What a year. I don’t say that lightly — 2025 delivered more genuinely good horror films than any year I can remember in recent memory. From a vampire epic that nobody saw coming to a robot girlfriend thriller that quietly became one of the best films of the year, the genre outdid itself.
What follows is my personal selection of the 13 best horror films of 2025. The order is deliberately varied — this isn’t a strict ranking, it’s a curated list designed to cover as much ground as possible. From supernatural horror to slashers, from prestige A24 to gleeful gore, there’s something here for every kind of horror fan.
And yes — found footage gets its own section at the end. It always does on this site.
Honorable Mentions
Before we get to the top 13 — a few words about the films that almost made it. These are all worth your time, even if they didn’t quite crack the list.
I had high hopes for Hallow Road and came away with mixed feelings. Not essential, but solid atmospheric horror for patient viewers.
The sequel nobody asked for but everyone enjoyed — Black Phone 2 delivers more of what made the original work. Ethan Hawke back, Scott Derrickson back, and enough genuine dread to justify its existence. Doesn’t surpass the original, but doesn’t embarrass it either.
Quietly devastating and not for everyone — The Long Walk is the kind of slow-burn that won’t make mainstream lists but deserves to be on yours. If you’re patient enough to let it breathe, it lingers.
The one that genuinely surprised me this year was Good Boy. RT critics called it “visually striking and emotionally devastating” — a horror film that refuses to behave like one. Ambitious, unusual, and unlike anything else on this list.
More thriller than horror, but Drop earns its place here. Meghann Fahy plays a woman on a first date who starts receiving anonymous threats on her phone — and has to navigate increasingly dangerous situations while keeping up the appearance of a normal evening. Relentlessly tense, Hitchcockian, and the year’s best popcorn movie. 🍿
And finally — the most underseen film of 2025. The Surrender is a restrained, genuinely unsettling mother-daughter story pushed to its breaking point by a mysterious stranger. A remarkable feature debut from director Julia Max that deserves a much larger audience.
Our Quick Guide to the 13 Films
Thirteen films is a lot. If you’re staring at the list wondering where to start, here’s a quick cheat sheet before we dive in:
🎬 Not Sure What to Watch? Pick Your Mood
▼If you want the best film of the year, full stop — Sinners. No debate.
If you want something genuinely unsettling — Weapons or Together. Both will stay with you.
If you want fun without thinking too hard — Final Destination: Bloodlines or The Monkey. Sit back and enjoy.
If you want something original and surprising — Companion or The Ugly Stepsister. Neither goes where you expect.
If you want prestige horror — Frankenstein or Bring Her Back. Both are slower, both are worth it.
If you want a popcorn night 🍿 — Drop or Clown in a Cornfield. No homework required.
The 13 Best Horror Movies of 2025
The order below is deliberately varied — think of it less as a ranking and more as a curated evening’s programming. Something for everyone.
1. Sinners
Nobody saw this coming. Ryan Coogler — the director of Black Panther and Creed — making a vampire film set in 1930s Mississippi Delta? It shouldn’t work. It absolutely does.
The Story: Twin brothers (both played by Michael B. Jordan) return to their hometown to open a juke joint. On opening night, something arrives at the door that the music and the whiskey can’t keep out.
→ The rare horror film that earns the word “epic.” Rich, layered, and shot with extraordinary confidence. Whether it counts as horror is a conversation worth having — it’s also a period drama, a blues film, and a meditation on Black American history. The 97% on RT is no accident.
2. Weapons
The second film from Zach Cregger — director of Barbarian — arrived with enormous expectations. It met them.
The Story: A classroom of children runs out into the night and disappears. A fractured, non-linear mystery gradually reveals something deeply wrong at the heart of a small American town.
Less a trap springing shut than a slow creeping realisation that everything is connected. Amy Madigan as the villain Gladys is one of the year’s most memorable screen presences. I found myself thinking about this one for days.
3. Companion
The sleeper hit of the year. Undervalued in theatres, destined to be a cult classic on streaming. It also made it in our list of the best AI Horror & Sci-Fi movies.
The Story: Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is the perfect girlfriend — attentive, warm, devoted. She’s also not human. When she and her boyfriend join friends at a remote lake house, the carefully constructed reality of their relationship begins to unravel.
Smarter than its premise suggests and considerably darker than its marketing implied. Sophie Thatcher is extraordinary. The twists escalate with impressive discipline. I went in expecting a fun sci-fi thriller and came out genuinely shaken.
4. Final Destination: Bloodlines
Fourteen years after the last instalment, Death is back. And it turns out the formula still works.
The Story: A college student has a premonition that saves her family from a catastrophic accident — but Death doesn’t forget who it was owed. The surviving family members begin dying in elaborate, unavoidable sequences.
Using family rather than strangers as the group Death is hunting raises the emotional stakes considerably. The opening dream setpiece is one of the most inventively brutal sequences in the franchise’s history. Not high art. Exactly what it promises to be.
5. Together
The most uncomfortable film on this list — and I mean that as a compliment.
The Story: A couple in a deeply dysfunctional relationship find themselves increasingly, literally bound to each other during a home invasion. Less a thriller than a dissection of codependency taken to its extreme conclusion.
Uses genre mechanics to say something genuinely disturbing about relationships. Not a comfortable watch — designed not to be. Not for everyone. Absolutely for me.
