By Naomi Roper
It’s time for my annual round-up of the best horror films of the year! 2025 was another stellar year for horror. While it rarely gets the respect it deserves from critics or award bodies, horror is the one genre which can be relied on year after year to push boundaries and get cinema goers showing up. This was another great year for mainstream horror, with a couple of entries on our list in particular getting the kind of critical adoration the genre can usually only dream of.
Before we get into the list, a note that I have yet to see The Long Walk (which I’m sure is incredible, but having read the book long ago, I need to be in the right emotional frame of mind to watch), Dangerous Animals or The Ugly Stepsister.
18 – Heart Eyes
Splashy, gory, hilarious slasher from director Josh Ruben featuring a masked maniac killing couples on Valentine’s Day. Mason Gooding makes a swoon-worthy lead, Devon Sawa has a lot of fun as a detective, and all here just seem to be having a good time, especially Jordana Brewster, who is really quite brilliant. Plus bonus points for riffing off Brewster’s most famous role by calling the cops Hobbs and Shaw.
17 – Man Finds Tape
Quasi found footage from director/writing duo Paul Gandersman and Peter S Hall with a wannabe TikTokker/influencer finding a tape from his dead parents, which shows someone creeping into his bedroom as a child. His sister reluctantly returns home to investigate, and soon all hell is breaking loose in their small Texas town. Found footage meets Lovecraft in this unsettling, deliberately paced horror from Rustic Films (Benson and Moorhead’s production company). Not quite as chilling as I wanted it to be, but an intriguing cosmic horror. Features a raft of genre faves in cameos, including Graham Skipper and Shane Brady.
16 – Companion
This sadly underseen gem features Sophie Thatcher as the perfect, adorable girlfriend accompanying Jack Quaid on a trip to a remote cabin to spend the weekend with friends. Sure, the genre savvy will be well ahead of the film’s big reveal, but that doesn’t negate the film’s charm. What starts as a pleasant dinner party descends into a brutal cat-and-mouse battle for survival. Sophie Thatcher is a delight as “the girlfriend” forced to fight for autonomy and her life, while Jack Quaid has fun playing against type as a thoroughly nasty piece of work. Lukas Gage puts in a heartbreaking performance as the devoted boyfriend of Harvey Guillen’s catty friend. Rupert Friend pops up to have fun as a scuzzy drug kingpin. Criminally, this flopped in cinemas, but hopefully it will find the audience it deserves on streaming.
15 – Descendent
Another from Rustic Films Descendent is a trippy cosmic horror from writer/director Peter Cilella, with a man experiencing strange visions after seeing a light in the sky. Descendent combines the horror of alien abduction with the horrors of trying to live paycheck to paycheck in modern America, with its financially struggling lead trying to come to terms with his impending fatherhood and the suicide of his father years before. Gentle, beguiling and eerie with a deliberately ambiguous ending.
14 – Alpha
Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to the Palme d’Or-winning Titane follows Alpha (Melissa Boros), a rebellious mess of a 13-year-old who lives with her single mother. When Alpha returns from a party with a crude tattoo of an A on her arm, she becomes the school outcast. This is a world in which an unnamed blood-borne disease can turn people who catch it into marble, and everyone is concerned that Alpha may be contagious. Meanwhile, her mother struggles to cope with the reappearance of her drug addicted brother. Alpha is a frustrating beast. What initially appears to be a very tired and trite AIDS allegory slowly morphs into an extraordinary, challenging movie about love, loss, time and the ravages of addiction set in a world which is falling apart due to disease and climate change. Alpha is not the gentlest of gateway characters -she’s rude, stroppy and frequently annoying, but Ducornau isn’t interested in whether you like her lead. She just wants you to be on the journey as the narrative skips through time periods before climaxing in a devastating resolution. There were few scenes this year as purely joyous as the sequence where Alpha’s drug addicted uncle takes her for a night on the town. Frustrating, uneven, overlong, beautifully acted and emotionally devastating, Ducournau isn’t interested in playing safe. Long may that continue.
13 – Influencers
Having now attended a number of “influencer” media screenings and having been shoved out of the way so influencers can film their “content” I now have great sympathy for CW – the brilliant anti-hero in Kurtis David Harder’s sequel to his film Influencer.
When we last left CW (the incredible Cassandra Naud), she’d been left on the Thai island she had abandoned Madison on (Emily Tennant). As Influencers starts CW has escaped that fate and is now living happily in France with a new girlfriend. That happiness proves to be short-lived when a Brit influencer (Georgina Campbell) comes to the unfortunate attention of CW. Meanwhile, Madison, the survivor of the first film, is now living a humdrum life, struggling to cope with the world believing that she is responsible for the death of her boyfriend. But when Madison realises that CW has set her sights on two right-wing influencers, the stage is set for a hell of a showdown.
