The 175+ Greatest Horror Films of the 2020s (So Far)

143. THE HUNT (2020)

Wealthy liberals hunt kidnapped conservatives on a fenced estate, and Betty Gilpin’s drifter starts hunting back. Totally preempted Jan 6. 

142. TOTALLY KILLER (2023)

A modern teen time-travels to 1987 to stop the slasher who will kill her mother’s friends.

141. WOMAN OF THE HOUR (2023)

Rodney Alcala won an episode of The Dating Game in 1978 while actively murdering women, and Kendrick cuts between the taping and the killings. Freewheeling structurally, with some real tension-rich scene work.

140. DIDN’T DIE (2025)

So much of the zombie subgenre has been dedicated to the idea that with the death of civilization comes the death of humanity. In a contrast as stark as its rich black-and-white palette, Didn’t Die dares to see the collapse of society as a call to come together and find the color in life again.

139. UNHINGED (2020)

How’s this for a courtesy tap? A frazzled mom honks at the wrong driver and spends the rest of the day being hunted by an unhinged and oversized Russell Crowe.

138. THE POPE’S EXORCIST (2023)

Russell Crowe rides a Vespa through Spain as Father Amorth, taking on a pig-demon squatting inside an abandoned abbey. Much better once it stops being a possession movie and becomes straight up Indiana Jones.

137. PG: PSYCHO GOREMAN (2020)

Two kids find an amulet that controls an ancient intergalactic warlord, then make him play dress-up. Troma-lite Power Rangers meets E.T. meets Hellraiser and a lot of fun.

136. SOUND OF VIOLENCE (2021)

A composer who regained her hearing during a family massacre starts killing people to sample the sounds, rigging one victim as a human drum kit. Her music kills, and Noyer jams out to camp and slasher colliding.

135. MOTHER SUPERIOR (2022)

A woman takes a nursing post with an aging Austrian baroness in 1975 to investigate her own bloodline and finds the Blood Moon Templar instead. Just seventy minutes, no fat, and a strong calling card for writer-director Marie Alice Wolfszahn.

134. INFINITY POOL (2023)

At a resort in a fictional country, tourists who kill someone can pay to have a clone executed in their place, then watch. Sexual tension flows like thin red wine. A hedonistic descent into vacation goblin mode.

133. BECKY (2020)

Neo-Nazi escapees take a lake house and the furious thirteen-year-old in the woods outside starts picking them off. Lulu Wilson is true psycho mode. 

132. TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2022)

Gentrifiers bus into a dead Texas town to flip it and wake up Leatherface, who has apparently been waiting fifty years. A much better redux than it was credited for. 

131. THE CURSED (2021)

A massacred Roma camp curses a 19th century French estate with silver teeth and the werewolf bite they carry. The scarecrow scene is legit harrowing, even if it devolves into more standard horror movie fare.

130. THE BEACH HOUSE (2020)

Two couples share an off-season rental while something microbial rolls in off the water and starts rewriting them.

129. ALONE (2020)

A widow driving a U-Haul through Oregon gets tailed, taken, and forced to survive an encounter with a sadistic mansplainer played by Marc Menchaca.

128. SATOR (2020)

A family in the woods is worked on across generations by an entity their grandmother transcribes in automatic writing. Eerie and unsettling, but too sparse on mythos, story, and character to find oneself all that involved.

127. IMPETIGORE (2020)

A tollbooth worker returns to the village her parents fled and finds the place has been skinning children for their puppet theatre.

126. SAW X (2023)

Jigsaw flies to Mexico City for a miracle cancer cure, discovers the clinic is a con, and builds traps for the con artists. Better than 90% of the Saw movies. 

125. THE OTHER LAMB (2020)

A girl born into a cult of women led by one bearded Shepherd starts to see the arrangement for what it is.

124. ALL MY FRIENDS HATE ME (2022)

Such a perfectly painful watch. Anxiety-ridden and deeply cringe, this story about a friend reunion gone horribly awry uses the polite hostility of the British elite to create a true social horror.

123. ANYTHING FOR JACKSON (2020)

An elderly couple kidnap a pregnant woman to reverse-exorcise their dead grandson into her unborn child.

122. WOLF MAN (2025)

A father drives his family to his own childhood farmhouse in Oregon and gets bitten on the way in, then transforms across one night while they watch. Whannell is the modern maestro of Universal Monsters. Reinforced my desire to never get rabies.

121. THEY WILL KILL YOU (2026)

A night shift in a corner store turns into a siege by people who want what’s in the back room. Bodega Kill Bill with a twist of Ready or Not, and the production design is straight up Scooby Doo meets Wes Anderson.

120. BONE LAKE (2025)

Fun, kinda like a campy B-movie Speak No Evil by way of The Overnight.

119. SEND HELP (2026)

A woman and the boss who made her life hell wash up on a desert island, where she is the only one with survival skills. Raimi is mostly back. O’Brien is a convincingly smug douche and McAdams is electrifying as the capable one.

118. 40 ACRES (2025)

Decent little zombie movie, hold the zombies. Danielle Deadwyler is quite good.

117. THE RENTAL (2020)

Two couples take a clifftop Airbnb, find a camera in the showerhead, and spend the night making worse and worse decisions about it.

116. LISA FRANKENSTEIN (2024)

A grieving 1989 teen reanimates a Victorian corpse and starts fetching him missing body parts from the people who wronged her. Mostly charming, even as Diablo Cody cribs from a familiar deck.

115. NOPE (2022)

Sibling horse wranglers realize the thing in the cloud over their ranch is not a ship but an animal, and try to film it. Peele shifts out of social horror into Spielbergian science fiction. Proof he’s human.

114. DANGEROUS ANIMALS (2025)

A serial killer runs a shark cage tour and feeds his victims over the side, until he takes a surfer who fights. No species is harder to hunt than man, and he may have bitten off more than he can chew.

113. HELL HOUSE LLC ORIGINS: THE CARMICHAEL MANOR (2023)

An effective little spooker. Yes, found footage movies rely on the same gimmick over and over again, but this one had me unsettled. Mission accomplished.

112. BEAST (2022)

Man vs. lion B-movie Beast doesn’t rewrite the creature feature playbook, but nor does it need to. Strong pacing, gnarly animal action, and a worthy lead in Idris Elba make this a sinewy slasher worth a safari to the cinema.

111. THE BOOGEYMAN (2023)

A family in mourning gets a visitor that lives in closets and feeds on grief, which the surviving daughters can see and the therapist father cannot. Rob Savage tosses overcooked conventions in a blender and gets a fright fest that could fling you out of your seat.

110. COLOR OUT OF SPACE (2020)

A meteorite lands on a New England alpaca farm and starts melting the family, the livestock and the color spectrum together.

109. SMILE 2 (2024)

The grin-curse jumps to a pop star mid-comeback tour, where nobody can tell a breakdown from a haunting. Moving it onto a stage is smart; the mythology still develops in very similar ways.

108. TERRIFIER 3 (2024)

Art the Clown does Christmas, which mostly means a Santa suit and a chainsaw in a shower. Little more than a “he’s back again” plot thatched onto grizzly kills, and almost certain to be a win for anyone who has followed him this far.