The 10 Best Horror Movies of 2025 So Far, Ranked

10. “Bring Her Back”

The sophomore feature from YouTube creators-turned-feature-filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou is a more somber, disturbing affair, trading in “Talk to Me’s” dark jubilation for a kind of rueful bleakness. Sally Hawkins, in a tour de force performance that might remind you of Toni Collette in “Hereditary,” plays a woman who adopts two young children – one of whom is partially blind. She already has a foster kid too, who is acting … peculiar. What is going on in this house and what does it have to do with a scratchy tape Hawkins keeps watching? These are some of the mysteries nestled within “Bring Her Back.”

While some found the slow burn nature of the narrative a bit too deliberate, you’ll be rewarded for sticking with “Bring Her Back,” which leads to a blood-soaked downer of an ending as remarkable as anything in their inaugural outing. (Somehow, you’ll never look at tables the same way again.) Give “Bring Her Back” time and it might just become the cult favorite that “Talk to Me” was out of the gate.

9. “Together”

A horror movie about the terror of codependence, “Together” stars the real-life husband and wife duo of Dave Franco and Alison Brie, as a young couple who leave the city and head to the country, only to get involved in something far spookier. One of the rare breakouts from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Neon won the rights to the movie after interest from everyone from A24 to Searchlight Pictures. And it’s easy to see why – the combination of uncomfortable relationship intimacy and supernatural body horror is genuinely irresistible. Franco and Brie give committed performances and while the lore behind their commingling gets a little fuzzy (it involves a magic well and some cults, just to be clear), it’s their relationship, in all its ups and downs, that leads you through. It’s got some of the most scream-out-loud moments this year, that’s for sure. Deep breath.

8. “Companion”

One of the more underrated horror movies of the year, “Companion” snuck into theaters early in 2025 and is still one of the year’s very best. Written and directed by newcomer Drew Hancock and produced by “Weapons” filmmaker Zach Cregger, “Companion” is set in the near future and follows several couples as they spend a weekend away at a country house. This is a fairly typical set-up, especially for a low-budget genre movie, but “Companion” goes in a startlingly different way – one that was, regrettably, spoiled by early marketing materials – namely that Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is Josh’s (Jack Quaid) robot girlfriend. Where the movie goes from there is similarly unpredictable, with a very game cast (including Lukas Gage, Megan Suri, Harvey Guillén and Rupert Friend) fully committing to the bit.

Hancock is a smart writer and an even better director, assembling the movie as a series of suspense set pieces, punctuated by timely relationship commentary and, of course, discussion around the dangers of technology and AI. In short, it’s the perfect horror movie for now. It should have been huge.

7. “Final Destination Bloodlines”

What a wonderful surprise. Who would have guessed that there was still so much gas left in the “Final Destination” tank – or that the sixth (!) film would be the second-best in the franchise? From the very beginning, you can tell “Final Destination Bloodlines” is going to be special. Instead of the typical modern disaster, the setup was something in the past – a late 1960s Space Needle-type restaurant that goes up in flames. We then flash forward to today, as the contours of the story start to take shape. Instead of a group of survivors, who are forced to avoid Rube Goldberg-style death traps, it’s an entire family tree. It’s a stroke of genius and makes for a much more fulfilling, emotionally resonant movie, as they bicker and fight before getting sucked into a tree shredder (or whatever).

Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein know how to stage these scenes brilliantly but they also understand that you have to care about the characters for their horrible deaths to mean anything. It also has perhaps the best ending of any of the movies – both jubilant and downbeat. There’s a reason the movie was a surprise smash, making nearly $300 million worldwide – it’s just that good.

6. “The Monkey”

Osgood Perkins made last year’s word-of-mouth horror hit “Longlegs,” a serial killer thriller with occult overtones. And he followed it up with something in the complete opposite direction – a Stephen King adaptation so wacky and blood-soaked that it feels like a movie that you would rent and watch at a slumber party, with all of your buds laughing and screaming at every exploding body and dismembered corpse. Theo James plays the adult version of twins who receive a monkey toy from their father; when they wind it up and the monkey hits its drums, somebody dies in some horrifying way. Years later, one of the twins goes on a quest with his young son to find and destroy the monkey before it causes anymore damage.

Perkins said that he was inspired by 1980s classics like “Gremlins” and “Creepshow” (another King favorite) and it really does have the kind of freewheeling energy that exemplified those earlier films. It’s funny, it’s scary, it’s out of control. And it speaks to the kind of artistic elasticity of Perkins, as he has quickly proven himself to be one of the most exciting and electric genre filmmakers working today. And his next movie comes out in November!

5. “Presence”

Of course, a horror movie directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by David Koepp would be built around an ingenious concept, on both a technical and narrative level. “Presence” is a ghost story told from the perspective of the ghost. The entire movie is told from the entity’s point-of-view, as it careens around a nondescript house that wouldn’t be out of place in the same neighborhood that “Poltergeist” took place. We watch the drama in the house unfold, between various family members, and start to piece together who the ghost could be and what it is trying to accomplish with this haunting.

