How Genre Films Like ‘Sinners’ and ‘Weapons’ Factor Into Oscar Race

Hailee Steinfeld and her “Sinners” co-star Michael B. Jordan shared the kind of on-set conversations you can only have while making a horror movie. While filming, one of their frequent debates was over what would it sound like to feed on someone as a vampire. 

“We were joking that we sounded like the Cookie Monster at one point because we thought that, while you’re overcome by this whole transformation, you are still you, and everything you’re feeling is just heightened,” Steinfeld tells Variety. “You want what you want a whole lot more. You feel the loss and hunger a whole lot more.”

Questioning the specifics of vampire behavior may not seem like a serious acting exercise, but it was just one of the ways the cast of Ryan Coogler’s hit spent their days digging down to the root of humanity that flows through the Southern gothic vampire story. Yet horror films like “Sinners” very seldom get their due for the tremendous effort put into making the genre recognizable and realistic. Aside from notable exceptions like “Silence of the Lambs” and “The Exorcist,” vampires, witches and the stuff of nightmares have long failed to be taken seriously by awards bodies, despite receiving acclaim from critics and audiences.

“It truly is one of the most emotionally demanding genres because it asks actors to live in extremes,” Steinfeld says. “It is often dismissed as less serious or whatnot, but I think when it’s done well, it is a mirror that reflects our deepest fears and desires in a very raw way. I don’t even know if you could call [“Sinners”] a horror film without calling it anything and everything else too.” 

Even the fantasy genre has its troubles, despite big wins for films like “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” and “The Shape of Water.” But this year promises to challenge that long-held stigma with a handful of worthy contenders making the case that horror, fantasy and other genre stories can be successful without scaring voters away.

“Sinners” is just the start. In the horror space, Warner Bros. also has “Weapons,” Zach Cregger’s box office smash that has a surprise-but-thrilling awards contender in Amy Madigan as Aunt Gladys. Madigan’s campaign may have begun as grassroots manifesting online, but her recent Critics Choice Awards win for best supporting actress and a  SAG-AFTRA Actor Awards nomination solidifies that bigger prizes are within reach. 

In the fantasy realm, “Wicked: For Good” hopes to continue its own streak of making witches and wizards (even fake ones like Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard of Oz) palatable awards players, with Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande already being chiseled into stone for repeat nominations for their performances as Elphaba and Glinda, respectively.

But on the fringes, Oscar voters can also consider aliens (or at least conspiracies about them) with Focus Features’ “Bugonia,” starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons. Voters can fall under the spell of a different kind of vamp with Jennifer Lopez’s tantalizing musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” or ponder the fantasia that is life itself with Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King adaptation “The Life of Chuck.” The possibilities to recognize genre storytelling feel infinite this awards season, and it is all anchored in character work.

For Omar Benson Miller, who plays sharecropper and nightclub bouncer Cornbread in “Sinners,” his transformational role was personally grounded by his own family. Coogler had given him photos of sharecroppers to consider while in prep, but Miller didn’t need the lesson.

“Little did he know this was actually in my family history because my grandfather was a sharecropper in Mississippi,” Miller says. “I had photos I could get from my family, so there was a lot that went into me trying to represent my people and my actual family correctly, which then I felt like would translate across the board. At the end of the day, the only way Ryan’s bold vision will work is if you care about the characters before the genre element is ever introduced.”

When Cornbread’s story takes a tragic, but not wholly unexpected, turn, Miller says showing what made his character human helps the monster he becomes lure the audience into a dangerous sense of familiarity.

“The only way that you actually consider letting him in is if you have built a relationship with him,” he says. “Since Cornbread has been the face at the door for a while, and you saw him previously in the field with his wife, then it really matters when he is pleading and trying to get in.”

Skirting that line between horror and fantasy was the unique challenge for “Wicked: For Good’s” Ethan Slater, who had to take his compassionate Boq and warp him into something far more heartless when he is magically transformed into the Tin Man. Despite being a kid-friendly story about flying monkeys, witchy wars and soaring musical declarations, the making of the Tin Man may be among the biggest leaps for audiences. But that’s where the genre can break open even the most human experiences.

“There’s a horror element to what happens to him,” Slater says. “It was actually really helpful to have a character going through this massive transformation of being open-hearted and optimistic and loving, and then have that stolen from him and his heart shrinking. Sometimes magic is just a helpful way of expressing something that is innately human.”

The physical performance in this case also gets an assist from the prosthetics that let Slater slip into Boq’s new silver-plated era. “It was one of the benefits of working with such an amazing makeup and prosthetic team because I was wearing different skin,” he says. “That is also a very human thing — to not feel at home in your own body.”

Slater says genre storytelling can sometimes foster an authentic emotional platform that’s even more realistic than a traditional drama.

“When we are telling human stories, we control ourselves more than people do in real life, where we have really high highs and really low lows,” he says. “In reality, we sometimes do things that seem unrealistic, but that’s how people live and it is liberating to push stories to those very real extremes.”

In that way, “The Life of Chuck” may be the toughest pill to swallow among this year’s genre contenders. King’s story tells of the end of the world, through the life of one man. It’s an ethereal, almost mystical dance with the questions of the universe and our part in it. But Flanagan remembers that after King saw the film (and loved it, by the way), he was honest that it wouldn’t be for everyone because even with vampires, witches and wizards on screen this year, embracing human emotion may be the scariest thing of all.

“[King said] ‘This works on me because its heart is on its sleeve,” Flanagan recently recalled on an FYC panel. “We’ve been trained very well to be skeptical, to be on guard, and not to lead with our emotions because that’s vulnerable. We all had a realistic expectation that this wouldn’t necessarily work for everyone because it was so earnest.”