The 10 best horror movies of 2025, ranked

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It's been a very good year for horror fans

What's your favorite scary movie? When putting together this 2025 ranking, that delightful horror-film catchphrase suddenly became an impossible question.

The past 12 months have been absurdly great for horror fans, with small indie outfits and Hollywood studios alike serving up scare after scare. This was the year that Warner Bros. Discovery bet big on original horror, giving directors like Ryan Coogler and Zach Cregger the freedom to tell whatever type of story they wanted. Meanwhile, Danny Boyle resurrected his trailblazing zombie film 28 Days Later for a shockingly beautiful post-pandemic follow-up, a long-gestating Stephen King adaptation finally saw the light of day, and even Rian Johnson got in on the fun with his third Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Man.

Ranking these movies felt like an impossible task, but we did it anyway. Here are Polygon's top 10 horror movies of 2025.

10 Good Boy

Indy the dog investigating a dark room in a cabin from GOOD BOY

Good Boy has emerged as one of 2025’s most surprising small-scale horror successes. The haunted-house film marks the feature debut of director Ben Leonberg and stars his own Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, Indy, in the eponymous role. The story follows Indy and his owner, Todd (Shane Jensen), as they trade city life for the isolated country home of Todd’s late grandfather. Not long after settling in, however, Indy begins to sense something is wrong, picking up on eerie shadows, ghostly presences, and unsettling sounds that remain unseen and unheard by the humans around him. The film manipulates the crowd by having a dog as the lead, making audiences hang on every lingering gaze, whimper, or twitch from the pup when he’s in any sense of danger. It's genius filmmaking that immediately gets viewers invested and lets them project all their emotions onto a doggo who is probably reacting to his owner's treats off-screen to elicit all these reactions. —Isaac Rouse

9 Heart Eyes

Every movie and show coming to Netflix in May

Slasher horror meets romantic comedy in Heart Eyes, and the team behind the film successfully pulls off that combination. Directed by Dropout favorite Josh Ruben, Heart Eyes follows not-actually-a-couple Ally (Olivia Holt) and Jay (Mason Gooding) as they’re stalked by the notorious Heart Eyes killer, who preys on couples in a different city every Valentine’s Day.

The kills are delightfully gruesome (perhaps none more so than the winery’s notorious head pop in the opening minutes of the film) and unrelenting, and the Heart Eyes Killer racks up quite the body count, as one would expect in a slasher. All the while, Ally and Jay genuinely do fall for each other, ensuring Heart Eyes delivers on its romantic promise. —Austin Manchester

8 Bring Her Back

Danny and Michael Philippou’s Bring Her Back didn’t take off the way their breakout hit Talk To Me did, which is unfortunate, because it’s equally creepy and creative — and sometimes straight-up stomach-churning in shocking, awful ways. Packed with surprising reveals and narrative knife-twists, the film lets The Shape of Water’s Sally Hawkins flex her menacing muscles in a perfect role as a predatory foster parent. Her latest troubled wards, protagonists Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong), don’t initially suspect what their new guardian is up to, let alone why. As the wrenching story unfolds, it confirms the Philippous as horror creators with plenty of stylistic flair and a talent for putting unexpected new twists on old tropes. —Tasha Robinson

7 Final Destination Bloodlines

A Final Destination movie is only as good as its opening set piece, which is why the series’ second installment and its highway pile-up always ranks highly among the horror hall of fame. Thankfully, this year’s reboot, Final Destination Bloodlines, offers an equally gruesome spectacle to kick off its story, setting the action in a Seattle Space Needle-esque skyscraper that comes crashing down on its opening night.

Bloodlines doesn’t slow down from there, with co-directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein crafting increasingly devilish Rube Goldberg murder machines — the best involves an overpowered MRI machine and a Prince Albert piercing. I’m not sure how anyone can top that, but hopefully the team working on the next Final Destination movie will find a way. —Jake Kleinman

6 The Long Walk

Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk might be the best movie he’s ever made about a violent dystopia — and the man has directed four Hunger Games movies (with one more on the way). Adapting Stephen King’s 1979 novel, Lawrence and screenwriter JT Mollner (Strange Darling) take an almost perversely simple premise to its devastating and human conclusions. In a totalitarian near-future United States, teenage boys are drafted into a televised endurance contest: walk above the minimum speed or die, until only one survivor remains.

