HORROR Queens that Deserve Better from The OSCARS | Top 10 Female Horror Performances

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Demi Moore, Amy Madigan, two Oscar nominations and a win back-to-back for horror performances. And now with India Navarrete in Obsession making a real noise to be the third year in a row that we get some top-of-the-line horror nominations at the Oscars, something is happening. The Academy is finally paying attention to my favorite genre. If we are really in this new era for horror at the Oscars, then we have to talk about all the great performances that deserved a lot more love. Because you know those horror nominations have always been few and far between. That's no mystery. And the wins, in a 98-year history, I could probably count them on one hand. So today I want to celebrate some of these women who deserve to be in that conversation long before the Oscars decided to buy a ticket to the show.

[00:00:55]What is up, ladies and gentlemen?

[00:00:56]Welcome back to the garage. Gerald here with you, of course. Whenever I get a chance in my crazy YouTube, whatever, to mix horror and the Oscars together, I'm going to take that opportunity because those are literally my two favorite things that, up until the last few years, have not really ever mixed together. Very rarely. You have your Silence of the Lambs, right? Get Out by Jordan Peele. Kathy Bates in Misery going all the way back to my high school days. And a few more kind of sprinkled throughout in my lifetime, which by the way, I'm not a young dude. It just doesn't happen very often. So as I kind of alluded to in my cold open, because of India Navarrete's amazing, breathtakingly phenomenal performance in the new horror thriller from Karyn Kusama called Obsession, I started looking at some of these old, what I'll call modern, horror performances. And I said, "Man, there are so many opportunities that the Academy had in just the last 10 years, by the way." In fact, the oldest movie that I'm going to mention on this list is only 8 years old. We're going to be ranking today my personal favorite female performances in the horror genre that I think were very very deserving of an Oscar nomination.

[00:02:04]Before we get started, there were so many. I could have literally done 50, but again, I know I'm biased because it's my favorite genre. But real quick, I'm just going to list five honorable mentions. Those would essentially be my 15 through 11, and then we'll hop into our countdown. In number 15 would be Maika Monroe from Long Legs. Although she's been in quite a few that could be on this list. Nell Tiger Free, a newcomer who was in the First Omen a couple years ago. Sophie Thatcher from Companion last year. This year, 2026, we have what I think should be a contender, Rachel McAdams in a movie called Send Help. And then my number 11 would essentially be Sally Hawkins, a previous Oscar nominee actually for kind of a horror romance, The Shape of Water, but in this case, Bring Her Back.

[00:02:50]All right, coming in, my number 10 is Morfydd Clark, maybe one of the more lesser-known names that's going to be on my list for a movie called Saint Maud.

[00:02:58]This is a fully committed performance.

[00:03:00]And what I think makes the performance work is that Clark isn't afraid to show the cracks, right? Just as much as the confidence that her character has. Maud starts as this like devout caregiver, and she has a wounded past, but she doesn't just worship God, you know, she kind of becomes convinced that she's his physical disciple. Clark plays it with like complexity around faith and mental health. And honestly, I wasn't really expecting that. She can be terrifying, but the real menace in her performance, I think, comes from somewhere quieter, the loneliness, the isolation, the kind of delusion that like slowly builds when someone has been left alone with their thoughts for too long, you know? I love a good like possession or demonic horror film, right? Religious horror. But Saint Maud is something kind of different. It's super eerie and unsettling, and it it's a much more grounded tale because Clark takes you right to the edge of understanding what Maud's world is and then shows you exactly why that world can be so dangerous. Also, the last like 10 seconds of this movie, I literally haven't it hasn't left my mind since I saw it.

[00:04:11]Number nine is Emily Blunt for A Quiet Place and I'm talking about the original from 2018, although she was great in the sequel as well. But look, you know, these post-apocalyptic stories about you know, survival and parents protecting their children, I mean, it's nothing new, of course.

[00:04:25]But what Blunt does here in this film is she adds a layer to that that most of those other movies don't really reach.

