horror movie

The first shot of director Lynne Ramsay’s stubborn and exasperating postpartum nightmare “Die My Love” would be a great opener for a horror movie. The camera lurks in the kitchen of an isolated ranch house, as still and foreboding as a ghost, while a couple named Grace and Jackson (Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson) poke around the front porch of their newly inherited property. The two take several beats to go inside, long enough that we suspect these crazy kids are making a dangerous mistake. Just look at the wallpaper. Those florals would make anyone crack.

“It’s not New York but it’s ours,” Jackson says of the rural home, left to him by his uncle who died violently upstairs in a way that Grace finds hilarious. He grew up in the area and his parents, Pam and Harry (Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte), still live nearby. Neither Jackson nor Grace say anything about their past lives back in the city, but he yearns to play drums and she once claimed to write. There’s a sense that their dreams have stalled out, either due to finances, passion or talent. So they move in, have a baby and pivot to domestic chaos.

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Lawrence and Pattinson are such a natural, overdue pairing that it’s a surprise to realize this is the first time they’ve teamed up to make the kind of polarizing, go-for-broke prestige film they both enjoy. The two stars launched into the public consciousness roughly around the same time, then followed the same trajectory from teen franchise idols to creatively ambitious A-listers and now, more recently, newish parents making a movie about miserable parents whose hopes have run aground. Lawrence has two tots under 3; Pattinson, a toddler. Their kids shouldn’t watch this movie until college.

In a dynamic montage, Ramsay sets up their boyfriend-girlfriend pair as lusty but strange. Jackson and Grace flirt by fighting like wild beasts. Nuzzling, sniffing, biting, wrestling — that’s foreplay (and she’s more into it than he is). But they can’t communicate with words. “If you’re not feeling good, maybe we should, like … talk?” Jackson says tentatively to his increasingly restless and unstable partner. Grace isn’t interested in talking, though occasionally she’s game to scream. When they fight for real, their bodies twist into spasms of outrage. And when the other one isn’t looking, each seems to power down — Lawrence’s Grace physically collapsing like an unplugged air dancer — a clue of how much energy they must privately expend to make it work.

“Die My Love,” adapted by Ramsay, Enda Walsh and Alice Birch from the 2012 novel by Argentine author Ariana Harwicz, makes parenthood feel like being handcuffed to an anchor that’s sinking into a swamp. Lawrence’s Grace needs help and the more she flails, the worse she makes things. The book is an inner monologue of poison: “How could a weak, perverse woman like me, someone who dreams of a knife in her hand, be the mother and wife of those two individuals?” the first paragraph seethes. But Ramsay rejects putting its angst into words. As with Joaquin Phoenix in “You Were Never Really Here,” she prefers characters who silently roil under their skin.

The tension in this home starts quiet — too quiet — with Grace cranking up kiddie albums by Alvin and the Chipmunks and Raffi to drown out whatever noise is happening in her head. After Jackson brings home a stray dog, the racket becomes unbearable, with sound designers Tim Burns and Paul Davies skillfully and cruelly making sure that no matter how far Grace roams, she can still hear the darned thing bark.

Lacking much perspective into Grace, we mostly see a mentally unwell woman incensed that her sexual playtime is over. She howls with the urge to mate, prowling the house in matching fancy bras and thong sets that clash with this disheveled house and its stockpile of cheap beer. Occasionally, a mysterious leather-clad biker (LaKeith Stanfield) speeds by, considering a quickie with this bored beauty.

Grace’s erotic agony is reductive and a bit ridiculous, although I think the script is also trying to imply that Grace herself is focused on the wrong problems. The film represents her depression by coating the night scenes in so much blue tint that even Picasso might suggest dialing it back. Despite cinematographer Seamus McGarvey’s efforts to put us in her headspace with lenses that make the world blur and swirl around her, you’re more afraid of Grace than for Grace, especially when the shock editing has her smashing through doors like Michael Myers.

Hurling herself into every scene, Lawrence puts her full faith in Ramsay. It’s not a trust fall so much as a trust cannonball. As good and committed as Lawrence is, there were times I wanted to rescue her from her own movie, to protect her from the fate of Faye Dunaway when “Mommie Dearest” turned another blond Oscar winner into a joke.

Yet, this is a character who hates pity and I can’t help but admire that Ramsay faces down today’s phonily upbeat and relatable motherhood discourse with this boogey-mom who keeps herself aloof. Grace treats the older women in her family like a wall of advice to be tuned out even when they’re right. “Everybody goes a little loopy the first year,” Spacek’s Pam says, offering empathy that falls on deaf ears. (Spacek delivers a lovely, endearingly layered turn.) And while Grace is so lonely she literally claws the walls, she rejects any overture of friendship, either from a perky fellow parent (Sarah Lind) or a peppy cashier (Saylor McPherson) whose attempts to start a conversation go so badly that when the poor dear asks Grace if she’s found everything she’s looking for, Grace huffs, “In life?”

Pattinson has the more recessive role but his performance is so subtle and clever that it’s worth watching closely. His Jackson is pathetic, passive and skittish around his baby’s mother, who he both longs to heal and tries to avoid. He has a few moments that play so close to comedy — say, whining to be let into the bathroom — that you wish the movie would do more to encourage our pained, guttural laughs. The punchlines are there, such as a beat after one meltdown where Jackson admits he’s getting really stressed out and Grace coolly replies, “About what?”

