SINNERS Sweeps The FANGORIA Chainsaw Awards – Could The Oscars Be Next?

To the surprise of almost certainly nobody, Ryan Coogler's Sinners won big at the the 2025 FANGORIA Chainsaw Awards, taking home four of the night's most coveted awards including Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Wide Release and Best Score in a well-deserved sweep that Smoke and Stack would surely be celebrating down at the juke joint.

If for some reason you managed to miss Sinners on its box office busting theatrical run (or one of its re-releases), the vampire epic stars Michael B. Jordan as aforementioned troubled twin brothers Smoke and Stack, who return to their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi to start again after almost a decade working for the mob, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back. Alongside Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld (Bumblebee, True Grit), newcomer Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell (in the his first of his two standout “weird creepy guy roles” of 2025, the second being Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later), Wunmi Mosaku (His House, Deadpool & Wolverine), Li Jun Li (Babylon), Jayme Lawson (The Woman King), Omar Benson Miller (True Lies) and the legendary Delroy Lindo (Da 5 Bloods) all give some of the best performances of the year in an absolutely stacked ensemble cast.

Sinners being Coogler's first post–Black Panther work, and an entirely original story no less, hype was always going to be high, (not to mention that, thanks to Blumhouse blockbusters and the street cred of smaller, more genre-focused labels like NEON and A24, horror is hotter than ever) but still nobody could have predicted the absolute bloodbath that Sinners wrought upon the box office following its release in spring of this year. Thanks to that tremendous theatrical run, where additional screenings by popular demand, word-of-mouth momentum and “exceptional holds” in huge international markets all helped to make the pic a huge hit in a year of incredibly stiff competition that included The Conjuring: Last Rites, Weapons, Final Destination: Bloodlines and 28 Years Later, Sinners racked up over $360 million racked up at the global box office, making it not only the biggest horror box office winner of 2025, but also the biggest original Hollywood movie since Christopher Nolan's Inception back in 2010. An incredible feat for any movie, sure, but Sinners is, again we'll remind you, an R-rated. Original. Horror. Movie.

So with mountains of cash, goodwill and Chainsaw Awards in tow, as March approaches, the big question begins to show its fangs – will Sinners stand a chance at the upcoming Oscars? As us horror fans know all too well, our favorite genre is all-too-often ignored by the Academy Awards (Toni Collette in Hereditary, we will avenge you!) However, if a film like last year's The Substance, a female-directed, gnarly as all hell body horror with a savagely satirical social message, can nab itself five Oscar nominations (and take home a well-deserved win for Best Makeup & Hairstyling), then who's to say the tide hasn't turned? Lest we forget, Robert Eggers' Nosferatu was also recognized with four nominations last year, and Alien: Romulus one of its own. And, let's be real here, if any 2025 horror movie deserves recognition from the higher ups in the Academy, Sinners undoubtedly takes the crown.

There's an argument to be made that Sinners could be nominated in pretty much any category at this year's Awards and stand a good chance of winning – of course, there's the obvious options like Best Original Screenplay, Coogler for Best Director, Jordan for Best Actor and Lindo/Mosaku/Steinfeld for Best Supporting, but Sinners deserves just as much love in the technical and craft categories. For a film so intrinsically tied to the power of music in spirituality, culture and community, it would be nothing short of a travesty if Göransson's soundtrack isn't at least nominated for Best Original Score (the juke joint and “Rocky Road to Dublin” scenes ALONE would justify a win in this writer's humble opinion.)

Then there's DoP Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who, with Sinners, became the first female cinematographer to shoot a feature on IMAX film. A hugely impressive achievement enough, but Sinners has the added bonus of being a glorious visual feast from top to bottom that should make an Arkapaw win for Best Cinematography a no-brainer. Not to mention, Ruth E. Carter's incredible costume design, which situates its characters so firmly in the juke joint you can practically smell the dancing sweat emanating from the seams, and special effects artist Mike Fontaine, whose work on Remmick and co.'s vampiric transformations is the stuff of bloody nightmares, both of whom deserve their flowers in Best Costume Design and Best Makeup & Hairstyling respectively.

Sinners' incredible merits aside, a horror Oscar sweep is also long, long overdue. Should Sinners take home Best Picture, it would make it only the seventh movie to be nominated for the big award and, even more depressingly, the second to actually win, and the first since 1991's The Silence of the Lambs  (and yes, that IS a horror movie!)

Of course, as is the case with most horror movies, Sinners isn't just a vampire movie – its importance as a work of Black cinema in a world that's ever more culturally fragmented and a social landscape that seems to be moving backwards further into bigotry with each passing day cannot be disputed. As Lea Anderson remarks in her FANGORIA piece on the importance of Sinners as a modern vampire epic, “Sinners resurrects the historical and cultural tensions that created the modern vampire in the first place to reclaim the interwoven narratives of African spiritualities colliding with vampirism”, and is as concerned with examining the evils of white supremacy as it is with portraying more fictional devils. A Sinners Oscar sweep would be a middle finger in the face of all those so-called horror “fans” who think diversity in our beloved genre is a burden not a boon, despite the fact that horror has been, and always will be, a righteous scream of support for the most marginalized of communities.

While Oscar nominees for 2026 have yet to be announced, Sinners is up against some tough competition. Experts predict that among the hopefuls in the running next year will be Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, Jon M. Chu's Wicked: For Good, Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme and Chloé Zhao's Hamnet. However in most polls and predictions from industry players, Sinners still stands tall, and head and shoulders above any other horror offering from this year. While it's impossible to predict how Oscar voters will sway, Sinners more than deserves its day in the sun (or shade, as it were), and hopefully the Academy will cast their eyes over you, gracious FANGORIA Chainsaw Award voters, and see that the right choices have all already been made for them.

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