Coralie Fargeat and ‘The Substance’ Smash the Horror Ceiling with Historic Best Director Nod

With Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, and Actress nominations, the French filmmaker's body horror hit slices and dices one of the Oscars' long-held prejudices.

Who’s afraid of a little female body horror? For once, not the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, which on Thursday morning, finally opened one of the last remaining gilded doors of their annual Oscar nominations, pouring love all over filmmaker Coralie Fargeat and her “The Substance.”

The filmmaker, with just her second film, earned the sole spot for a female filmmaker in the Best Director race (alongside Sean Baker, Brady Corbet, James Mangold, and Jacques Audiard), in addition to helming the lone female-directed film in the Best Picture race (including “Anora,” “The Brutalist,” “A Complete Unknown,” “Dune: Part Two,” “Emilia Pérez,” “I’m Still Here,” “Nickel Boys,” and “Wicked”). Meanwhile, other female filmmakers and their work were shut out not just from the picture and director race, but the entire Oscar nom kit and kaboodle, including Payal Kapadia and her “All We Imagine as Light” and Halina Reijn and her “Babygirl.”

Earlier this month, Fargeat told IndieWire at the Golden Globes that she believes horror films are fully deserving of a level playing field at the Oscars. “I don’t see horror films as any different from other movies,” she said. “They are so political. They are such a great way to tell so many things in a very rude way, and in a very indelicate way. To me, they should compete at the same level as everything else. I learned to accept who I was as a filmmaker, not loving writing dialogue, for instance, but expressing myself in a visual and very visceral way. And that’s when you accept who you are, and then the magic can happen. The best thing I wish for the Academy is that there is not this barrier, that every movie is considered as cinema, which I think it is.”

Meanwhile, in the realm of horror movies at the Oscars, only those directed by men have previously been honored in top categories, including William Friedkin (“The Exorcist”), Steven Spielberg (“Jaws”), Jonathan Demme (“The Silence of the Lambs”), M. Night Shyamalan (“The Sixth Sense”), Darren Aronofsky (“Black Swan”), and Jordan Peele (“Get Out”).

Despite Fargeat’s historic nominations, much remains the same in Oscars land for female filmmakers, particularly when it comes to nominating a single woman in the director category.

A brief history, for anyone who needs a little catch-up: in 2024, only one female director was nominated in the category (“Anatomy of a Fall” filmmaker Justine Triet, who went on to win Best Original Screenplay), following a pair of record-breaking (for very different reasons) years. In 2023, not a single female director was nominated, and that was on the heels of Jane Campion’s record-breaking win for her “The Power of the Dog” in 2022. That win established her as only the third woman to ever win the Oscar for Best Director, following Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”) and Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”).

While the most recent USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative study does not quite show a decline in inclusion, it does reveal that the progress in finding, elevating, and hiring Hollywood directors who are not white men has plateaued. Of 112 directors analyzed as part of the pool (for the top 100 grossing movies of 2024), 13.4 percent or 15 were women, nearly equivalent to 2023’s 12.1 percent. Though there has been progress since 2007, when 2.7 percent of directors were women, in 18 years, only 6.5 percent of directors were women.

Our own list of studio-backed films coming from female filmmakers includes just 14 studio films coming from women directors in the next two years. Let’s hope (and expect) a new joint from Fargeat will soon be announced to further fill their ranks.

Elsewhere on Oscar nom morning, female filmmakers were nominated in a handful of other categories, including two in Best Adapted Screenplay: French filmmaker Léa Mysius for “Emilia Pérez” (which listed her as one of three additional names “in collaboration with” filmmaker Jacques Audiard) and Joslyn Barnes, who shared screenwriting credit with “Nickel Boys” filmmaker RaMell Ross (she also produced the film). In Best Original Screenplay, “The Brutalist” co-writer Mona Fastvold scored a nomination alongside Brady Corbet (her partner in both film and life), in addition to Fargeat also scoring a nod for her “Substance” screenplay.

The Best Documentary Feature Film race includes three films directed by women: Shiori Ito’s “Black Box Diaries,” co-director Rachel Szor’s “No Other Land” (shared with Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Yuval Abraham), and co-director Emily Kassie’s “Sugarcane” (shared with Julian Brave NoiseCat).

Alas, both the Best Animated Feature Film and Best International Film categories did not include a single film directed by a woman.

In the Academy Awards’ 96-year history, only eight women total have ever been nominated for Best Director: Lina Wertmüller (1976′s “Seven Beauties”), Sofia Coppola (2003′s “Lost in Translation”), Greta Gerwig (2017′s “Lady Bird”), Emerald Fennell (2020’s “Promising Young Woman”), Bigelow, Zhao, Campion, and Triet. “The Power of the Dog” filmmaker is also the only woman nominated twice for the honor.

2021 marked the first time the Academy handed out nominations to two women in the category, with Zhao going on to win both Best Director (making her just the second woman to win the award, after Bigelow) and Best Picture for her “Nomadland,” while Fennell took home the statuette for Best Original Screenplay.

Nominations voting for this year’s Oscars ended on January 17, after being pushed back following the wildfires in Los Angeles. Final voting will take place from February 11 – 18, 2025. And finally, the 97th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 2, and air live on ABC. Emmy-winning late-night host Conan O’Brien will host this year’s ceremony for the first time.

Check out the full list of this morning’s nominations right here.