[00:04:30]That childbirth scene alone where she's giving birth in a bathtub by herself while these blind creatures that hunt by sound are tearing through her home, it's one of the most like tense, physically committed performances without any dialogue that I've really ever seen. And that's what makes this performance overall so impressive. Because so much of it is really silent. Blunt is carrying the grief of having already lost a child, but she's also holding it together for the children that she still has as well as having one on the way, of course.

[00:05:01]And these are all under circumstances that are, you know, to put it mildly, pretty dire. Oh, and by the way, she actually had a path to the Oscar nomination that year, one of only a couple on this list that I could say that about. She actually won the SAG Award that year and she also got nominated for the Critics' Choice for the same role.

[00:05:17]The Academy just wasn't ready, apparently. I think if this film had come out like two or three years later, I think she probably would have been in the five.

[00:05:29]And number eight is Norwegian actress Lea Myren for a movie called The Ugly Stepsister. This one might be the most like underrated pick on the list. In fact, it is. The film came out last year. Those of you that watch this channel know this, but it ended up as my number one of 2025 and more people need to be talking about this, but if they don't, don't worry cuz I won't shut up about it. Myra plays Elvira, essentially Cinderella's stepsister, and she's given that skeleton of the Grimm fairy tale Cinderella as her backstory, but slowly drifts past the edges of sanity, right?

[00:05:59]She chases what she believes is true beauty throughout the whole film. She has this arc from like a sweet, naive outcast to this obsessive, like mean-spirited diva, and I am here for it. I loved her in this film. Her character's kind of tragic loneliness, that desperate need to be as pretty as her stepsister, pushes her into some pretty unthinkable territory. The film wraps all of that in dark comedy, body horror, real gross-out stuff, and some unnerving dramatic moments. And as a horror fan, this was absolutely my cup of tea, and Myron's work here does not get enough credit.

[00:06:37]At number seven, Lily-Rose Depp from Robert Eggers' Nosferatu. A lot of Depp's performance, which she's not the only one on this list, but it lives in her face and her mannerisms, you know?

[00:06:47]She had to carry the haunting of this film almost entirely through expression, and she perfected it. A lot of credit goes to Eggers, of course, but here's what matters, because Ellen Hutter in this version is completely transformed from the 1922 original, because she isn't just the object of Orlok's obsession here. The story is now told through her POV, and that shift alone makes this a fundamentally, like different movie.

[00:07:13]Ellen goes from being the prize, right, to being the one with the actual power.

[00:07:17]And Depp carries that transition with grace, sadness, and honestly some genuine movie magic in the final act.

[00:07:24]She goes from that pretty dangling keychain to the actual key itself, and watching that happen across the entire runtime, you realize, you know, just how much of this story that Lily-Rose Depp is pulling on her own.

[00:07:42]At number six, Florence Pugh in Midsommar from Ari Aster. I would say we're crossing over into some pretty elite territory at this point. Almost every performance on this list is dealing with grief in some way, and horror has been criticized for having that be too much of the focus as of late. Florence Pugh's Dani lives through an unthinkable tragedy right at the top of the film, and it doesn't just like alter her emotionally like it does in a lot of these films. It reshapes everything. It reshapes her relationship with her boyfriend, Christian, which will be very pivotal, her sense of self.

[00:08:15]It eventually takes her to the remote hills of Sweden for an annual midsummer festival that is not as cheery as it sounds when you start watching the film.

[00:08:24]I'll tell you, man, the wailing that we hear from Florence Pugh and the screams at the beginning of this film in that first act, the first time I heard that in the theater, it literally wrecked me for the rest of the runtime, and I still think about it sometimes when I see the movie poster or something. It was just like, "Holy she went somewhere."

[00:08:39]Ari Aster builds what I've referred to as like a daylight horror film, you know? It's very much in the spirit of movies like The Wicker Man, and Pugh is the central heartbeat of this one. You know, with every moment where I go, "What the hell am I watching?" and every like cringe look-away sequence, all of it is in service of watching Dani process grief on the most surreal stage imaginable. And when this movie finally ended, I can remember looking up at the screen as the credits were rolling, and I was going, "You know what? Good for her."

