46 Movies Nominated For 2024 FANGORIA Chainsaw Awards

Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise has been nominated for seven FANGORIA Chainsaw Awards, including Best Wide Release, Creature FX, Makeup FX (Tristan Lucas), Score (Stephen McKeon), Supporting Performance (Alyssa Sutherland), Lead Performance (Lily Sullivan), and a Best Director nomination for Cronin.

The new entry in the Evil Dead franchise took the action out of the woods and into a city high rise as the Deadites wreaked havoc on a single mom and her family (and all their unfortunate neighbors).

Check out our interview with Evil Dead Rise director Lee Cronin and nominated stars Alyssa Sutherland and Lily Sullivan.

Evil Dead Rise is now streaming on Prime Video and Max.

Another new entry in an established franchise comes in with 7 nominations. Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen transported audiences to Italy in the ‘70s for an Omen prequel that far exceeded general expectations.

Nominated this year for Best Wide Release, Cinematography (Aaron Morton), Costume Design (Paco Delgado), Score (Mark Korven), Lead Performance (Nell Tiger Free), Director (Arkasha Stevenson), and Screenplay (Arkasha Stevenson, Tim Smith and Keith Thomas; story by Ben Jacoby).

Read more in our interview with director Arkasha Stevenson on her fight against an NC-17 rating, and composer Mark Korven on creating the nightmarish score.

Brandon Cronenberg’s original horror Infinity Pool comes in with 6 nominations, including Best Wide Release, Cinematography (Karim Hussain), Score (Tim Hecker), Supporting Performance (Mia Goth), along with Best Screenplay and Best Director nominations for Cronenberg.

For more, check out our interview with Brandon Cronenberg.

Is original horror “back” yet? Asking for a friend. The Philippou brothers come in with six nominations for their wild take on possession-as-a-party-drug smash hit, Talk To Me. Nominated for Best Wide Release, Makeup FX (Bec Buratto, Paul Katte and Nick Nicolaou), Lead Performance (Sophie Wilde), Supporting Performance (Joe Bird), Screenplay (Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman), and Best Director (Danny and Michael Philippou).

Best Supporting Performance nominee Joe Bird graced the cover of FANGORIA #20.

Radio Silence’s vampire ballerina horror comedy Abigail joins the party with five nominations for Best Wide Release, Best Makeup FX (Liz Byrne, Paul Byrne & Matthew Smith) and three nominations for Best Supporting Performance (Kathryn Newton, Dan Stevens, and Alisha Weir).

Watch our interview with nominees Kathryn Newton and Dan Stevens.

Two of this year’s Best Wide Release nominees take us back to the ‘70s. But instead of immersing us in convents and Italian discotheques, Late Night With The Devil takes us to a soundstage for the live broadcast of a late night talk show. David Dastmalchian leads the charge as host Jack Delroy, who believes a live chat with the devil will be great for ratings. He’s probably right, but naturally, things go awry!

Nominated for four Chainsaw Awards, including Best Wide Release, Costume Design (Steph Hooke), Lead Performance (David Dastmalchian), and Best Screenplay (Colin and Cameron Cairnes).

For more, read our interview with David Dastmalchian and Colin and Cameron Cairnes after their SXSW premiere.

Easily one of the most unsettling films of the year. Terrified director Demián Rugna returns with a tale of curses, contaminants, and canines — When Evil Lurks. The Argentinian director made history at the Sitges Festival as the first Latin American film to win, and now he's nominated across four categories for the slightly more prestigious Chainsaw Awards.

In an interview with FANGORIA, Rugna shared some insight into his approach to extreme horror: "Part of it is a need to cause an uncomfortable moment in others, but also for my own amusement. That’s what one does when making that type of prank. Whether or not I execute it depends a lot on my stubbornness. When I want something, I don’t stop until I get it."

Read the full interview with Demián Rugna right here.

M3GAN danced her way into our hearts, and onto the ballot with three nominations, including Best Wide Release, Creature FX (Adrien Morot, Morot FX Studios) and Best Screenplay Akela Cooper; story by Akela Cooper and James Wan).

Believe it or not, Godzilla Minus One is not the only Academy Award winner on the ballot this year! Nominated for Best Wide Release and Best Score (Naoki Satô), Godzilla Minus One took the box office (and awards season) by storm.

Director Takashi Yamazaki felt it was important to make Godzilla "scary" again: "I always thought that if Godzilla actually showed up in front of me, it would be scary, undeniably. And I also felt the visual effects technology overall is at the point where I could create the scary Godzilla that I wanted. Now the emphasis I placed was on how close Godzilla is, and the detail — people are running away, and you see his foot come down. You know he’s coming close to the train, and you see all the details. So, it’s a closeness."

