenplay is by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini. That combination should tell you everything about the tone they are going for.

A24 Has a Director for Texas Chainsaw Massacre and His Last Film Cost Under a Million Dollars

Deadline confirmed that Curry Barker is writing and directing A24’s reimagining of the 1974 original. Barker made Obsession for under a million dollars. Focus Features paid north of fifteen million to distribute it. It sits at 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. A24 hired him before it even opens, which opens May 15.

Kim Henkel, who co-created the original with Tobe Hooper, is executive producing his own creation’s reimagining. That is either a blessing or a haunting. Probably both.

Astrolatry Is Going to Cannes and We Talked to the Actor Who Faced the Creature

Astrolatry is heading to the Frontières Buyers Showcase on May 16-17. The film has a sentient severed penis that grows into a ten-foot practical creature with spiky teeth. We interviewed star Ethan Daniel Corbett about what it was actually like to act against it. Short answer: genuinely terrifying. Long answer is on the site.

The Bone Temple Is Home

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple hit 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD on Tuesday. If you held out from the digital release in February, now is the time. The 4K presentation is supposed to be great. Extras include audio commentary and a deleted scene. If your gonna watch The Bone Temple, why not watch it where the snacks are better.

News

Astrolatry Built a Ten-Foot Practical Penis Scorpion

Published

3 days ago

April 24, 2026

Luna Gray

A sentient severed penis grows into a ten-foot creature with spiky teeth. Genre cinema is doing fine.

Astrolatry follows Elliot, played by Ethan Daniel Corbett, who is every ingredient for quiet catastrophe assembled in one man. Socially isolated. Physically isolated. Craving dopamine and finding it in the wrong places. The romance guru pipeline, followed to its logical conclusion. Elliot does not just spiral. He loses a piece of himself, literally, and that piece does not cooperate.

Corbett described it as “a horror satire, a trippy mind-fuck roller coaster” and “a modern retelling of Maniac,” both of which are accurate and neither of which adequately prepares you. Director David Gordon is making his feature debut after shooting 14 films as a cinematographer and he is swinging for the fences.

The Creature

The effects company behind the creature has festival circuit work Corbett had already seen before signing on. He knew what they could do but he was not ready. “When I saw it in person it was kind of mind-blowing,” he said. “Everything that you see in this movie is practical. Very, very little else. It was genuinely terrifying to have a ten-foot creature coming at you with a big mouth and spiky teeth.”

A CG creature asks an actor to imagine something. A ten-foot physical creature on a set asks nothing. It just arrives. The fear on Corbett’s face in those scenes is not a performance. It is the normal reaction to a scorpion dick with sharp teeth.

Elliot

Corbett went into the character through the body. “I mainly focus on the physicality of it. Who this character is and who he is wholly. I strive in those kinds of moments as an actor.”

Gordon was explicit about the concept, the “nice guy” archetype and the overtly toxic one are the same problem, both aimed at the same object. That reading lands because Corbett does not play it as a reading. Elliot is not a symbol. He is a person.

Where It Is Going

Astrolatry is heading to the Frontières Buyers Showcase at Cannes on May 16-17. “To be able to get into that kind of room on David’s first feature is incredible,” Corbett said. “To be in front of buyers and to showcase the film and potentially get distribution through that.” Frontières is the correct room. It is full of people who understand that the most extreme premise, executed with precision, is not a punchline. It is an argument.