One of my favorite things to do every year is a bit of Oscar catchup once the Academy Award nominations come out. For some that might mean sitting down to marathon September 5, Flow, The Brutalist, etc. And while that’s all well and good, the real fun is in finding horror movies that the nominees made or starred in before they hit the prestige era of their career (though The Substance proves that those two eras aren’t always mutually exclusive).

If you’d like to join in on this grand tradition, I have arranged an epic marathon that drags the horror movie skeletons out of these esteemed performers and filmmakers’ closets!

An Oscar Inspired Horror Marathon

Brady Corbet in Funny Games (2007)

Before he was the esteemed director of The Brutalist, Brady Corbet was the less-esteemed director of the ludicrous pop music odyssey Vox Lux. And before that, he was a working actor, a gig that led him to star opposite Naomi Watts in Michael Haneke’s shot-for-shot remake of his notorious 1997 movie Funny Games. I’m just saying, if any Brady Corbet movie actually deserves to be called The Brutalist, it’s probably this one.

Traci Loader doing Possessor (2020)

From an English-language facsimile of an Austrian movie, we move on to a son’s facsimile of his father’s beloved subgenre. This body horror outing by Brandon Cronenberg featured work by Makeup and Hairstyling nominee Traci Loader. Traci is nominated this year for Nosferatu, another horror title getting big ups from the Academy this year, but she proved her mettle in the genre long before that with the visceral Possessor.

Possessor is streaming on Tubi

Demi Moore in Parasite (1982)

Before making a splash in St. Elmo’s Fire, Oscar-nominated The Substance star Demi Moore took on her second-ever feature film role in the 1982 sci-fi horror movie Parasite, in which she plays a lemon grower who helps fight off a post-apocalyptic parasite. This movie’s shlock credentials are unmatched, considering it is also an early outing from notorious Full Moon filmmaker Charles Band and was also originally distributed in 3-D.

Parasite is streaming on Plex

Timothée Chalamet in Bones and All (2022)

The theme connecting this to Parasite is “filmmakers who have lived in Italy.” (Never forget Charles Band lived and worked in a 12th century castle just outside Rome for years – check it out in Castle Freak.) Luca Guadagnino’s cannibal love story is a YA fantasy romance adaptation to beat the band, filled to the brim with carnal longings, whether it be for food, flesh, or A Complete Unknown nominee Timothée Chalamet. And when you’re watching a Guadagnino film, you know it’s mostly the latter.

Bones and All is streaming on MGM+

Guy Pearce in Ravenous (1999)

From one cannibal movie to another, it’s time to check out The Brutalist nominee Guy Pearce leading a cast studded with “that guy” actors including Robert Carlyle, Neal McDonough, and David Arquette. This Wendigo movie is unique among the horror genre in many ways, including its 1840s period setting and the fact that it’s a pre-2000 horror movie directed by a woman, in this case the late great Antonia Bird.

Coralie Fargeat doing Revenge (2018)

Speaking of horror movies directed by women… This isn’t necessarily a skeleton in the closet considering the fact that Coralie Fargeat has been nominated for directing The Substance, but her directorial debut Revenge is a must-watch. While this modernized rape-revenge movie feels like an entirely different beast from The Substance, it contains many of the same core nuggets, including a harrowing examination of a specific aspect of one woman’s experience with the patriarchy, a fuckton of blood, and a general top-to-bottom disgust with the human condition.

Revenge is streaming on Shudder

BONUS: Demi Moore on I Spit On Your Grave (1978)

So we’ve just talked about the rape-revenge genre AND The Substance, so let’s take a quick break to honor Demi Moore’s early work as the cover model on the poster for 1978’s I Spit On Your Grave. Feel free to watch the movie, if you can handle it, but it actually stars Camille Keaton, so it doesn’t technically count for this marathon.

Fernanda Torres in Gêmeas (1999)

OK, we’ve hit a bit of a snag here. If you don’t speak Portuguese, this one will be harder to find, so feel free to skip it if you’re actually following along. But I’m Still Here nominee Fernanda Torres has dabbled in horror, and it is well worth acknowledging this psychological thriller about twin sisters (both played by Torres) who fight over the same man.

Adrien Brody in Splice (2009)

And now we move on from characters who share DNA to characters who specifically mutate DNA. In Splice, which was helmed by Cube’s Vincenzo Natali, The Brutalist nominee Adrien Brody plays a geneticist who is part of a team that accidentally creates a monster.

Splice is streaming on Max

Jarin Blaschke doing Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet (2009)

Splice’s B-movie nature leaves a huge gulf in esteem between it and The Brutalist, but I think we can widen that gulf here. Jarin Blaschke has been nominated for lensing Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu after collaborating with the aesthetically inclined filmmaker previously on The Witch, The Lighthouse (for which Blaschke was nominated for his first Oscar), and The Northman. However, way back in the day, he was cutting his teeth on the down-and-dirty direct-to-DVD slasher Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet, which features appearances from horror royalty in the form of Bill Moseley and Danielle Harris.

