The Best Scary Movies Of 2025 So Far, Ranked

It’s that time of the year when — well, frankly, I don’t know. I feel like 2025 has been both an eternity and the blink of an eye? But the calendar says we’re just about halfway through another cycle around the sun, and the weather indicates summer, so that means it’s time to pump out some “Best Of (So Far)” lists. Luckily, I’ve been numbing the hellscape that is life by watching and reviewing as many movies as possible, so this shouldn’t be too hard.

Specifically, let’s evaluate 2025’s horror releases thus far. Last year was a tremendously bountiful harvest of titles, many of which are now available to stream. I’m not sure if 2025 will surpass last year’s class, but it’s making a solid effort. There are a lot more original successes this year than franchise sequels or prequels, with shout-outs to some studio gambles that paid off in a big way. Let’s run through ‘em all and count down the best scary movies of 2025 so far!

15. Final Destination Bloodlines

Final Destination Bloodlines is the longest Final Destination by far, but it never feels that way. Filmmakers Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein meet the challenge of resuscitating Final Destination over a decade after the last release, and deliver a standout premonition that might be the best yet. It’s a cheekier Final Destination given the family values that are preyed upon by death, but kill sequences don’t relent. Just because mothers, siblings, and relatives have to watch their loved ones die doesn’t mean there’s any softening of blows. Final Destination Bloodlines delivers exactly what franchise fans crave, and has a blast doing so.

14. Bring Her Back

Danny and Michael Philippou sure know a thing or two about plunging audiences into murky pools of grief. Bring Her Back is a suffocatingly dreadful supernatural tale hinged on a pain-stricken and dominating performance by Sally Hawkins. It’s playing loosey-goosey with its narrative structure between old video clips of possible cult practices and the jumps between characters, but it’s always a heartbreaking experience. Everyone involved is feeling some type of loss, which the film explores through diabolical means. It’s not as tight as Talk To Me, but is more vicious when the shoe drops — er, the kitchen knife, I should say.

13. Clown in a Cornfield

Clown in a Cornfield made $3.7 million in its opening weekend, setting a new opening record for IFC (sorry, Late Night with the Devil). Good on Shudder’s young adult slasher because it deserves the haul. Eli Craig leaves Tucker and Dale behind to adapt Adam Cesare’s novels into a teen-friendly splatterfest that introduces moviegoers to their new evil clown obsession: Frendo. I hadn’t read any of Cesare’s series, which helped since plotted surprises hit much harder than if I’d known. Craig’s having fun with brutal death scenes, but he also keys into the generational commentaries embedded in Cesare’s pages. It’s not a kiddie movie by any means, but it’s a fantastic starting point for budding horror fans who want to try a gateway slasher with a little more bite.

12. Locked

The movie where Bill Skarsgård is locked inside a car and tormented by its owner, Anthony Hopkins, is pretty darn good. Perhaps that shouldn’t come as a shock. Locked is a remake of an equally interesting Spanish-language film called 4×4, so the bones were there. Skarsgård and Hopkins square off in a battle of morality and wits, as Hopkins controls the temperature and sends electric jolts into the sealed luxury SUV Skarsgård tried to carjack. Despite the confined setting, there’s room to breathe inside the four-wheeled metal coffin, and the film never feels restricted. Credit director David Yarovesky for understanding how to maximize the situation’s potential, never letting his thriller run out of gas.

11. Get Away

Nick Frost writes and stars in this vacation thriller on a Swedish island. “Get Away” plays with the term “getaway,” as your picturesque British family finds themselves interrupting a secluded community’s Karantan celebration that might or might not be dangerous for outsiders. From here, the film subverts what you’d expect from your average fish-out-of-water tourist horror comedy. I don’t want to say much more because the ride is all the fun, but rest assured there’s violence, survival instincts, and a body count that’ll tip any airport security scales.

10. The Damned

Thordur Palsson’s icy feature debut chills like AMC’s The Terror and lurks like Emma Tami’s The Wind. It’s a 19th-century Nordic thriller rooted in dreary folklore that hardly blazes forward, but establishes an authentic period presence with supernatural influences. Palsson’s tiny fishing community haunter bathes in slinking dread, as you can feel the characters on screen succumbing to their paranoias. It’s a frigid Arctic ghost story worth a shiver, even if the ending introduces more questions than answers.

9. It Feeds

I don’t see a lot of It Feeds chatter, so hopefully this sparks a few watches. Chad Archibald’s tale of disturbed children and clairvoyant psychiatrists packs a decent amount of scares into an inviting indie package. Ashley Greene stars as the woman with powers, hoping to save a young patient who insists an entity is feeding on her. Enter Shawn Ashmore as a suspiciously stern father, a jet-black figure that haunts its victims, and exciting frights that keep audiences on their toes. It’s simple and unassuming, but that’s what lets Archibald focus on the good stuff: the horrors.

8. Drop

A movie about the horrors of first dates? Well, there’s a little more to Christopher Landon’s Drop. Meghann Fahy and Brandon Sklenar star as romantic diners in a Chicago skyline restaurant, interrupted by meme drops from an unknown sender. Fahy’s widowed single mother, Violet, gets caught in a nefarious assassination plot, and he’s the catch — Sklenar’s Henry, Violet’s date, can’t leave or he dies. Cue a Hitchcockian restaurant thriller where Violet has to convince Henry to stay seated while attempting to suss out the anonymous dropper before anyone has to die. It’s a nervy whodunit that keeps the situation fresh and interesting, hitting on that perfect Friday night theater vibe to put a smile on moviegoers’ faces.