Read our full interview with Godzilla Minus One director Takashi Yamazaki.

Satanic Hispanics is an anthology film created entirely by Latino filmmakers, running the gamut from folklore to all-out wild chaos (we're looking at you, Hammer of Zanzibar). Showcasing a star-studded lineup of directors: Alejandro Brugués, Mike Mendez, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Eduardo Sánchez, and Demiàn Rugna.

Another Academy Award winner makes its way onto the ballot with three nominations. Poor Things is nominated for Best Cinematography, Costume Design, and Lead Performance (Emma Stone).

Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw The TV Glow brought to life a neon-soaked nostalgia for a TV show we've never seen but knew in our bones all along. Nominated for Best Limited Release and Best Cinematography (Eric K. Yue).

Cited as having some of this year’s fan-favorite kills (shout out to Steven Kostanski), In A Violent Nature takes us on a slightly different slasher journey. It’s like a ride-along, but with a crazed killer. Nominated for Best Makeup FX (Steven Kostanski) and Best Cinematography (Pierce Derks), who shot the whole thing (or rather reshot the whole thing) on a $5,000 Canon C70.

Sydney Sweeney starred in and produced Immaculate, a throwback to good old-fashioned nunsploitation. Religious horror is really having a moment, and we are here for it.

Nominated for Best Lead Performance (Sydney Sweeney) and Best Costume Design (Lisa Crescioli). It turns out Sydney Sweeney is actually a huge horror fan, and she shared some of her all-time favorites with us.

Another horror comedy enters the ring with two nominations. The Diablo Cody penned Lisa Frankenstein is an ‘80s goth teen dream, with lead Kathryn Newton slinging one-liners with a precision set to kill. This is Newton’s second appearance on the ballot, nominated for a Best Supporting Role in Abigail AND a Best Lead Performance for her titular role in Lisa Frankenstein.

Funny enough, during an interview, Newton explained that when she first read the script for Lisa Frankenstein, she felt Lisa was more of a supporting character, and Creature was the focus of the film. Congrats on your Chainsaw-nominated leading role, Kathryn!

Also nominated for Best Costume Design (Meagan McLaughlin). Go behind the scenes with McLaughlin, and check out our full interview with Kathryn Newton and Lisa Frankenstein co-star Cole Sprouse right here.

It’s no wonder French director Sébastien Vaniček was tapped to make an upcoming Evil Dead film. Once you’ve seen Infested, it becomes a very clear pairing. The French spider horror crawls onto the ballot with two nominations for Best Creature FX (Thierry Onillon and Léo Ewald) and Best International Release.

Check out our full interview with Sébastien Vaniček.

Brian Duffield’s unique take on alien horror, No One Will Save You, is nominated in two categories: Best Streaming Premiere and Best Lead Performance (Kaitlyn Dever). 

The largely dialogue-free movie didn’t initially start out that way intentionally, Duffield shares:  “In Final Draft, it usually pops up if you’ve written the name before as a character that speaks, and that hadn’t happened [in the writing process yet], and that’s when I realized, 'Oh, fuck, she hasn’t talked.' I was 40 pages in at that point, and I knew she was about to head back home and be alone again, so…”

The ending had the potential to be more divisive than the lack of dialogue, “And as for the ending: for me, it was about Kaitlyn’s character and, I guess, two things...” Read more on that in Scott Wampler’s spoiler-filled interview with Brian Duffield.

Another vampire has entered the ballot, but there’s nothing comedic about The Last Voyage of the Demeter. Nominated for Best Creature FX (Göran Lundström) for his horrifying design of the blood-sucking stowaway, brought to life by creature actor Javier Botet. 

The look is featured on the cover of FANGORIA #20. For more, check out our interview with The Last Voyage of the Demeter's Javier Botet.

Emma Tammi’s feature film adaptation of the hit video game Five Nights at Freddy’s blew up the box office and streaming platforms. In no small part, thanks to the nominated Best Creature FX created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. The animatronic monsters of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza go from cuddly to carnivorous in a horrifyingly believable fashion.

In the first of five Best Documentary Feature nominees on our list, the maestro of giallo receives the documentary treatment in Dario Argento Panico.

Take a walk through giallo (and cinema) history with a combination of archival footage, interviews with Argento himself, and an impressive roster of interviewees, including Asia Argento, Fiore Argento, Nicolas Winding Refn, Gaspar Noè, Guillermo del Toro, Michel Savia and Lamberto Bava.

The feature-length documentary is exclusively on Shudder, we shared a special sneak peek at the legendary Guillermo del Toro discussing Argento’s Deep Red.

Philipp Escott returns to the roots of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, accompanied by some familiar faces, including filmmakers and critics, delving into the reasons behind the movie’s impact on an entire generation and its perpetuating legacy in this Best Documentary Feature nominee.

