‘REANIMAL’ Leads The Horror Game Awards 2026 With 10 Nominations, and Doug Bradley’s Pinhead Is in the Fight
The most stacked horror gaming year in recent memory finally has a scoreboard. The Horror Game Awards unveiled its 2026 nominees over Halloween weekend, and the frontrunner is not the eight-million-selling Capcom juggernaut most people would have bet on. Tarsier Studios’ creepy co-op nightmare REANIMAL leads the field with 10 nominations, one ahead of Resident Evil Requiem’s nine.
Scroll a little further down the ballot and it gets more fun. Doug Bradley is up for Best Performance for voicing Pinhead in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, in a category that also includes Leon S. Kennedy’s voice actor and Lost’s Terry O’Quinn. Public voting is open right now and closes Nov. 11, with the show streaming live from a graffiti tunnel in London on Nov. 20. Here’s who’s nominated, how the voting really works, what the numbers say and who we think can actually take home the Claw.
Watch the Frontrunners
REANIMAL’s launch trailer, from the game’s February release:
And Capcom’s fourth major trailer for Resident Evil Requiem, which pairs Leon with FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft:
The Details: Everything Confirmed
The fifth edition of the awards takes place Friday, Nov. 20 at 26 Leake Street in Waterloo, London, a venue carved out of the city’s famous graffiti tunnel. The stream starts at 7 p.m. GMT, which is 2 p.m. Eastern, 1 p.m. Central and 11 a.m. Pacific, across the show’s YouTube and Twitch channels. In-person seats were limited; the organizers list room for 350 people in the main tunnel, and tickets were handed out by application and a guest draw rather than sold.
According to Bloody Disgusting’s rundown, more than 100 titles are competing across 21 categories, and 10 games landed at least five nominations. Here’s how the leaderboard shakes out:
- 10 nominations: REANIMAL
- 9 nominations: Resident Evil Requiem
- 8 nominations: Silent Hill: Townfall, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, Silver Pines
- 7 nominations: Project Songbird, The Skin Stapler, Tenebris Somnia
- 6 nominations: Andyland’s Endacopia
- 5 nominations: Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake
All 10 of those are up for Game of the Year. They’re joined by six more: Routine, Directive 8020, Heaven Does Not Respond, No Means Nothing, Offering App and The Blood of Dawnwalker. That’s a 16-game race for the top prize, and the mix of nine-figure-franchise money and tiny indie weirdness is the whole charm of this show.
Six categories are brand new this year: Critics’ Choice, Scariest Horror Game of the Year, Best Cosy Horror Game, Best Ongoing Horror Game, Best New Multiplayer Game and Best Adaptation. To be eligible, a game had to come out between Nov. 27, 2025 and Oct. 26, 2026. There’s also a rule worth applauding: nominees must, as far as the jury and production team know, “not have been made using generative AI.”
The categories fans will argue about most
- Best Performance (15 nominees): Doug Bradley, Terry O’Quinn, Nick Apostolides, Angela Sant’Albano, Kezia Burrows, Layna Lazar, Luis Bermudez, RJ Green, Valerie Rose Lohman, Hexy IRL, Joseph May, Nicole Tompkins, Chase Brown, Clara Kovacic and Willow Leef.
- Lifetime Achievement (11 nominees): Sam Barlow, Thomas Grip, Frédérick Raynal, Jonathan Boakes, Shinji Mikami, Dr. Mick Donegan, Philippe Morin, Keiichiro Toyama, Will Doyle, Koshi Nakanishi and Akira Yamaoka.
- Critics’ Choice (8 nominees): Hellraiser: Revival, REANIMAL, Resident Evil Requiem, Silent Hill: Townfall, Halloween, The Sinking City 2, Forbidden Solitaire and Photomaly.
- Most Anticipated (15 nominees): the list includes Alien: Isolation 2, Metro 2039 and Saw Genesis.
- Best Adaptation (9 nominees): the new category puts the Resident Evil movie in the same fight as Hellraiser: Revival, Halloween, Iron Lung, The Mortuary Assistant, Exit 8 and Backrooms.
Nominee names above are taken from the portrait and logo images on the official category pages, so exact spellings could differ slightly.
Who’s Behind It, and How Voting Works
The awards were founded in 2022 by Will Penkeyman and Phil Dickens, who bill the show as the world’s first dedicated horror game awards. It’s presented by Lost in Cult, and the two co-creators host again with co-producer Ash Millman. Game of the Year is sponsored by Creative Assembly, the Alien: Isolation studio, which is a fun bit of trivia given that Alien: Isolation 2 is sitting over in Most Anticipated.
The voting has more layers than a Cenobite’s wardrobe. Players’ Choice and Horror Content Creator of the Year are completely public, from nomination to win. Fifteen other categories are nominated by a jury of more than 60 content creators, and specialist juries handle accessibility, technical and lifetime awards. For the first time, a critics’ jury picks Critics’ Choice. Dead Meat’s Zoran Gvojic sits on the main jury, and Bloody Disgusting’s Harrison Abbott is on the critics’ panel. The hosts and presenters don’t get a vote.
For most categories, the public vote narrows the field and the jury then picks the winner from the finalists. One wrinkle: the official site says the top three go back to the jury, while Bloody Disgusting reports the top five. Either way, your vote matters now, because a game that misses the cut can’t win, and that window shuts Nov. 11.