There’s one scene in which Grace reveals a snippet of backstory that might explain her psychology, and I think that specificity is a narrative misstep. What’s powerful about Grace is that she’s howling for all parents, even the mostly happy ones. Harwicz’s book deliberately never gave her character a name.

Even inside this movie, Grace’s anguish is universal. Yes, she wanders into the wilderness at night, but so do her in-laws Harry and Pam, for reasons of their own.There are dark vibrations emanating from almost every character, even the minor ones, although Grace is too caught up in herself to take any comfort from that. But Ramsay is comfortable suggesting that everyone feels crazy and miserable. I suspect she thinks it’s the most normal way to live.

There’s a good chance that a horror movie will be nominated for the 2025 best picture Oscar.

And if Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” or Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” make the cut, it will be the first time in the Academy Awards’ 97-year history that a fright film has been nominated in consecutive contests.

It’s long overdue. And if you believe part of Oscars’ purpose is to promote the industry and celebrate its achievements, there’s no better time for the academy to get over its traditional disdain for cinematic monstrosities.

As most other sectors of Hollywood’s film business look precarious — adult dramas, the traditional awards season ponies, are dropping like dead horses at the box office, while attendance for the once-mighty superhero supergenre continues to disappoint — horror has hit its highest annual gross of all time, $1.2 billion, with a good two months left to go.

“Sinners,” released in April, remains in fifth place on the domestic box office chart with $279 million. Its fellow Warner Bros. offerings “The Conjuring: Last Rites,” “Weapons” and “Final Destination: Bloodlines” occupied slots 12 through 14 as of mid-October.

Mia Goth as Elizabeth and Oscar Isaac in “Frankenstein.”

(Ken Woroner / Netflix)

“Horror has been, historically, the Rodney Dangerfield of genres,” notes Paul Dergarabedian, head of marketplace trends for global media measurement firm Comscore. “It can’t get no respect.

“But horror is very important to the industry on so many levels now,” he continues. “We have four horror movies in the top 15 this year, all of those generating over $100 million in domestic box office. And to make a significant scary horror movie, you don’t have to break the bank. Look at [‘Weapons’ filmmaker Zach Cregger’s 2022 breakout feature] ‘Barbarian’; half of that was shot in a basement.” Similarly, compare “Sinners’” $90 million price tag to “Black Panther’s” $200 million.

Horror’s popularity has gone in cycles since Universal’s run of classic monster movies in the early 1930s. But profitability has been a reliable bet more often than not — and Karloff’s “Frankenstein” and Lugosi’s “Dracula” still resonate through pop culture while most best picture winners of the same era are forgotten.

Still, it wasn’t until 1974 that “The Exorcist” received the first best picture nomination for a horror film, and ahead of the success of “The Substance” at the 2025 Oscar nominations the genre’s fortunes had only marginally improved. Indeed, many of the titles usually cited as a mark of horror’s growing foothold in awards season — “Jaws,” “The Sixth Sense,” “Black Swan,” 1991 winner “The Silence of the Lambs” — are arguably better characterized as something else entirely, or at best as hybrids. (To wit, the sole monster movie that’s won best picture, Del Toro’s 2017 “The Shape of Water,” is primarily considered a romantic fantasy.)

Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners.”

(Warner Bros. Pictures)

Fright films’ reputation for delivering cheap thrills to undiscerning audiences was often deserved, but there were always stellar horror films that the academy overlooked. And more recently, films such as “The Substance,” “Sinners” and Jordan Peele’s 2017 nominee “Get Out” have pierced ingrained voter prejudices against the genre by adding social commentary and undeniable aesthetic quality without compromising gory fundamentals.

“The horror genre really does seem to be attracting great directors who are immersed in it, have a real auteur point-of-view and make interesting movies that have horror elements but explore other themes as well,” notes The Envelope’s awards columnist, Glenn Whipp. “‘Sinners’ is Ryan Coogler’s vampire movie, but it’s also about the Jim Crow South and American blues music. How can you resist that if you’re an academy voter?”

And with horror packing in filmgoers like no other genre, high-profile nominations could help the Academy Awards broadcast attract the bigger ratings its stakeholders have been desperately seeking at least since “The Dark Knight” failed to make the best picture cut in 2008.

Austin Abrams in “Weapons.”

(Warner Bros. Pictures)

“That was the whole reason we went to 10 potential nominees,” Dergarabedian recalls. “We wanted to have more blockbuster representation at the Oscars. This may be the perfect storm. If I were an academy voter, I would vote for ‘Sinners’ and ‘Weapons.’ I don’t think that’s an overstatement, given the films that have come out this year.”

Even beyond this “perfect storm,” though, Whipp sees a sea change afoot.

“Everything’s an Oscar movie now if it’s well made,” he says. “Studios aren’t really making traditional, grown-up dramas and the academy can only nominate what’s in front of them. Horror is being produced at a rate that is greater than it used to be, and at least two of these Warner movies really landed with audiences and critics. The genre is attracting some of our top filmmakers right now, and that’s something that will trickle down to the Oscars.”

“This is not a blip,” Dergarabedian concludes. “It’s a trend that feels like it’s happened overnight but it’s been a long time coming. Back in 2017 we had our first $1-billion-plus horror movie box office. If they stop making good horror movies it might be a blip, but I think Hollywood should take this and bloody run with it.”