[00:09:18]>> [music] >> owns that concept from the jump because her Skye Riley plays almost like someone with multiple personalities or schizophrenia, you know, she's erratic, fractured, completely unraveling in front of a bunch of people that assume it's just the pressures of fame, right?

[00:09:49]The audience watching the movie knows exactly what's really happening while everyone else around her just doesn't believe her. She gives some of the best screams of any of these horror performances that I'm mentioning. This movie proved to me and clearly a lot of other people that she's a legitimate star, you know, the nature of the Smile franchise being what it is, I doubt that we're going to see Skye Riley again, but Naomi Scott is forever on my watch list. She is coming for some awards sooner than later. I honestly believe that. She's just too good.

[00:10:24]All right, here we go at number four.

[00:10:26]This is the holidays, I'd say the reason of for the season. But what I'll say is this is the real reason that we're all here today. In the Navarette an Obsession is at my number four and I did a full review of this movie on the channel. I'll tag it for you below, but here at the end of May it's still sitting at my number one for 2026 and I have been saying since I saw this film a few weeks ago that Navarette gives one of the best performances in horror history and I mean that with everything I have. You can argue with the wall. And it's absolutely the best I've seen in modern horror in quite a few years.

[00:10:58]Here's what I think makes it so difficult and extraordinary that we might take for granted, right? She's playing two versions of the same person, which is no huge, you know, gravitational thing. I mean, Michael B.

[00:11:08]Jordan just won the Oscar for doing the same thing, right? But the Nikki from the first act of the film, I'll just say, is warm, funny, you know, genuinely charming, sweet, you know? And then Freaky Nikki for the rest of the film, which is not that stuff. Now, these two people feel completely different within the same body, right? Freaky Nikki is erratic, physically unhinged. She does things with her body and her face in this role that were really unsettling, honestly. But underneath all that, you can still feel the real Nikki fighting to break through. There's a moment late in the film that best describes this, I think. I won't give it away, but we hear the real Nikki speak, just briefly, whispering. And what she's saying is really devastating and emotional. And the fact that her performance made that moment land as hard as it did, you know, to me says everything about the range that she's working with here. The Academy has a chance to do something really meaningful by recognizing this performance. This could be like Pippen tossing an alley-oop to Jordan in the '90s. You know, we just need the Academy not to mess it up.

[00:12:19]At number three, Toni Collette's in Hereditary. If you've been paying attention to the horror community, I'll say, over the last like seven or eight years, you know why she's on this list.

[00:12:30]Collette's Annie is the performance that kind of started this conversation to begin with, at least in modern times.

[00:12:35]It's the one where horror fans collectively said, "Enough already. The Academy has got to start recognizing this genre the same way it does everything else out there." And when you watch what Collette does in this film, it's not hard to understand why we're saying that. She's playing a woman on the absolute brink, carrying loss, motherhood, family history. It just keeps unraveling the more you learn about it. The sanity gets shakier with every scene she's in.

[00:13:01]The craft is undeniable. She is like top tier. Genuinely frightening at times, and it has really nothing to do with like makeup or effects. It's just her performance carrying the weight of all that. The Academy's bias towards this genre was still strong enough to keep her off the stage. That's just the truth. But if there is a bright side to her snub, perhaps it's that the performance shook the Academy out of their daze, and it forced them to start noticing a genre that they typically ignore because they did start come a little more frequently after this.