Satanic Panic runs amok! Nominated for Best Documentary Feature, Satan Wants You follows the true untold story of the ‘80s moral panic that punctuated the decade, focusing on the rotten root— a memoir entitled Michelle Remembers.

The book, written by a psychiatrist and his patient, allegedly relied on recovered memory therapy to uncover Michelle’s abduction by “baby-stealing Satanists.”

This documentary breaks down the new shark movie subgenre that exploded after the success of Jaws. Dive into the weird, wild cinematic legacy of sharks on film. For more, the Sharksploitation filmmakers Josh Miller and Stephen Scarlata put together this primer of 10 shark movies you’ll love to sink your teeth into.

Erotic thrillers to the front! Our fifth Best Documentary Feature nominee goes in search of the forgotten world of the direct-to-video erotic thriller, an American film genre that once dominated late-night cable television and the shelves of neighborhood video stores.

Nominated for Best First Feature, Bomani J. Story’s The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster riffs on familiar Frankenstein lore with a unique framing. Brilliant and grieving teenager Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes) is sick of witnessing death and absorbing its impact.

Deciding that “death is a disease,” she sets out to invent a cure and succeeds—but not without terrible consequences. Read more on inoculating death with the cast and creator.

Another Frankenstein riff enters the ballot, this time in the form of Laura Moss’ Birth/Rebirth.  This exploration of a mother’s love centers on a morgue technician (Marin Ireland) who successfully reanimates the body of a little girl. But we know it’s not quite that simple!

To keep her breathing, she will need to harvest biological materials from pregnant women. When the girl’s mother (Judy Reyes) discovers her baby alive, they enter into a deal that forces them both down a dark path of no return. Nominated for Best First Feature.

With slight elements of an Indian folklore-infused A Nightmare On Elm Street, writer/director Bishal Dutta delivers a hard-hitting and terrifying original horror story with It Lives Inside.

Sam is desperate to fit in at school, rejecting her Indian culture and family to be like everyone else. When a mythological demonic spirit latches onto her former best friend, she must come to terms with her heritage to defeat it.  Read our full interview with Bishal Dutta and learn more about the true story that inspired the movie. Nominated for Best First Feature.

Nominated for Best First Feature, Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink follows two small children who wake up in the middle of the night to discover their parents are missing. The atmospheric feature debut became a viral sensation.

Ball shared: “Shooting a movie in the house you grew up in about two characters that are more or less you and your sister, I didn’t have to try to make it more personal – it just sort of happened. And then an added benefit was my mom had saved a bunch of childhood toys that we used in the movie, so it got even more personal.”

Read our full interview with Skinamarink director Kyle Edward Ball.

Robert Morgan’s live-action feature debut is nominated for Best First Feature. Stopmotion traces the path of a stop-motion animator who begins a new, rather startling puppet project, where the characters in her film take on a real-world life of their own.

In a FANGORIA interview with stop-motion master Phil Tippett, Morgan shared: "This movie, Stopmotion, was based on my own experience making a short film. It was a 23-minute short film about ten years ago that seemed to take on a life of its own. And I got quite ill as a result of it.

It seemed to have its own agenda. It was almost as if the film itself had its own consciousness, like it came alive." Read the full conversation between Phil Tippett and Robert Morgan.

The Coffee Table is one of those “you just have to watch it” deals.  “We wanted to make one of the cruelest films ever made, one that people cannot forget”, said Director Caye Casas.

“It will make them feel very strong emotions, real terror without monsters, zombies, ghosts or murderers, only with a dining room table and the cruelest fate that you can imagine.”

Nominated for Best International Movie, find more on The Coffee Table in FANGORIA Issue #23.

Writer-director Jang Jae-hyun's Exhuma follows the process of excavating an ominous grave as the dreadful consequences buried underneath are unleashed. Nominated for Best International Movie.

Michelle Garza Cervera's Mexican folk horror Huesera: The Bone Woman been described as “a Mexican folk-inspired spin on crucial maternal horrors such as The Babadook, Hereditary, and Rosemary’s Baby.” Nominated for Best International Movie.

Jigsaw himself lands a Best Lead Performance nomination! For his ninth appearance as John Kramer in the Saw franchise, Tobin Bell is nominated for Saw X. The tenth installment in the Saw film series serves as both a direct sequel to the original Saw and a prequel to 2005’s Saw II.

Another addition to the Best Lead Performance category, Lupita Nyong’o brought us to tears in the latest entry (another prequel, as it were) in the A Quiet Place franchise. Frodo the Cat shockingly did not take home a Best Supporting Performance nod, but shocking no one at all, Lupita absolutely knocked her performance out of the park and onto another plane.

