Horror and the Oscars are famously (and unfortunately) strange bedfellows. Which is odd in that regard, since even a casual film buff can recognize the immense importance the horror genre has to the medium. So many of Hollywood's most successful filmmakers got their start in horror, so many technical innovations were made because of horror films, and the very grammar of cinema would not be as advanced as it has become without the horror genre. To neglect horror or remove it from any study of the medium is to fundamentally misunderstand cinema, period.

If it's all common knowledge, then why horror continues to be treated so poorly by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? The reasons for this are too long and varied to detail here, suffice it to say that it has to do with an amalgam of antiquated (re: puritanical) opinions about culture and art that have been sublimated into the endless debate about high art . versus low art, the war between elitist snobbery and grassroots populism. Horror films are generally dismissed under the lens of classicism: they are considered "cheap", called "B-movies", and in some extreme cases they are labeled as morally irresponsible.

Sometimes, though, the artistry, popularity, and overall impact of a horror film is too great to deny. That's exactly what happened in 1992 at the 64th Academy Awards, when Jonathan Demme's 1991 film 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 ever win the top prize. Picture. To this day, in 2024, it remains the only horror film to receive that honor.

A movie that won Best Picture at the Oscars tends to canonize it in one way or another. Some have the reward of sparking endless debate about their actual quality (hello, 2004's Crash), while others (like last year's "Oppenheimer") inspires conscious support of agreement with the choice of the Academy. The Silence of the Lambs falls into that latter category, and for good reason. Demme was a filmmaker who effortlessly glided between many genres throughout his career, thanks in large part to his formative years as a director working for producer Roger Corman (who makes a cameo appearance in Silence of the Lambs) and New World Pictures. during the 1970s. That period allowed him to hone his craft while learning how to construct a film that contained artistic richness while still being able to please as wide an audience as possible. By the time he made "Lambs" in 1991, Demme had a few celebrity fans — the concert film "Stop Making Sense" and the rom-com boss "Married to the Mob" among them — and he brought everyone to his allure to opposed the adaptation of the novel Hannibal Lecter by Thomas Harris.

Lecter and Harris' novels were already popular when The Lambs was made; famously, the film wasn't the first cinematic adaptation of the character, that honor going to Michael Mann's Manhunter starring Brian Cox as Lector. However Anthony Hopkins' superlative performance in The Lambs as Lector forever imprinted the character in the public consciousness, so much so that the cannibalistic killer overshadowed the murderous protagonist, Jaime Gumb (Ted Levine), in the film's legacy. Although that character and other aspects of the film are problematic in retrospectit seemed downright progressive (or at least transgressive) in 1991 to have a mainstream film openly dealing with thorny subjects like serial killers and the persistent feminism of FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) as she battles misogyny in her career.

Not to mention the fact that The Silence of the Lambs is just an extremely well made movie. Its page-turning procedural story has a hook to it that never lets up, its characters are compellingly portrayed, and it features some sequences (most notably the night vision goggles climax) that remain terrifying to this day. In terms of a horror film that clearly announces its tone, themes, and stakes, and then delivers them all to the fullest, it's a Platonic ideal, and that's probably why it proved such a catnip for Academy voters.

While The Silence of the Lambs' Best Picture award is certainly deserved, it remains bizarre, if not disheartening, to realize that it's been more than 30 years since a horror film won that honor. To be fair, horror is a genre that should never try too hard to be legitimized by society at large. After all, one of the functions the genre provides is no-frills social commentary; like its sci-fi cousin, horror allows artists to comment heavily on current issues without getting too specific, a quality that inspired Rod Serling to make The Twilight Zone. The tough problem with horror being an accepted part of the culture is that it always has to fight to stay on the fringes, even just a little bit, enough to bite when it needs to.

So, while it's ridiculous to argue that a horror film should have won Best Picture multiple times between 1992 and now, it's just as ridiculous to argue that no horror film during that period deserved the honor. "Se7en" by David Fincher, "The Sixth Sense" by M. Night Shyamalan, Ari Astaire's The Inheritance, and Jordan Peele's Get Out are just a few films that can be named that reach the same level of depth and craft as Demme's Silence. the lambs,” and while most of those films received some nominations, none of them were deemed worthy of a major award.

This year alone has been a banner year for horror movies, so much so that an argument could be made that the genre is almost single-handedly saving the box office, as the majority of new, edgy horror releases have drawn crowds and become cultural waves. The Academy's voting system being what it is, there can only be one winner per year, so the horror of falling by the wayside more often than not is an understandable phenomenon. But it's long past time for a horror film to win Best Picture, so listen up, AMPAS: this could be the year Hannibal Lecter is finally dethroned.