Sinners and Frankenstein join JAWS in the Oscar Best Picture nomination club

Horror’s always been the naughty child of cinema - loud, unruly, uncompromising and historically has been largely kept at arm’s length when it has come to Academy Award nominations for Best Picture.

Not so in 2026, with both Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein – insert your own he’s just a pit part actor joke here – and for Sinners, both getting nods in the Best Picture categories.

Both have multiple nods, with Sinners, directed by Ryan Coogler, gaining 16 - you’re gonna potentially need a bigger cabinet – which is the highest number of nominations in the 98 years of the Oscars, beating out the previous high of 14, gained by All About Eve. Titanic and La La Land.

Not that high numbers of nominations equate to wins – just look at Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple gaining 11 nominations and walking away with nothing.

Sinners and Frankenstein have boosted the numbers in the horror films nominated for Best Picture club, making the previous shortlisted films budge up, and it’s remained a small but distinguished group of memorable cinematic classics.

The first ever horror film to be nominated for Best Picture was the – quite literally – head turning The Exorcist (1973), based on the best-selling book by William Peter Blatty and directed by William Friedkin. Sadly, the power of the film didn’t compel quite enough Academy members to vote for it at the 1974 awards ceremony, losing out to the Richard Zanuck and David Brown executive produced – whatever happened to them? – The Sting.

The second swam into the Best Picture nomination category after also being a best-selling book and also setting the box office alight and becoming a cultural phenomenon; it was of course Steven Spielberg’s JAWS (1975).

The film scored four nominations – incredibly nothing for Spielberg or in the acting stakes for Robert Shaw (surely one of the biggest Oscar nomination snubs in history).

JAWS did swallow whole wins for Best Score for John Williams, who was also working in the conductor’s pit that evening, meaning he didn’t have far to go, Best Editing for Verna Fields and Best Sound for Robert L. Hoyt, Roger Heman Jr, Earl Madery and John R. Carter.

And then horror went silent in that Best Picture category for over 15 years before triumphantly coming back from the dead – as it tends to do - at the 1992 Academy Awards with a Best Picture nomination and win – the first and only so far for horror – with The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which also took home Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay gongs for Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster, Jonathan Demme and for Ted Tally.

At the 2000 ceremony it was M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999) up for the Best Picture nod, but the Bruce Willis-starrer with the supernatural twist didn’t have a ghost of a chance against American Beauty.

Black Swan danced its way into the race in 2011, its psychological torment wrapped in arthouse prestige. Jordan Peele’s Get Out had us sitting uncomfortably and shattered expectations in 2018, proving that horror could be socially incisive and commercially explosive.

And Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, with its romantic-monster-movie heart, took the Best Picture nod in 2018.

But 2026 marks a turning point. Not one but two horror films muscled their way into the Best Picture lineup - and one of them did so with historic force, Sinners.

For a genre once dismissed as lowbrow – which is probably some of these on this list are more often labelled thrillers than horror - this is a watershed moment. Sinners dominated across the board: acting, directing, screenplay, cinematography, editing, design, and even the categories where horror traditionally thrives, like sound and makeup. It’s the kind of across-the-board recognition that signals not just respect but awe.

Then there’s Frankenstein, a bold, modern reimagining of Mary Shelley’s classic. Its nomination marks a symbolic full-circle moment: the monster who helped define cinematic horror, starting with the James Whale Boris Karloff classic in 1931, finally stands among the Academy’s elite. Its presence in the Best Picture race feels complete.

Horror is no longer sneaking into the Academy Awards through the back door. It’s not just seen, it’s positively striding in, backed by critical acclaim, box office success, and artistic ambition. Horror is no longer the phantom of the Oscars.

Words by Dean Newman

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