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

35. WATCHER (2022)

An American trails her husband to Bucharest, doesn’t speak the language, and every night the man across the courtyard is watching back. Her sanity and her marriage unfurl as the specter grows.

34. PREY (2022)

A Comanche healer in 1719 tracks a Predator through the Northern Great Plains with a rope-tethered tomahawk. A.K.A. Comanche vs Predator.

33. RESIDENT EVIL (2026)

Cregger nails the inimitable feel of playing a survival-horror game, all scarce ammo and wrong corners. Enough blood-vessel-bursting energy and explosive set pieces to easily claim the hyperbolic title of best video game movie ever.

32. BRING HER BACK (2025)

Unrelentingly bleak in its exploration of grief’s demolishing power, this deeply feel-bad genre excursion is a challenging watch. But for unfazed genre fans, there’s real dramatic purpose roiling beneath its horrific surface. Evil Sally Hawkins is a gift.

31. THE MENU (2022)

A riotous dark satire that uses the upper echelon of the food world to skewer class warfare, with Ralph Fiennes delivering an icy tour-de-force as a mesmerizing, disturbed chef at the end of his rope. Full of twists and full-bellied laughs, consider it a dish that should be consumed immediately.

30. HIS HOUSE (2020)

A South Sudanese couple placed in a British council house are told not to move, and the walls hold the debt they crossed the water with.

29. STRANGE DARLING (2024)

Shot in the PNW, Strange Darling evokes the kind of movie born out of the ’90s indie film gold rush, the type that would have rocketed its creators to overnight fame. Instead, the production faced unhinged levels of producer interference, with financiers demanding recuts and even the removal of its lead actress. That Strange Darling saw the light of day as originally intended is nothing short of a miracle. That it’s also a shotgun blast of genre creativity, brimming with crafty (and nonlinear) cat-and-mouse play that toys with our expectations, earns it a spot on this list. Movies like this, heralding new voices, taking risks, being playful, and delivering a damn fun watch, remind us there’s still plenty of joy to be found in independent cinema. Willa Fitzgerald is the breakout star of the year, delivering eye-popping work here despite nearly being fired.

28. WRONG TURN (2021)

Hikers on the Appalachian Trail cross a self-governing mountain society that has been up there since before the Civil War. A franchise detour that pivots away from everything the series was built on, and is hugely enjoyable for exactly that reason.

27. WHEN EVIL LURKS (2023)

Possession works like communicable disease here, with a rulebook everyone knows and nobody follows in time.

26. THE NIGHT HOUSE (2020)

A widow finds her husband built a mirrored version of their lake house across the water, and learns why. Beth confronts a terrifying, mutually exclusive truth: either ghosts exist, or there’s truly nothing waiting beyond this mortal coil.

25. SMILE (2022)

A trauma therapist watches a patient kill herself while grinning and inherits the curse, which passes by witness. It makes full use of its R-rating, going to extremes not often seen in a wide studio release.

24. BEAU IS AFRAID (2023)

A medicated man tries to get to his mother’s funeral and passes through a feral city, a smothering suburb, and a forest theatre troupe on the way. Aster stages it like Homer. A troubled guide through a decaying world.

23. SANCTUARY (2022)

A hotel-suite two-hander between an heir and the dominatrix he’s trying to retire before taking over the family company. Qualley commands every scene with a gravitational pull as total as the domme she plays.

22. CANDYMAN (2021)

An artist moves into the gentrified footprint of Cabrini-Green and paints his way into the hook. DaCosta doesn’t mince her words nor blunt her imagery, and what it has to say about the cycle of Black trauma is doubly horrifying.

21. THE INNOCENTS (2021)

Four kids in a Norwegian apartment block discover telekinetic powers over one summer, and one of them has no reason not to use them. Vogt’s direction is taut and the child performances are great. Empathy and psychopathy in children too young to understand either term.

20. FINAL DESTINATION BLOODLINES (2025)

Death works backward through a family tree from a tower-restaurant premonition two generations old.

19. THE COFFEE TABLE (2022)

New parents buy a hideous glass coffee table, something unspeakable happens on it in the first twenty minutes, and the rest is the husband not telling anyone. Invigorating, captivating, and it shook me deeply. Who knew Eraserhead and A Serbian Film would have a baby?

