The only horror film to win Best Picture at the Oscars

Horror and the Academy Awards have a notoriously (and unfortunately) strange relationship. This may seem strange, but even the casual movie buff can recognize that the horror genre is extremely important to the medium. Many of Hollywood’s greatest filmmakers got their start in horror, many technological innovations have been made thanks to horror films, and film grammar itself would not have advanced as much as it did without the horror genre. Probably. To ignore horror or exclude it from the study of the medium is to fundamentally misunderstand cinema.

If that’s all common sense, then why does horror continue to be treated so poorly by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? The reasons are too long and varied to go into detail here, but Culture and Arts Suffice it to say, it has to do with a fusion of outdated (puritanical) opinions about being sublimated into endless debates about high art. vs. the war between low art, elitist snobbery and general populism. Horror films are generally dismissed from a classist perspective. Horror films can be considered “cheesy”, called “B-movies” and, in extreme cases, labeled as morally irresponsible.

But sometimes, the artistry, popularity, and overall impact of a horror movie is too great to deny. At the 64th Academy Awards in 1992, Jonathan Demme’s 1991 The Silence of the Lambs not only won Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay, but also became the first horror film to win Best Adapted Screenplay. That’s exactly what won the award for best screenplay. photograph. As of 2024, it remains the only horror film to receive this honor.

Movies that win Best Picture at the Oscars tend to canonize them in some way. For some films, the award sparks endless debate about its actual quality (such as 2004’s “Crash”), while for others it prompts a natural nod to the Academy’s choices (such as last year’s “Oppenheimer”). be. The Silence of the Lambs falls into the latter category, and for good reason. Demme has moved effortlessly between different genres throughout her film career, thanks to her formative years as a director working for producer Roger Corman (who had a cameo in The Silence of the Lambs) and New World Pictures. He was the director. In the 1970s. This period allowed him to hone his craft, learning how to construct films that contained artistic richness while pleasing the widest possible audience. By the time he made Lambs in 1991, Deme had made several critically acclaimed crowd-pleasers, including the concert film Stop Making Sense and the romantic comedy Marriage to the Mob. He brought it all. His showmanship was credited with influencing the film adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novel.

Rector and Harris’s novels were already popular at the time “The Lamb” was created. Famously, this film was not the first film adaptation of the character; that honor went to Michael Mann’s Manhunter, which starred Brian Cox as Lecter. But Anthony Hopkins’ best performance as Lecter in The Lambs forever etched the character into the public consciousness, making this cannibal killer one of the main killer characters in the film’s legacy. He is now overshadowed by James Gumb (Ted Levine). In hindsight, although the characters and other aspects of the film are problematic, it’s still a mainstream film that openly deals with troubling themes such as serial killers and the staunch feminism of FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie). It seemed downright progressive (or at least transgressive) in 1991 that the movie was made. Foster) has battled misogyny throughout her career.

It goes without saying that The Silence of the Lambs is a very well-made movie. The page-turning procedural story is never boring, the characters are convincingly drawn, and some sequences (especially the night-vision goggle climax) are still horrifying. It’s a Platonic ideal, in that a horror film clearly announces its tone, themes, and stakes, and realizes them all to the fullest, which perhaps proved to be a flop for Academy voters. This is the reason.

It’s certainly no surprise that The Silence of the Lambs won Best Picture, but it’s still, if not disappointing, to know that it’s been more than 30 years since a horror film won that honor. That’s strange. To be fair, horror is a genre that should never strive for legitimacy in society at large. After all, one of the features this genre offers is no-frills social commentary. Similar to horror’s cousin science fiction, horror allows artists to make focused comments on current events without being too specific. This trait inspired Rod Serling to create “The Twilight Zone.” The trouble with horror being accepted as part of the culture is that it always has to fight to stay on the fringes, even if only slightly, just enough to bite when it needs to.

So, while it would be foolish to claim that a horror film should have won Best Picture the majority of the times it should have won Best Picture from 1992 to the present, the horror films that deserved that honor in that era It’s just as ridiculous to claim it wasn’t. David Fincher’s Se7en, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, Ari Aster’s Hereditary, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, and Demme’s Silent These are just a few examples of films that reach the same level of depth and skill as ‘Silence’. Most of those films, including “The Lambs,” received several nominations, but none were deemed worthy of major awards.

This year alone has been a banner year for horror films, with the majority of high-profile new horror releases drawing audiences and elevating their cultural status, leading to arguments that the genre is almost single-handedly saving the box office. I can even do it. wave. That’s how the Academy’s voting system works, with only one winner per year, so it’s an understandable phenomenon that horror is often sidelined. But it’s long past time for a horror movie to win Best Picture, listen up, Anpus. This year may finally be the year Hannibal Lecter abdicates his throne.