The Best Limited Release category continues with found footage horror The Outwaters. Director Robbie Banfitch shared some insight into achieving the look while still remaining in the realm of found footage: “I wanted to use a consumer camera [Canon 70D] so that it didn’t look like a Hollywood crew shot it, but I also wanted to make it look pretty. I conceived of my character in the film as a Terrence Malick fan, so my cinematographer character had a tendency to frame shots in a style that was artistically inspired. I wanted to make a ‘pretty’ found-footage movie.”

Banfitch added, “I’m not trying to craft a particular style or anything. I want to give each particular story what I think would be the most interesting-looking movie out of it.” Read our full interview with Banfitch.

Joe Lynch’s Suitable Flesh is an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep” and stars some of our favorite people (including Barbara Crampton, Heather Graham, Bruce Davison, and Johnathon Schaech).

The story follows psychiatrist Elizabeth Derby (Graham), who becomes obsessed with helping a young patient suffering from an extreme personality disorder. But her desire to help leads her into dark occult danger as she tries to escape a horrific fate. Nominated for Best Limited Release.

Nominated for Best Streaming Premiere, Sick is a bit of a time capsule. Co-written by Scream’s Kevin Williamson and Katelyn Crabb, Crabb shared that the duo approached the piece in “a way that acts as a period piece wrapped in a slasher package.”

The story follows best friends Parker (Gideon Adlon) and Miri (Bethlehem Million) shacking up in a lake house to ride out the quarantine. Trouble is, they’re not as alone as they presume themselves to be, which leads to all manner of Kevin Williamson-style slasher shenanigans.

Read our full interview with Katelyn Crabb, tracing the journey from Scream fan to Sick co-writer.

Horror comedy is enjoying a pretty respectable showing on this year’s ballot! Totally Killer director Nahnatchka Khan has a lush background in comedy, Totally Killer marks her first stab at horror.

The time travel/slasher/horror comedy sees Kiernan Shipka’s Jamie being sent back to 1987 to face offf against the town’s infamous “Sweet Sixteen Killer.” In order to do that, she’ll need to team up with her teen mom, who does not know she’s her mom (and is kind of an asshole, tbh) leading to some very funny moments. Check out our full interview with Totally Killer director Nahnatchka Khan.

Continuing the ‘80s vibe, V/H/S/85 plays out as an ominous mixtape blending never-before-seen snuff footage with nightmarish newscasts and disturbing home video to create a surreal, analog mashup.

As the sixth entry in the long-running franchise, V/H/S/85 marks anthology segments 27-31, helmed by directors Scott Derrickson, Natasha Kermani, Mike P. Nelson, David Bruckner, and Gigi Saul Guerrero. Nominated for Best Limited Release.

Keeping with the period horror, the Adams family is taking it way back to Depression-era America. John Adams, Toby Poser, and daughter, Zelda Adams all share directing and writing credits on Where The Devil Roams which follows a family of murderous sideshow performers as they travel the dying carnival circuit.

Following the success of their feature film, Hellbender, the family mentioned wanting to up the ante on their FX, and up it they did. It’s been an incredible journey watching the filmmakers grow in real time and we can’t help but get giddy over every new mention of upcoming projects from this filmmaking family. Nominated for Best Streaming Premiere.

Based on Paul G. Tremblay's The Cabin At The End of the World, M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin, centers on a family and an impossible ultimatum. 

Four strangers pay the vacationing family a visit to tell them they’ve “been chosen to make a horrible decision: Your family must choose to willingly sacrifice one of the three of you, to prevent the apocalypse.”

The ringleader of this ragtag Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is Leonard, played by Best Supporting Performance nominee Dave Bautista. Built like a beast, Bautista brings a gentleness to mild-mannered Leonard, his sincerity and conviction leaving the audience absolutely uncertain of anything. And what’s more chilling than that?

Horror comedy The Blackening is another title that flew slightly below the radar, but ultimately found an audience. It centers around a group of Black friends who reunite for a Juneteenth weekend getaway only to find themselves trapped in a remote cabin with a twisted killer.

Forced to play by his rules, the friends soon realize this ain’t no motherf****** game.” A sequel to The Blackening is in the works with writers Dewayne Perkins and Tracy Oliver returning. If you missed this one, it’s a good time to catch up with it, Dewayne Perkins is nominated for Best Supporting Performance.

Wow, there you have it! 46 incredible horror movies nominated across 15 categories. Obviously, this list does not include out Achievement In Non-Fiction, Best TV Series, or Best Video Game categories, but you can see a full list of nominees on our initial announcement and on the ballot.

The polls close July 20th so make sure to get your votes in now. Click here to access the official 2024 FANGORIA Chainsaw Awards ballot.

Use our Letterboxd list of nominees to keep track of your watchlist and find where you can watch all of the nominated movies.