The Long Walk spent years and years in development hell, perhaps because studio-moviemakers thought the idea of a bunch of boys talking, walking, then being gruesomely disposed of one by one needed something more. All it took, it turns out, was a fantastic cast of future legends who you want to hear ramble on about their lives (and inevitable deaths). Cooper Hoffman anchors the film as Ray Garraty, a quiet thinker shaped by state violence and forbidden ideas. Industry and Alien: Romulus breakout David Jonsson steals the movie as Peter McVries, whose stubborn optimism becomes a lifeline for everyone around him. Their bond gives the march — dialogue-heavy and physically exhausting, even from the distance of a theater seat — a soul. Mark Hamill, who occasionally pops up as the Major to pop a kid in the back of the head, punctuates every moment of bro beauty with absolute dread. —Matt Patches

5 Companion

When M3gan 2.0 took a large swing away from the horror space this year, Companion was there to pick up the slack. The debut feature film from writer and director Drew Hancock, who previously wrote on Blue Mountain State, takes a very different approach to the AI thriller genre, though. Companion casts its humans as the villains, rather than the companion robot, Iris, played flawlessly by Yellowjackets' standout Sophie Thatcher.

The inciting incident sees Iris, unaware she is a synthetic being, killing a man in self-defense. As the story unravels, it's the humans around her who are revealed to be the ones going mad, be it with anger, jealousy, or selfishness. And as the wider plot comes into focus, humanity becomes more and more of the villain until the film's climax, which is a satisfying one, though not without a few jaw-dropping moments of frustration over how deep the human characters sink. —Chris Hayner

4 Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Story

A blood-covered priest (Josh O'Connor) leans forward from the back seat of a car at night to speak to Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), who's in the driver's seat, in Wake Up Dead Man

Rian Johnson’s elegantly intricate movie Wake Up Dead Man isn’t a conventional slasher movie or possession story, but viewed through a horror lens, with full consideration of Johnson’s inspirations, it looks a lot more like an Edgar Allan Poe story than either of his previous two Knives Out tales. Wake Up Dead Man ditches the first movie’s cozy Agatha Christie manor house and the second movie’s sunny lifestyle-porn island setting in favor of a darker, more Gothic direction. The bodies pile up in a small town where the most frequent settings for the action are an ominous church, the looming woods, and a mausoleum.

The most telling elements, though, are the motives behind this movie’s murders, and the way Johnson puts them on screen. A flashback to a woman’s messy breakdown is shot like a possession movie, while a confrontation in the space between woods and mausoleum feels like a slasher session. Wake Up Dead Man is a lot of things, including a thoughtful examination of religion and a way for Johnson to up his game as a writer and director. But it’s also a conscious swerve into a different mode of storytelling, one that’s darker, scarier, and more oppressive than his previous Benoit Blanc movies. —TR

3 Weapons

Weapons' Aunt Gladys aka Amy Madigan wearing a red wig and hideous amounts of lipstick

When an entire third-grade class of children mysteriously run away from home en masse, residents of Maybrook, Pennsylvania point the finger at the missing children's teacher, Justine (Julia Garner). Rumors about the disappearance spread like wildfire in the small town, leading Justine to cross paths with an angry, Archer (Josh Brolin). As the pair attempt to uncover the truth, they discover that Justine's only remaining student — a young boy named Alex (Cary Christopher) — is living with a bizarre new relative (Amy Madigan) who refers to herself as Gladys and is not at all what she appears to be.