7. Sinners

Yup, it’s Sinners time. Ryan Coogler’s Jim Crow-era From Dusk Till Dawn infuses musical mayhem into a 1930s juke joint vampire thriller. Michael B. Jordan is thriving as Smoke and Stack, two criminal disciples of Al Capone who return to Mississippi with dreams of opening a nightclub for the local Black community. They do, and America’s racist past comes to life in the form of a bloodsucking scourge who starts turning Smoke and Stack’s patrons one at a time. A safe haven for Black southerners becomes a hideout under seige as pointy teeth tear flesh. Coogler sure as hell keeps the politics in horror and proves why that’s important. History and genre embellishments blend into a rambunctious brand of thrills that deserves the praise it’s earned.

6. Dead Talents Society

“Imagine Sadako vs. Kayako but as a Christopher Guest sports comedy … [with shades of] Monsters, Inc. and Beetlejuice.” That’s how I described Dead Talents Society in my Fantastic Fest review, which hopefully grabs your attention. John Hsu’s Taiwanese horror comedy is a lighthearted yet gory treat that turns the afterlife into a scare competition. It’s far funnier than it is nightmarish, but nails its meta-horror commentaries by giving us behind-the-scenes looks at ghouls who haunt the living. Often sweet and frequently amusing, Dead Talents Society deserved far more than its unmarketed dump onto Netflix.

5. Dangerous Animals

In a just world, Dangerous Animals would launch a parade of projects where Jai Courtney plays nothing but psychotic freakos. He’s fantastic as the namesake of “Tucker’s Experience,” who feeds helpless women to sharks off the back of his cage-diving vessel. Hassie Harrison stars as his latest target, Zephyr, a vagabond surfer girl who regains consciousness aboard Tucker’s boat. Director Sean Byrne brings his trademark bleakness to the kidnapping scenario, especially Tucker’s predatory instincts, but there’s plenty of fight in Zephyr. Courtney’s eccentric baddie matches aquatic horror thrills, and it all comes together with storytelling that nails the comparison between nature’s creatures and actual monsters.

4. The Rule of Jenny Penn

“Let them fight,” but it’s John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush in a nursing home. That’s James Ashcroft’s The Rule of Jenny Penn, an elderly power struggle between Rush’s ailing stroke victim and Lithgow’s faking dementia patient (Royal Pine Mews Care Home’s villain by night). Ashcroft and co-writer Eli Kent coldly adapt Owen Marshall’s devious short story that illustrates how easily tyrants can amass power through psychological warfare. Even better, The Rule of Jenny Penn translates those eerie, almost ghost-town-like feelings we’d get as children walking through old folks homes into a breeding ground for dastardly behavior. The farther the film goes, the more we’re sucked into Rush’s deteriorating mind and the more the film embraces surreality. Rush and Lithgow know precisely how to generate tension with all the above — veteran actors crushing on the level you’d expect.

3. Heart Eyes

Valentine’s Day has its fair share of by-the-books slashers. My Bloody Valentine is a classic, the 2009 3D remake rips (don’t hate), and Valentine ain’t half bad. Where Heart Eyes differentiates itself is that while slasher kill scenes are horror-fan-approved, the twisted love story between potential victims is surprisingly sweet. Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding are oozing as much chemistry as the “Heart Eyes Killer’s” wake of corpses oozes blood, carrying a romantic warmth throughout the otherwise knife-to-the-heart slasher. Director Josh Ruben strikes a tonal balance between humor, earnestness, and gonzo gore that fills all three cups (bringing Christopher Landon, Michael Kennedy, and Phillip Murphy’s screenplay to life), delivering an easy holiday favorite for any horror fan’s date night.

2. The Monkey

I’ve been waiting for Oz Perkins to make a movie like The Monkey. It’s a better Final Destination movie than Final Destination Bloodlines. If you want blood, you’ve got it by the bucketful as a drumming toy monkey cues brutal death after brutal death. It’s a Stephen King adaptation by Oz Perkins that ditches all of the filmmaker’s slow-burning signatures and embraces a more off-the-wall King short with cartoonish morbidity. It’s a film about death, filled with gratuity and laughs, that still finds an uplifting message under all the chunky guts and dismembered body parts. I like this version of Perkins, the Midnighter madman who wants to have a little fun.

1. The Ugly Stepsister

The Ugly Stepsister isn’t the first time Cinderella’s fable has been adapted in the horror genre (no-budget knockoffs abound), but it’s inarguably the best. Emilie Blichfeldt’s nasty body-horror take on the womanly pains to achieve beautification has way more in common with The Substance than you’d expect. Shudder’s bleak and bloody fairy tale feels like a grim period fantasy with tonal comparisons to Hulu’s The Great, with a standout lead performance by Lea Myren as the “ugly stepsister.” It’s all punishingly comical as Myren’s Elvira endures outdated plastic surgery methods and ingests tapeworms, until a finale that’ll have your stomach churning or worse.

A confident, exquisitely commanded, and memorably repulsive debut from Blichfeldt immediately announces a new filmmaking talent to watch.