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

71. IN THE EARTH (2021)

A scientist and a ranger hike into a plague-era English wood to find a missing colleague and meet a man worshipping whatever is under the soil. An audio-visual blitz where Wheatley genre hops like a mad man. The squeamish body horror stuff is just aces.

70. BODIES BODIES BODIES (2022)

Rich twenty-somethings play a party murder game during a hurricane blackout and someone actually dies. So many love triangles you’d need pins and yarn. Everyone’s as viable a suspect as in any tabletop game of Clue.

69. 28 YEARS LATER (2025)

Shifts midway from a rock-em-sock-em zombie movie into something far more meditative, and the jolt is jarring. The ending is straight up bonkers. But everything it builds toward gets paid off in The Bone Temple, a more complete and better film.

68. THE PLATFORM (2020)

A vertical prison lowers one banquet table through hundreds of floors, and each level eats what the level above left.

67. OXYGEN (2021)

A woman wakes in a sealed cryo-pod with no memory, falling oxygen, and only an AI to argue with. Buried meets 2001 in true Aja style. Loved this vibe, particularly in the post-lockdown blues era.

66. CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022)

In a future without pain, a performance artist grows novel organs and has them removed in front of an audience. The surgery of Dead Ringers, the kink of Crash, the transformations of The Fly. All of Cronenberg’s favorite fetishes have come out to play.

65. GAIA (2021)

A ranger stumbles onto two survivalists in a South African forest worshipping a fungal god that grows through people. A triple feast for the eyes that’s also super horned up, with Carel Nel giving off major Klaus Kinski energy. Even the trees are vaginal.

64. BLOODY HELL (2020)

A bank robbery hero flees his own fame to Finland and gets carved up by a family feeding something in their basement. Follows proudly in the grand tradition of Australian horror, irreverent about the genre while adding a worthwhile entry to it.

63. I SAW THE TV GLOW (2024)

Two suburban teens bond over a canceled YA horror show, and one of them decides the show was the real life. Schoenbrun’s identity horror crescendos into something undeniably powerful. It won’t soon leave you, even when the TV stops glowing.

62. THE HOUSE (2022)

The furry stop-motion animation is arrestingly eerie in this unsettling anthology.

61. LEVITICUS (2026)

An Australian teen sent to conversion therapy finds something following the boys who complete the program. The It Follows influence is impossible to miss, and it still finds frightening and heartbreaking territory of its own.

60. BLINK TWICE (2024)

A cocktail waitress gets invited to a tech billionaire’s private island for an undisclosed stretch of hard partying where days stop connecting. The only prescient question becomes, “are you having enough fun?”

59. THE DARK AND THE WICKED (2020)

Two siblings return to the family goat farm for their father’s last days and find something already in the house with their mother.

58. A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE (2024)

Invasion day in Manhattan. A hospice patient and her cat walk out through it.

57. LONGLEGS (2024)

An FBI agent with a psychic streak works a case of family annihilations where the killer never enters the house. We literally never see how long his legs are.

56. ABIGAIL (2024)

Kidnappers take a ballerina for ransom and lock themselves in a mansion with a centuries-old vampire. Blood-soaked vamp-ballet with a scenery-gobbling Dan Stevens. A damn good horror jaunt.

55. HOST (2020)

A lockdown Zoom séance with six friends, shot in real time on the actual call, running fifty-seven minutes. Way better than it has any right to be.

54. COME TRUE (2020)

A runaway joins a university sleep study, and every subject turns out to be dreaming the same shadow figure standing in the same doorway. Sarah gets driven further from everyone and closer to the cusp of sanity.

53. SWALLOW (2020)

A pregnant housewife in a glass house starts swallowing marbles, thumbtacks and batteries, the one appetite nobody gets to manage for her. A flesh and blood femme-bot who powers on when her husband walks in. It reeks of tragedy.

52. HUESERA: THE BONE WOMAN (2022)

A woman gets the pregnancy she was supposed to want and a bone-cracking figure starts appearing to take it back.

51. ALIEN: ROMULUS (2024)

Colony kids board a derelict station to steal cryo-pods and find the facehugger breeding program still running. The best Alien since Cameron’s Aliens, back to horror roots and practical effects, though one legacy character is resurrected with VFX sorcery that’s truly hard to take.

50. COME TO DADDY (2020)

A hipster answers a letter from the father who abandoned him and finds a beach house, a stranger, and a genre change every twenty minutes.

49. BACKROOMS (2026)

A kid noclips out of reality into endless yellow office corridors, expanded from Kane Parsons’ web series with an A24 budget and no restraints. Frustrating if you want tidy mythology, and uniquely distressing if you submit to its wavelength.

48. ULTRASOUND (2021)

A man with a flat tire knocks on the only door for miles and is invited to sleep with the host’s wife, and that is the least strange thing that happens. The script plays into then subverts expectations scene after scene after scene.

47. MADS (2024)

One unbroken take that starts with a teenager driving home from a dealer and ends somewhere far worse, handing off between characters as it goes.

46. RED ROOMS (2023)

A model with money and no visible interior attends every day of a child-killer’s trial for reasons she will not explain.

45. EVIL DEAD BURN (2026)

Vaniček takes the Book of the Dead somewhere new and keeps the franchise’s nothing-is-sacred mentality intact, spiking the screen with viscera. Nasty, simple, brutally effective, and carrying the demented baton.

44. THE DEVIL’S BATH (2024)

In 1750s Austria, women who wanted to die but feared damnation murdered a child, confessed, and were absolved before execution. Anja Plaschg is outstanding, and Fiala and Franz solidify their standing as two of the most interesting storytellers working.

43. M3GAN (2022)

A roboticist gives her orphaned niece a four-foot AI doll with a protection directive and no supervision. Malicious sentience isn’t fresh; what M3gan does well is approach it with an almost programmatic level of fun.

42. THE LODGE (2020)

Two kids are snowed into a remote cabin with their father’s new fiancée, the lone survivor of a suicide cult, and the heat goes out. Franz and Fiala’s style is as icy as the oblivion they set it in.

41. THE UGLY STEPSISTER (2025)

A confident, stomach-churning debut that cements Emilie Blichfeldt as a thrilling new voice in horror. Fairytale whimsy and grotesque body horror collide in a nightmarish fable about the violence of beauty standards, anchored by a breakout performance from Lea Myren.

40. GODZILLA MINUS ONE (2023)

A kamikaze pilot who refused to die has to face the thing that came out of the Pacific into a country that has nothing left.

39. RELIC (2020)

Three generations of women in a house that grows corridors as the grandmother’s dementia advances. The script complicates the dynamic with implied unpleasant histories without severing that unbreakable bond of family.

38. THE SADNESS (2022)

Maximum depravity: achieved.

37. ANTLERS (2021)

A teacher in an opioid-hollowed Oregon town realizes the boy she’s worried about is feeding something in his attic. Addiction, generational trauma, poverty, abandonment. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel, just more tunnel.

36. X (2022)

A porn crew rents a Texas farmhouse in 1979, and the elderly couple who own it want something the crew has.