[00:13:37]My runner-up here is Lupita Nyong'o in Jordan Peele's Us. Here's another dual performance. It's not the first one we've mentioned, right? She's playing two versions of the same character. It's a bit of a theme with some of these performances, but they're not It's not easy to do at the same time. You know, by default Lupita plays Adelaide, who is like a contemporary mother. She's on vacation with her family, you know, kind of doing all the normal things, but she also plays Red, which is her doppelganger. It's part of this like shadow population called the Tethered that live beneath the surface of like American society. Red can be menacing and scary, but I think that comes from somewhere real because the nuance underneath her story is haunting and tragic once the film really kind of shows you what's going on. And what Lupita does like physically and vocally to differentiate these two people while keeping them both like seemingly connected was really extraordinary. I mean, the voice that she gives Red alone, you watch some clips on YouTube, I still haven't been able to shake it like 5 years later. Much like Emily Blunt earlier, I would say Lupita probably came the closest to the Oscar stage for a horror performance on this list. You know, she had a real path because she also got the SAG nomination.

[00:14:43]She got the Critics' Choice nomination, and she was a previous winner. She won like 5 years before this for 12 Years a Slave. So, her name was definitely in the conversation, I would say. But, you know, as a recurring theme, the horror bias, you know, gets in the way again big time with this one.

[00:15:02]And the only performance I can put above Nyong'o is one of the more recent ones.

[00:15:05]It's a few years old now, and that is Mia Goth in Ti West's Pearl. Here's the analogy I used when I reviewed this film when it came out. I said, you know, what if Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz did her little adventure, came back to Kansas, and then eventually snapped and went on a killing spree? For me, that's Pearl. And Mia Goth plays that title character with a delicate lunacy. She is teetering on the edge of madness. She never quite falls over that edge. She has this dream, right? Of being a star.

[00:15:33]You know, and you've seen the memes and whatever of Mia doing that, being a movie star. She plans to escape this like farm life, you know?

[00:15:40]>> [music] >> And out of the rigorous like strictness of her mother, all in service of this dream to be a star. But when that plan falls apart and doesn't work out, plan B kicks in. And plan B in this case stands for bloody as hell. Also, Mia Goth has this 3-minute monologue in the film where she explains her grief over losing out on her dream. It's one continuous shot, and it's one of the best acted monologues that I've literally ever seen in my life. And then, on top of that, kind of similar as the credits roll, she like holds this smile and blank stare directly into the camera that I promise you will shake whatever is left of your core. You know, she has these shy cries for attention, these departures from reality. It's super impressive. You know, she shows you a woman that is so open to what the world has to offer, but that also makes her extremely vulnerable to like the harsh realities of the world, right? And in the end, you know, she's just been so corrupted, she's beyond any point of no return. The Oscar nomination never came, even though I was actually predicting her for like the first eight or nine months of that year, cuz that's how good this thing was.

[00:16:42]Probably the same thing I'm going to do with Nawarat this year. And I'll just put it this way, Indie Nawarat in Obsession is the best at least female horror performance that I've seen since Mia Goth in Pearl.

[00:16:55]So, if that tells you anything, that's how hard I'm going to ride for her this season, which is kind of what the inspiration for this video was to begin with. What did I miss? What horror performance do you think, in the realm of, you know, legitimacy, like, you know, there's other ones that I absolutely am crazy fond of, but at the same time, there's no way they would ever get an Oscar nomination. At least all the ones I mentioned >> [music] >> would have somewhat of a path to do it.

[00:17:19]You know, like I love like Lauren LaVera in the Terrifier films, but I mean, we might be getting we might be making some strides, but we need to crawl before we walk there. The Academy would not nominate Terrifier if it was literally the only movie that was released this year. So, you know, there's that. Let me know down below. I really want to know this actually. Hit me in the comments.

[00:17:37]Do you think, or give me the percentage chance that Inès Navarrete, the 25-year-old kind of newcomer who plays Nikki in Obsession. What are the What are your odds that she would be nominated for an Oscar this year? Do you think Rachel McAdams from Send Help this year deserves it and would have a shot?

[00:17:54]How much horror are we going to see this time around, the third year in a row if we can get a performance nominated? I'm all about it. Hit me in the comments.

[00:18:00]Let me know all your thoughts. Thanks for tuning in to this video. I'll see you guys very soon in the garage.

[00:18:08]>> [music]