18. THE INVISIBLE MAN (2020)

An abuser fakes his death and keeps tormenting his ex from inside an optics suit, so every witness thinks she’s unraveling. Whannell reworks Wells’ triangle of madness, power and perseverance to topical results, and the predator hunts with all the privilege of inconspicuousness.

17. 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE (2026)

Spike falls in with a death cult built from bone and finds membership isn’t much better than infection. What’s worse: dying, or losing a piece of your soul in order to survive?

16. UNDERTONE (2025)

Ian Tuason’s debut builds an all-encompassing nightmare out of what you can hear coming and can’t see. As immersive as it is bone chilling, with truly elite sound design.

15. TOGETHER (2025)

A twisted, tactile meditation on love, compromise, and the bodily cost of staying too close for too long, brought to life by Michael Shanks’ sharp direction and a pair of knockout performances from Alison Brie and Dave Franco. Together, they make the film’s grotesque intimacy feel oddly, disturbingly relatable.

14. POSSESSOR (2020)

A corporate assassin drives other people’s bodies to commit murders, and one host starts driving back. Gore resides in Vos’s soul and on the screen, and Riseborough’s turn as the chilly killer is searing.

13. SAINT MAUD (2020)

A palliative nurse decides her dying patient’s soul is her personal assignment from God. Maud’s connection isn’t blind faith but direct call and response: God Zooms in for a quick chat and a bit of direction. Devotion is cursed.

12. EVIL DEAD RISE (2023)

The Book of the Dead turns up in an LA apartment building’s parking garage and a mother of three opens it. Not only is there an elevator full of blood, characters come flooding out with it. I could watch one of these every decade.

11. BARBARIAN (2022)

A woman arrives at a double-booked Detroit rental at night, and the man already inside offers her the only bedroom with a lock and opens the wine in front of her to prove nothing’s in it. Part Don’t Breathe, part Wrong Turn, and it rules.

10. TALK TO ME (2022)

Teens pass around an embalmed hand that lets a spirit ride you for ninety seconds, and film each other doing it. Shakes itself into your conscious and roots deeply. Without a doubt the horror movie of its year.

9. SPEAK NO EVIL (2022)

A Danish family accepts a weekend invitation from the Dutch couple they met on holiday and won’t leave no matter how bad it gets. Every instinctual alarm goes off and nobody listens. They play into societal expectation, and then they are exploited. A vicious film. 

8. PEARL (2022)

A farm girl in 1918 auditions for a dance troupe as her escape and murders her way toward it. She thinks she can hide her budding psychopathy behind a Hollywood-worthy performance. The trouble is she’s not all that great an actor.

7. TITANE (2021)

A woman with a titanium plate in her skull kills, gets pregnant by a car, binds her body flat and passes herself off as a fire captain’s missing son. Ducournau’s Raw was my favorite film of 2017, and this one bites harder.

6. NOSFERATU (2024)

Eggers rebuilds Murnau out of mud, candlelight and a rotting Orlok who wants to be invited. I succame.

5. OBSESSION (2025)

A nice guy wishes his way out of the friend zone and gets a girlfriend who cannot be talked out of loving him. Curry Barker proves himself a genre craftsman with a wicked sense of humor, a mean visual streak, and an unnerving command of tone. Actually scary and actually funny.

4. THE BEAST (2023)

Bonello runs one couple through three centuries and an AI process for purging emotion, with a Los Angeles incel chapter in the middle. A masterbeast.

3. SINNERS (2025)

Twin brothers open a juke joint in Jim Crow Mississippi and the music they make there calls something older than the Klan outside. The real thrill is how it makes its deeper ideas textual rather than ornamental.

2. THE SUBSTANCE (2024)

A fired aerobics star injects a black-market serum that spawns a younger self, and the two have to split every week between them. She doesn’t just regain her glow, she loses herself piece by horrifying piece to the version she thought she wanted. Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley are phenomenal, and their fearless performances are the film’s highlight.

1. WEAPONS (2025)

Seventeen children in one class walk out of their homes at 2:17am, arms back, and never come home, told through the people left behind. A clear step up in craft, and Cregger may just be the horror prince the 2020s were promised.