Zach Cregger's off-the-wall thriller is, above all else, weird. But it's a good kind of weird, and its dark themes don't stop Cregger's comedic roots from shining through. There are laugh-out-loud funny jet-black humor throughout that never detract from the film's creepy premise. Ultimately, Weapons is a beautifully shot, well-acted, and incredibly well-written entry in the horror canon. It doesn't go out of its way to explain itself, but rather than negatively impacting the quality of the film, this ambiguity serves as a sort of mirror for the audience to gaze into. Cregger trusts viewers to deduce Weapons' symbolism and deeper meaning for themselves, rather than engaging in the sort of narrative hand-holding and over-explaining that would suck all the fun (and fear) out of the experience. —Claire Lewis

2 28 Years Later

Twelve-year-old Spike examines a skull presented by a mysterious stranger played by Ralph Fiennes in a scene from 28 Years Later

Improbably, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s return to their dormant zombie franchise is both filmmakers’ best work in years. Garland serves up a taut and resonant script that expands the thematic range of these movies to take in grief, mortality, families, and Brexit, without laboring his metaphors or showing his working. Boyle is energized, shooting fast and loose on iPhone and working with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle to create a contemporary and dangerously beautiful spin on the original movie’s roughed-up, gonzo digital style.

The true MVP, though, is Ralph Fiennes, who turns up halfway through the movie in a role that could just be an eccentric bit of scenery-chewing. Instead, Fiennes imbues his character, and the whole film, with a deep soulfulness, just as the journey of 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams, excellent) and his mother Isla (Jodie Comer) reaches its emotional climax. It’s unexpectedly, intensely moving — and Boyle and Garland aren’t even done with the blind-siding surprises yet. 28 Years Later is as gritty, invigorating, and heart-wrenching as a zombie movie could possibly be. —Oli Welsh

1 Sinners

Expectations were high for director Ryan Coogler’s first non-IP movie in over than a decade. With Sinners, he more than delivered, serving up the best horror movie of the year — and one of the best vampire films in recent memory.

When the Smokestack twins (a pair of criminally inclined hustlers played by Michael B. Jordan in the best identical twin performance since Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap) return home to Mississippi with a suspicious amount of money, they set about opening a new juke joint, only to accidentally awaken a primordial evil.

The first half of Sinners is a powerful period storytelling about racial and economic injustice in the Jim Crow-era South, but the film takes a sharp turn into horror when a gang of vampires shows up at the club and start causing havoc. The second half of Sinners pivots into bloody mayhem, offering a fresh take on the horror genre that other filmmakers will likely be emulating for years. —JK

Honorable mentions

She Loved Blossoms More: Every year sees endless small imported horror movies go straight to digital release, where they’re largely overlooked by everyone but the most exploratory, hardcore, or just lucky horror fans. The gem of this year’s crop is Yannis Veslemes’ Greek/French co-production She Loved Blossoms More, a hauntingly creepy, cryptic film with wild practical effects that have to be seen to be believed.

Obsessed with bringing their mother back from the dead, three brothers experiment with a time machine, and wind up gaining access to another realm. The early going feels like a take on The Fly that has three strong personalities conflicting over the experimental process. But as the story unfolds (and several bodies horribly unfold as well), the results land somewhere between H.P. Lovecraft, Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm, and the works of Panos Cosmatos. It’s a trippy, creepy movie, full of elaborate body-horror imagery designed to haunt your dreams — and to feel like your nightmares. —TR

Influencers: Sexy, lush, and speckled with bursts of jaw-dropping violence, Influencers asserts Kurtis David Harder and his collaborator-star Cassandra Naud as our leading purveyors of social-media horror. Their 2022 film Influencer introduced CW (Naud), a Tom Ripley-esque enigma who embroils herself in the life of Insta star Madison (Emily Tennant) while on vacation in Thailand, then frames her for multiple murders. Influencers expands the mythology and destabilizes the timeline.

The sequel reintroduces CW as an expat living the luxe Parisian life with a new girlfriend. That… won’t go well, nor will Madison’s pursuit to clear her name and expose CW. Their cat-and-mouse battleground: a new ecosystem of clout-chasers and Twitch grifters, running amok in Bali on the manosphere’s dime. With a thumping soundtrack and the gliding camerawork of a movie five times its budget, Influencers might sound closer to a David Fincher airport thriller than a Shudder exclusive. But don’t worry: CW kills again, the film’s slasher heart exposes itself with every turn. Bring on part 3! —MP

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