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