2026 FANGORIA Chainsaw Awards: Best Lead Performance Nominees

As the ass-kicking ex-con Asia Reaves in Kirill Sokolov's They Will Kill You, Zazie Beetz continued to prove her chops as an incredible actress, but also as a damn good stuntwoman too. As the title suggests, Beetz spends most of They Will Kill You trying to avoid become a sacrifice for a group of elite cultists who quickly realize they picked the wrong woman to mess with.

Beetz performed a majority of her own stunts throughout the action horror-comedy, including brandishing that fire axe – will see her use it to chop down the competition in this year's FANGORIA Chainsaw Awards?

The next ass-kicking leading lady on our list of nominees for Best Lead Performance is Jessie Buckley, whose role as the titular revenant in Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! breathed new life into a character who, in her original film appearance in James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein, doesn't really get to do a whole lot.

In The Bride!, Buckley rectifies that by delivering a bold, explosive performance that's as punk-rock as it is passionate. Buckley already has a slew of awards, including an Oscar – will 2026 be the year she gets to add a FANGORIA Chainsaw Award to the shelf too?

Games of Thrones alum Peter Dinklage traded a crossbow for a mop when he starred as downtrodden janitor Winston Gooze in Macon Blair's The Toxic Avenger remake. Along with Luisa Guerreiro who provided Gooze's physical performance, Dinklage's signature dry humor and wit made Toxie one of our favorite heroes of the year, Superman be damned.

We never thought we'd cry at a Toxic Avenger movie, but thanks to Dinklage delivering heart among the horror-comedy, we shed a toxic tear or two.

It takes an incredible actor to make the mundane horror of liminal spaces so terrifying, so leave it to Chiwetel Ejiofor to do just that. In Kane Parsons' box office busting Backrooms, Ejiofor plays Clark, a would-be architect turned furniture store manager who discovers a seemingly endless labyrinth of mysterious rooms in the basement of his shop.

Ejiofor's performance as Clark is just the right balance of believable and uncanny for a film like Backrooms. Will the BAFTA Award-winning star take home a Chainsaw Award to complement his stacked accolade shelf?

The great Ralph Fiennes returned for the second part of the 28 Years Later trilogy in Nia DaCosta's The Bone Temple, giving a predictably magnificent performance as the heart and soul of the series, Dr Ian Kelson. Through his relationship with Chi Lewis-Parry's Samson the Alpha, Kelson reminded us that it is our empathy and unconditional care for one another that truly makes us human.

That's before we even get into Kelson's fiery Iron Maiden showdown, which proved that Fiennes should not only win an Oscar, but also a Tony, too. But will he take home the most coveted accolade of them all, a FANGORIA Chainsaw Award, this year?

In Sam Raimi's desert-island set thriller Send Help, Rachel McAdams went pure sicko mode in a way we haven't seen since Regina's meltdown in Mean Girls. As the meek and downtrodden Linda Liddle, McAdams got to play alongside co-star Dylan O'Brien in the funniest, bloodiest send up of corporate culture the year has to offer.

Should McAdams walk away with the coveted FANGORIA Chainsaw Award this year, we could see it sitting nicely in Linda's living room, next to her newly acquired golf clubs.

Curry Barker's Obsession is officially the biggest horror movie of 2026, thanks in no small part down to the performance of Inde Navarette, who has thoroughly cemented herself as a horror superstar with her breakout role of Nikki, the bewitched girlfriend of manipulative nightmare ‘nice guy' Bear.

Navarette's incredibly unsettling physicality and gradual descent into derangement had us as terrified of Nikki as we were heartbroken for her. Should Navarette take home the FANGORIA Chainsaw Award for Best Lead Performance, we highly doubt it'll be the last accolade she earns.

The matriarch of the creative powerhouse that is the Adams Family nabs herself a well-deserved Best Lead Performance nomination for her role as the witch Solveig in folky supernatural horror Mother of Flies. Along with the rest of the Adams clan, John, Zelda and Lulu, Poser crafted another ambitious, original and incredibly creative world that sits alongside Hellbender and Where the Devil Roams as their best features to date.

Poser's directing prowess is matched by her acting talent, and in Mother of Flies she delivers a performance that's hypnotic and eerie in equal measure.

Adam Scott's standout performance as the grumpy everyman Ohm Bauman made Damian McCarthy's supernatural horror Hokum feel all the more realistic and lived in. A fish out of water in rural Ireland, American author Bauman visits a charming, yet impossibly creepy hotel to scatter his parents' ashes, only to be met by whisperings of a witch living in the long-locked honeymoon sweet.

As it so often does, Scott's natural comedic tendencies lend themselves perfectly to horror, and we hope that Hokum is the latest in his continued line of acclaimed, potentially Chainsaw Award-winning credits (no, we didn't forget Hellraiser: Bloodline or Piranha 3D!)

It's no easy feat for an actor to hold their own against not only the inimitable powerhouses that are Mads Mikkelsen and Sigourney Weaver, not to mention the giant practically crafted titular monster of Dust Bunny, but star Sophie Sloan did just that, and at only 12 years old.

As Aurora, Sloan brought incredible heart to Dust Bunny, her adorable chemistry with Mikkelsen being the soul of the fantastical fairy tale horror. A FANGORIA Chainsaw Award would be the perfect way for Sloan to kickstart what is sure to be a long and storied career in film.