Mikey Madison in Scream (2022)

And so we move from one slasher to another, though this one is much better known. Not only is Anora nominee Mikey Madison in the 2022 legacy sequel Scream, but she also gets to (SPOILER ALERT) play one of the Ghostface killers. Honestly, that’s a much bigger honor than some paltry Oscar.

Scream is streaming on Netflix (and also Paramount+)

BONUS: Ariana Grande in Scream Queens Season 1 (2015)

If you’re still thirsty for slashers after all that, why not have a cool-down at the end of your marathon with the first couple episodes of Ryan Murphy’s short-lived horror-comedy series Scream Queens? The Wicked nominee has a memorable death scene early on, and you’ll get to witness the ignoble birth of the cringe-inducing “Señorita Awesome” meme that you may have seen floating around the Internet lately.

Scream Queens is streaming on Hulu

The Final Destination franchise is all about how Death will not allow people to cheat it and, when they do, it seeks revenge in a variety of nasty, Rube Goldbergian ways. Because of this, there is naturally an immense roster of creative, outlandish kills in the series, even more so than a typical slasher franchise. So cutting the wheat from the chaff to craft a Top 10 is much more difficult than usual, but never fear.

Let me bravely guide your path toward the best and bloodiest ways that FD characters have shuffled off this mortal coil.

A note: I won’t be counting any deaths from the franchise’s signature opening sequence premonitions here, as they technically don’t happen in-universe, and they’re generally so stellar that they deserve their own article.

For a ranking of every entry in the franchise, click here!

The Top 10 Deaths in The Final Destination Franchise

#10 Surprise Bus (Final Destination)

The “surprise death” has become a staple of the franchise, but – as is so often the case – the first is the best.

#9 LASIK (Final Destination 5)

This one is ranked slightly lower because the actual Death (Olivia falling out of the window) isn’t that interesting. But the way it plays out beforehand is pitch perfect grossout thriller tension-building. From the way it harnesses everyday fears (I haven’t gotten LASIK myself, but I imagine this is what everyone who gets it worries is going to happen) to the eye trauma to the hand trauma, this is a laundry list of some of the nastiest and most brutal ways to terrorize both a character and the audience.

#8 The Kitchen (Final Destination)

Just like the bus sequence, the Death of poor Ms. Lewton was the progenitor of many future Final Destination scenes, this time of the Rube Goldberg variety. This scene drags out her Death by putting her in an increasingly impossible situation and closing on a bloody moment where the thing that might save her – the dish towel – ends up spelling her doom. Plus, that gory little punchline at the end where the falling chair deals the killing blow is just deliciously nasty.

#7 The Fire Escape (Final Destination 2)

The fire escape sequence perfectly encapsulates everything the Final Destination franchise does best. It has a drawn-out rise and fall and deals the killing blow exactly when Evan thinks he’s escaped. But on top of the final moment, the entire four-minute sequence is chock full of fun grace notes, from the harrowing garbage disposal moment to the cheeky little foreshadowing of the fridge magnets spelling out “E Y E.”

#6 Shower Strangulation (Final Destination)

Because the first movie was a little less elaborate and focused on things that might conceivably happen to a human being in real life, its kills are less outré, but no less brutal for it. Seeing the veins in Tod’s eyes burst as he is being strangled is a deeply chilling injection of body horror verisimilitude.

#5 The Airbag (Final Destination 2)

This is the Final Destination equivalent of the photographer going, “Now, let’s do a fun one.” Kat survives a car wreck, only to have the airbag (something that’s meant to keep them safe) smash their head into a broken pipe. It’s funny, it’s gruesome, it’s a blast.

#4 The Pool (The Final Destination)

Sure, this may not be the best or most believable setup in the world, but this Death has everything it needs. 1) An everyday, commonplace fear dragged from the back of the collective subconscious. 2) A truly awful way to go that allows for an explosion of blood. 3) Shirtless Nick Zano. Hey, I don’t make the rules.

#3 The Weight Bench (Final Destination 3)

One of the best misdirects in the entire series! After the scene focuses so hard on the clattering swords on the wall, only for them not to hurt Lewis, they do indeed become instruments of Death, but in a way that nobody would have expected (and one that allows for a lovely explosion of blood, another staple of the franchise).

#2 The Balance Beam (Final Destination 5)

The balance beam kill! Truly a tension sequence of epic proportions, both because of how much it draws out the audience’s anticipation of the fact that this poor gymnast is going to die epically and because of the downright Hitchcockian way that the sharp screw on the balance beam triggers the most squeamish, intimate fears hidden deep within our psyches. Nobody really has a sense of what getting decapitated feels like, but we can all squirm in revulsion at the thought of a tiny sharp object piercing the sole of our foot.

The only reason this is #2 is the same reason the LASIK kill is ranked so low: the actual Death isn’t the reason this scene is great. Just like Candice herself, it doesn’t really stick the landing, even though it is decently gnarly in its own right.

#1 The Falling Glass (Final Destination 2)

Look, the Final Destination franchise courts simple pleasures like watching a kid get squashed like a grape by a falling pane of glass, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a good ol’ explosion of gore, especially one this perfectly rendered. Not everything has to be Hitchcock.