The Backstory: From Online Show to Leake Street
Last year was the turning point. The 2025 edition, held Dec. 13, was the first live, in-person show, at London’s Kensington Conference and Events Centre. Silent Hill f cleaned up with four wins from six nominations: Game of the Year, Best Narrative, Technical Achievement and Best Performance for Konatsu Kato. Look Outside took Best Art Direction and Best Indie Horror Game, No, I’m Not a Human won the Players’ Choice, Markiplier took Content Creator, and Hideo Kojima received the Lifetime Achievement Award.
The winner of Most Anticipated Horror Game that night? Resident Evil Requiem. So Capcom’s game walks into this year’s show having already been crowned the thing everybody was waiting for. Now it has to prove it was worth the wait against a game that sold a fraction of its copies.
Photo: Terry O’Quinn via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped.
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By the Numbers
- Resident Evil Requiem: released Feb. 27. Metacritic scores run from 89 on PS5 to 93 on Xbox Series X/S, with 96% of OpenCritic critics recommending it. It sold five million copies in five days, the fastest start in series history, and Capcom had it at more than eight million by the end of June.
- REANIMAL: released Feb. 13. Metacritic scores of 80 to 83, 82% recommend on OpenCritic, and more than one million copies sold by May, according to THQ Nordic and Embracer.
- Silent Hill: Townfall: released Sept. 24. Metacritic 80 on PS5 and PC, with an 89% OpenCritic recommendation rate.
- Hellraiser: Revival: released Oct. 8. OpenCritic shows a 74 top-critic average and 65% recommending across 111 reviews. Launch-day scores ranged from 9/10 at Insider Gaming to 4.5/10 at Game Informer, which Pure Xbox fairly called “seriously divided.”
- The Blood of Dawnwalker: released Sept. 3. Metacritic 83 to 84, 94% recommend, and over a million copies in three days.
- Directive 8020: released May 12. Metacritic 68 to 73 and just 53% recommend, which makes its Game of the Year slot one of the bigger surprises on the ballot.
Analysis: What This Ballot Really Says
The headline is that nominations and reputation aren’t lining up, and that’s a good thing. On pure review scores and sales, Requiem is in a class of its own. Eight million copies in about four months puts it more than halfway to the 16.04 million lifetime total of the Resident Evil 4 remake, and its Metacritic scores tower over the rest of the field. In a normal awards show, that’s the end of the conversation.
But REANIMAL’s 10 nods are not a fluke, and the game has been quietly collecting this kind of recognition all year. In September it won the narrative and direction prize at the Japan Horror Game Awards, where Silent Hill f took the grand prize. In August it picked up Sweden’s Utmärkt Svensk Form design award. Narrative lead David Mervik has talked about wanting story to be something you feel rather than get told, and that approach plays well with a jury of creators who’ve spent hours watching games from the inside. It’s also worth noticing what this ballot corrects: REANIMAL wasn’t among Fangoria’s five Chainsaw Awards nominees for Best Video Game in July, which did include Requiem and Silent Hill f.
The real test comes down to how the show’s format rewards different games. Look at last year: Silent Hill f won the top prize while a tiny indie, Look Outside, beat bigger titles for art direction, and the crowd’s favorite was the viral No, I’m Not a Human. This show has a track record of splitting the trophies, so don’t be shocked if Requiem takes Game of the Year while REANIMAL, Silver Pines or The Skin Stapler clean up in the craft categories. The Players’ Choice is its own animal too, since fans alone decide it and the shortlist includes Captured 2, The Plant Shop and Crisol: Theatre of Idols alongside the big names.
Then there’s Hellraiser: Revival, the most interesting case on the ballot. Eight nominations for a game with a 65% recommend rate tells you that horror people judge it differently than general critics do. A divisive, nasty, faithful game is exactly what this crowd tends to love, and Bradley is the perfect emblem of it. He’s 72, he’s been the face of Pinhead since 1987’s Hellraiser, and he’s finally playing the role in a game after decades of fans wanting exactly that. Against the likes of Apostolides, whose Leon carries a blockbuster, and O’Quinn, who brings serious prestige to Townfall, it’s a tough race. But it would be hard to imagine a more popular moment in that tunnel than Pinhead winning a trophy.
Photo: Akira Yamaoka via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped.
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The Lifetime Achievement list deserves its own moment, because it reads like a history of the genre. Frédérick Raynal made Alone in the Dark. Shinji Mikami directed the original Resident Evil. Keiichiro Toyama directed the original Silent Hill, and Akira Yamaoka gave that series its sound. Thomas Grip brought us Amnesia. Sam Barlow made Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Immortality. Any of them would be a worthy successor to Kojima, and the fact that Koshi Nakanishi is on there while also leading the Requiem push is a nice bit of drama.
What We Still Don’t Know
We don’t have the presenter lineup, any world premieres or a confirmed in-show announcement slate yet. Those are the things to watch in the next two weeks, since the organizers had promised jury, presenter and ticket news in stages. We also don’t yet know which games make the finalist cut, because the public vote is still open.
Dates to circle: Nov. 11 for the end of public voting, and Nov. 20 for the show itself.
Bottom Line
Requiem should still be the favorite on the strength of everything it did, but REANIMAL’s lead proves this isn’t a coronation, and Hellraiser: Revival’s eight nods prove horror fans grade on their own curve. That’s what a genre-specific show is for. So which game do you think takes the Claw on Nov. 20: REANIMAL, Requiem, Townfall or Pinhead’s big comeback? And does Doug Bradley deserve Best Performance on the name alone, or does Leon have this one locked?
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Photo credits: Header photo of Doug Bradley via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped with text added.
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