The Best Horror Movies of the 2020s
Horror got loud again after 2020, so rank these movies of the 2020s and be ready to argue for the order. Fear has to be the point. Funny is fine. Awe is not, and that is what puts Godzilla Minus One out: it plays for scale and grief. A film also needs a threat that acts on the people in it: a monster, a supernatural presence, or a person filmed as one. That threat has to be on screen at the ending. It has to have opened in cinemas or on streaming: nothing made for television. A remake counts on its own, by its own year. The decade runs 2020 through 2026, and a film belongs to the year it first opened to the general public, so a festival or invitation premiere does not move it. Two tiers: the upper one is films with nothing before them on screen, no earlier series entry and no earlier version of the same material. Everything else qualifying is the lower tier, and each says what came first. The vote orders both.
Sinners (2025) is #1 on “The Best Horror Movies of the 2020s”.
- 1
Sinners (2025)
Ryan Coogler shot the Mississippi Delta on 65mm, mixing IMAX and Ultra Panavision cameras, and spends an hour in a sawmill juke joint before anything bites. Michael B. Jordan plays both twins. Remmick and his two thralls stand out in the dark singing Will Ye Go Lassie Go, waiting to be asked in, and they are still in the room when it ends. Nothing came before it, no series and no earlier version.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31193180/ - 2
The Substance (2024)
Coralie Fargeat hands you a bathroom, a stabiliser syringe and a switching rule nobody keeps. Demi Moore's back splits open on the tiles and Margaret Qualley climbs out of it. By the finale the thing on the New Year's stage has both of them inside it and will not stop bowing at an audience that is screaming. Fargeat wrote it with no earlier film to answer to.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17526714/ - 3
Barbarian (2022)
Zach Cregger books the same Brightmoor rental to two strangers on one rainy night, then spends forty minutes on manners. Tess goes down for toilet paper and finds a door behind the shelving. What is under it keeps going past where the house should end, and the film changes shape twice more after that. Cregger started from a blank page with no prior entry to serve.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15791034/ - 4
Talk to Me (2023)
Danny and Michael Philippou built a party game out of an embalmed hand set in ceramic. Light the candle, say talk to me, say I let you in, and let go before ninety seconds. Riley does not let go, and what he does to his own head against the table leg is hard to watch twice. The brothers had no earlier chapter to carry.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10638522/ - 5
Weapons (2025)
Chapters, one per witness, each hitting the same night from a different angle, and the story only assembles when the last one lands. Alex's aunt Gladys keeps a basement, a rulebook and a way of getting into a house. Then the running goes the other way: the children come down the road at Gladys with their arms held back. No series preceded this.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26581740/ - 6
Nope (2022)
Jordan Peele hides his monster in plain sight for an hour, so the tell is a cloud that never moves and horses that will not go out. Gordy's Home is the sitcom flashback with the chimpanzee and the shoe standing upright in blood. Jean Jacket belongs to nothing else. Peele invented it for one picture and left it there.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10954984/ - 7
His House (2020)
Remi Weekes puts a South Sudanese couple in a damp council house and a caseworker tells them to fit in. Bol tears the wallpaper down and the dark behind it goes back further than the plaster does. The apeth wants payment for the girl they lost crossing the water. Weekes made it first, with no earlier instalment behind it, and Netflix put it out in October 2020.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8508734/ - 8
Longlegs (2024)
Osgood Perkins keeps Nicolas Cage half out of shot for an hour, cropping the top of his face off in the prologue so you lean toward the screen. The dolls do the killing by proxy and somebody's mother has been driving them to the doors. Perkins wrote the character new, with no film ahead of it in any run, and Neon opened it in July 2024.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt23468450/ - 9
X (2022)
Ti West sets a porn shoot on a Texas farm in 1979 and lets the elderly couple who own the place watch from the house. Maxine swims, and an alligator glides under her while the camera stays wide and far away. Howard has a shotgun. The crew has a schedule. West began the story here, before the prequel and before the sequel.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13560574/ - 10
Possessor (2020)
Brandon Cronenberg gives Andrea Riseborough a job: ride somebody else's body, kill with their hands, then shoot your way out of them. Tasya keeps choosing a knife over the clean exit because she wants the mess. Colin fights back from inside his own skull, and the calibration scenes melt faces in camera rather than on a computer. Nothing precedes it in a series.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5918982/ - 11
Malignant (2021)
James Wan spent his Conjuring credit on a giallo pastiche about a killer who fights out of the back of somebody's head. Madison gets dragged around her own house by a thing that talks through radios. The police station sequence, Gabriel unfolding backwards out of her spine and going through a room of armed officers, is the reason to sit down with it. Wan attached it to no earlier entry.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3811906/ - 12
Obsession (2026)
Curry Barker made his first feature in Los Angeles in October 2024 for $750,000, after a rerun of the Simpsons monkey paw episode gave him the wish. Bear works in a music store, buys a toy called One Wish Willow and wishes his coworker Nikki would love him back. She does, and she keeps loving him well past the point of bodies. Nothing came ahead of it.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt37287335/ - 13
Pearl (2022)
Six months after the film it is a prequel to, Ti West shot this with the same crew on the same New Zealand farm, in Technicolor reds, with a scarecrow standing in for a husband. Mia Goth delivers an unbroken monologue at the dinner table to people who are past listening. Second of the three West made in this run.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18925334/ - 14
The Invisible Man (2020)
Leigh Whannell holds his camera on empty corners of rooms, so you spend the whole film scanning for something that is not there. Nobody believes Cecilia, and the restaurant settles that: a knife comes off the table by itself and opens her sister's throat while Cecilia is still talking. James Whale filmed the Wells novel for Universal in 1933 and sequels followed it, so Whannell arrived long after.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1051906/ - 15
Nosferatu (2024)
Robert Eggers lights by candle and gives his vampire a moustache, which is closer to Stoker's count than to the bald creature of the silent version. Rats come up the streets of Wisborg in a grey tide. The last image holds on Ellen and Orlok in her bed as the sun comes up on them. Murnau filmed it in 1922 and Herzog again in 1979, so Eggers is not first here.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5040012/ - 16
Evil Dead Rise (2023)
Lee Cronin drags the cabin into a condemned Los Angeles apartment block, where an earthquake opens a hole in the car park and the Book is sitting in it. Ellie greets her children through the peephole with her face wrong. Somebody takes a cheese grater to a leg, and a lift opens on a corridor of blood. Fifth in the run, after 1981, 1987, 1992 and 2013.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13345606/ - 17
A Quiet Place Part II (2021)
John Krasinski opens in daylight at a little league game, with a burning bus coming down the main street of a town that still has people in it. Regan works out that hearing aid feedback pushed through a radio transmitter will drop one of them. It premiered in March 2020, was held back a year, and reached cinemas in May 2021. It follows the 2018 original.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8332922/ - 18
Backrooms (2026)
Kane Parsons was nineteen when A24 gave him the job, and he modelled the yellow rooms in Blender before the crew built them as sets. Clark finds a lit seam in his basement wall that opens onto carpet, fluorescent tubes and corridors that repeat wrong. Something hunts him and his therapist Mary, and the thing wearing Clark's face is still chasing her at the end. The Backrooms (Found Footage) came first, uploaded to YouTube in January 2022.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26657236/
How this list was ranked
Readers rank this list by voting items up and down. Items are ordered by reader votes.