6. The Ugly Stepsister
The Cinderella story you didn’t know you needed — and definitely didn’t expect to be this disturbing.
The Story: A dark reimagining of the classic fairy tale, told from the stepsister’s perspective as she desperately tries to fit into the glass slipper by any means necessary. Body horror ensues.
One of the year’s most original films — a body horror fairy tale that uses the original story’s cruelty as its launch pad. The practical effects are extraordinary. Will split audiences cleanly down the middle. I was firmly on the side that loved it.
7. Bring Her Back
The follow-up to Talk to Me from the Philippou brothers — and a very different kind of horror.
The Story: A grieving father hires a mysterious stranger to bring back his late wife. Sally Hawkins plays the stranger. What she brings back is not quite what was promised.
Bleaker and slower than Talk to Me, and deliberately so. Sally Hawkins is extraordinary — quietly terrifying in a way that stays with you. Some found it too one-note. I found it haunting.
8. 28 Years Later
Danny Boyle returns to the universe he created. The result is exactly what the franchise needed.
The Story: Three decades after the rage virus devastated Britain, a young man ventures beyond the boundaries of his isolated community for the first time — and finds a world that has moved on in ways nobody expected.
Not as viscerally terrifying as 28 Days Later — but it’s not trying to be. This is a broader, stranger, more ambitious film. It divided audiences and I understand why. I thought it was bold, and bold counts for something.
9. Dangerous Animals
The underseen gem of the year’s mainstream horror releases.
The Story: A woman matches with a charming stranger on a dating app and agrees to meet him in an isolated location. What begins as a thriller about online predators becomes something considerably more complex.
Subverts its premise at exactly the right moment and in exactly the right direction. Lean, precise, and smarter than it looks. The kind of film that rewards going in with as little information as possible.
10. The Monkey
Osgood Perkins continues his remarkable run — and delivers the most fun horror film of the year.
The Story: Twin brothers discover their late father’s wind-up monkey toy. When it plays its little cymbals, someone nearby dies. They separate and throw it away. It keeps coming back.
Gleefully mean-spirited and completely aware of it. The Monkey isn’t trying to scare you — it’s trying to make you laugh and wince simultaneously, and it succeeds with remarkable consistency. The deaths are inventive, the tone is pitch perfect, and Perkins clearly had a great time making it.
11. Frankenstein
Guillermo del Toro’s long-awaited adaptation of the classic novel — and it was worth the wait.
The Story: Set in 19th century Eastern Europe, a creature born from the experiments of Dr. Victor Frankenstein is hunted down forty years later by another scientist who wishes to continue the work. Oscar Isaac plays the creature.
Del Toro brings his signature visual language and genuine emotional weight to a story that has been told many times and rarely this well. Not a horror film in any conventional sense — more a gothic tragedy. But unmissable for anyone who cares about what the genre can do at its most ambitious.
12. Clown in a Cornfield
More clever than the name implies — considerably more clever, actually.
The Story: A teenage girl moves to a small town with a dark history and a local legend involving a clown mascot named Frendo. The legend, it turns out, is more active than anyone is admitting.
A mid-film twist upends genre conventions in a way that genuinely earns the subversion. Not the scariest film on this list, but one of the most satisfying in terms of pure slasher craft. Good fun with a sharper edge than expected.
13. Until Dawn
The video game adaptation nobody expected to work — and that works better than it has any right to.
The Story: A group of friends return to the mountain resort where another group of friends disappeared a year earlier. They find themselves trapped in a loop of increasingly violent scenarios with one rule: survive until dawn.
The loop mechanic is lifted directly from the game and translated to film with more intelligence than most video game adaptations manage. Not profound. Genuinely entertaining, inventive with its kills, and proof that the right source material in the right hands can surprise you.
Outstanding Found Footage of 2025 — And a Look Ahead
Found footage had a quieter year than usual in 2025 — but three titles deserve your attention, and one of them is genuinely one of the best entries its franchise has ever produced. Wanna know what else came out? Take a look at our extensive found footage database.
V/H/S Halloween (2025) earned 94% on Rotten Tomatoes — making it not just the strongest V/H/S instalment in years but one of the best anthology horror films of the entire year. The Halloween theme gives the segments a cohesion that the franchise sometimes lacks, and the quality across the board is remarkably consistent. If you drifted away from V/H/S after the earlier entries, this is the one to bring you back. On pure quality it belongs in the main top 13 — I kept it here because it feels more at home in its own category.
Horror in the High Desert 4 (2025) — the most committed pure found footage series still running. Dutch Marich’s films operate at the opposite end of the budget spectrum from Backrooms — lo-fi, deliberately paced, and effective in ways that bigger productions rarely manage. If you haven’t discovered the series yet, start at the beginning. By the fourth instalment, Marich has refined his approach to something genuinely distinctive.
Hell House LLC: Lineage (2025) — the franchise continues to find new angles on its haunted house mythology, and Lineage is another solid entry in a series that has outlasted most of its found footage contemporaries. Not the strongest instalment, but further proof that Stephen Cognetti hasn’t run out of ideas. If you haven’t worked through the Hell House LLC series yet, now is a good time to start.
And if 2025 was a quieter year for found footage — 2026 already has its answer. Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons and produced by A24, opened to $81 million and reminded everyone what the format is capable of when someone genuinely believes in it. We’ve covered it extensively — read our full review here and discover similar movies.
Found footage isn’t dead. It just needed a bigger stage.