The performances, led by Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan as the parents and Callina Liang as the teenage daughter that the entity seems particularly obsessed with, are tender and nuanced and give so much life to a story that could have otherwise been overwhelmed with death. And the shtick of the floating camera never feels like a gimmick, it’s key to the understanding of the story and to understand these characters in the way that we do. At 85 minutes, too, the movie never overstays its welcome. “Presence” is a gift.

4. “Heart Eyes”

Undeniably the most underrated horror movie of the year, “Heart Eyes” works because its dicey gambit of being a romantic comedy as much as it is a slasher film, is treated seriously and totally works. The Heart Eyes Killer is an infamous masked serial killer who targets lovers on Valentine’s Day. And this year the killer is hunting Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding, mistaking them as a committed couple when, in fact, they’ve only just met. They’re forced to survive a very long night as the killer stalks them, while also falling in love. It’s a meet-cute that turns into a stay-alive. Both leads are adorable and know exactly the tone that director Josh Ruben and writers Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy are going for, paying homage to “Friday the 13^th Part VI – Jason Lives” as much as “When Harry Met Sally.” And the Heart Eyes Killer is a distinct, iconic figure, with the heart-eyes mask and array of gadgets.

Beautifully shot by Stephen Murphy and featuring an ace supporting cast that includes Devon Sawa, Jordana Brewster, Michaela Watkins and Gigi Zumbado, “Heart Eyes” should have been an oversized hit when it was released this Valentine’s Day. There should have been an announcement about another sequel already. But here we are, waiting for streaming numbers or other metrics to tip the scales. “Heart Eyes” should stalk – and swoon – another day.

3. “28 Years Later”

A legacy sequence to a movie that still feels cutting edge, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland returned to the post-apocalyptic wasteland for “28 Years Later,” their first team-up since “Sunshine.” In the world of “28 Years Later,” Britain is a quarantine zone. (“28 Weeks Later,” made with little involvement from Boyle and Garland, has been deleted from the sacred timeline, so that movie’s coda with zombies entering Paris, is no more.) Those indelible images of Cillian Murphy wandering around an abandoned London have been replaced by a small island village off the coast of Great Britain, where a young father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is dealing with his precocious son (Alfie Williams) and ailing wife (Jodie Comer). When father and son embark on a mission to the mainland, the movie mutates, first into something resembling a folk horror tale and then into something sweeter and more unexpected, as the son brings his mother to the mainland in search of a doctor (Ralph Fiennes).

Taking inspiration from Ken Loach’s 1969 coming-of-age film “Kes” and embroidered by a one-of-a-kind score by Scottish hip hop act Young Fathers, “28 Years Later” has a sensation all its own – if you don’t sob through the first act, you might be a heartless zombie. At least the sequel, written by Garland and directed by Nia DaCosta, is just around the corner, arriving in theaters in January 2026.

2. “Weapons”

Zach Cregger’s follow-up to “Barbarian” is an ambitious epic, mixing tones and styles with gleeful abandon. Part of the fun of “Weapons” is in the way that it slowly reveals its sinister secrets, so we will be brief and opaque when it comes to our description of the movie. But we can say this – in the town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, a group of kids get up at 2:17 a.m. and leave their homes. Julia Garner plays the teacher of the class of kids, Josh Brolin is one of the fathers and Alden Ehrenreich is the local cop investigating the disappearances, with a bulk of the story taking place a month after the kids went missing. And that’s really all you need to know! The way that the narrative unfolds, following various characters as they go through this experience, and the way that Cregger mixes dread and comedy, is absolutely galvanizing. And the movie’s thematic undercurrents, about how a community processes grief and explains away violence, makes everything that much more powerful. It’s a must-see and one of the year’s very best movies.

1. “Sinners”

Leave it to Ryan Coogler, who had amassed an unlimited reservoir of goodwill following his “Creed” and “Black Panther” movies, and who decided to utilize that goodwill on a hugely expensive, beautifully photographed passion project – a musical vampire movie, stuffed with symbolism and historic context, that is also one of the most fitfully entertaining movies of the past few years. In “Sinners” Michael B. Jordan plays the Smokestack Twins, bootlegging brothers who rode with Al Capone for a time but who have returned, in the early 1930s, to their backwater Mississippi town. Their plan is to open a rowdy juke joint. This is an entrepreneurial act, for sure, but also looks to enrich their community by giving the folks working the plantations and the cotton fields somewhere to go after work and be free. Of course that freedom is threatened when a vampire (Jack O’Connell) shows up and looks to turn the revelers into blood-sucking children of the night.

“Sinners” is piled high with themes and ideas, with Coogler exploring everything from the importance of Black business ownership to the (literally) transcendent power of the blues, to vampirism as a cultural force as much as it is a supernatural one. And the fact that all of this stuff doesn’t clash with one another, instead building beautifully to something melancholic and unforgettable, is one of the many magic tricks of “Sinners.” Coogler made a stone-cold masterpiece that defies easy categorization and demands further excavation. Complete with one of the great scores of the year (by Coogler’s frequent collaborator Ludwig Göransson), this is one for the ages.