This is just huge fun- Tennant is great as the woman fighting to prove her innocence, and Naud is an unstoppable force of nature as the brilliant but insane CW.
Just one question – HOW DID SHE GET OFF THE FUCKING ISLAND KURTIS?
12 – The Rebrand
Seen as part of Soho Horror’s Pride online festival The Rebrand (from director Kaya Adelaide who also co-wrote the film with lead Nancy Webb) is an absolute riot and my second favourite horror comedy of the year. Nicole is a videographer hired by a lesbian lifestyle influencer couple, Blair (Andi E McQueen) and Thistle (Nancy Webb), to film their redemption comeback after Blair’s comments on the trans community result in them being cancelled. Key to their redemption arc is marriage (they’re already married), and a child, and well, Nicole just so happens to be 8 months pregnant… The Rebrand is viciously hilarious – there are so many brilliant one-liners in here that I found myself cackling over them for days. Blair and Thistle are just magnificent creations. Blair is essentially a Ken doll – amiable but dumb as a bucket of frogs, and Thistle is completely and totally unhinged. Together, they make for one of the funniest couples of the year. This is an absolute delight.
11 – The Black Phone 2
Ethan Hawke’s late career resurgence as a scream king is as delightful as it is mystifying. Having previously teamed up with Scott Derrickson for Sinister (one of my favourite mainstream horrors of recent years), they next worked together on The Black Phone, an adaptation of a Joe Hill short story. Hawke was memorably unsettling as The Grabber, a serial killer of children, but the first movie wasn’t great, being something of a generic ghost story light on scares. So my expectations for the sequel were low. But The Black Phone 2 is the rare sequel that is significantly better than its predecessor. Gwen (sister of the Grabber’s lone survivor Finney) starts having dreams of murders committed at Alpine Lake Camp in the 70’s. Convinced that her mother (who worked there at that time) is trying to communicate with her, she drags Finney and her friend Enesto (brother of one of the Grabber’s victims) to come with her to Alpine Lake Camp to investigate. But the Grabber isn’t too pleased that Finney killed him and is back for revenge. Sure its basically A Nightmare on Elm Street Dream Warriors by any other name, but this is a vast improvement on the original. Derrickson repeats his favourite trick from Sinister, and the flashback sequences are grainy nightmare fuel. Hawke commits to making the Grabber as horrible as possible – no redemption arc here. A welcome surprise.
10 – Final Destination Bloodlines
I have watched every Final Destination film multiple times, and they now form a key part of my life. I don’t drive, so I don’t have to concern myself with driving behind trailers filled with logs, but I walk around every ladder, avoid every piece of construction and generally eye all things wth suspicion as a “Final Destination death waiting to happen”. The new film starts with the death of multiple people on the opening night of a new skyscraper as the glass viewing platform on which people are dancing shatters, plummeting them to their deaths. This turns out to be the recurring nightmare of college student Stefani Reyes, who doesn’t understand why she is now having visions of grisly deaths. As Stefani’s family starts dropping like flies, she struggles to work out the connection with the incident in 1969.
The Final Destination films live or die by their death sequences. While nothing will quite top the tanning bed sequence in Final Destination 3, the deaths in Bloodlines are brutal. Death by bin man, death by lawn mower and most memorably death by MRI machine. All played out with clinical precision and a deft brutality. The difference in Bloodlines from some of the other films is that the gifted ensemble makes you care about these characters so that when they all start dropping in a variety of grisly ways, it’s actually really upsetting. Features a beautiful and fitting send-off to Tony Todd – if you can watch without sobbing, you have a heart of stone.
And yes, I cheered very loudly when the piano squished the child.
9 – Redux Redux
Written and directed by Kevin and Matthew McManus Redux Redux is a high-concept thriller starring Michaela McManus as Irene, a woman who travels across the multiverse to get revenge over and over again for the murder of her daughter. Michaela McManus (channelling Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2) is astoundingly good as the grief-stricken, tortured Irene, who has become so addicted to killing and vengeance that it has consumed every drop of goodness in her. It’s a virtuoso performance and the emotional core of the film. Stella Marcus matches McManus as the scrappy Mia who blunders into Irene’s life and gives her something to care about. An indie gem.
8 – Mother of Flies
The talented Adams family returns with this beautiful tale about love, life, faith in the human spirit and the acceptance of death. Written and directed by John Adams, Zelda Adams and Toby Poser it stars Zelda as Mickey, a young woman stricken with terminal cancer. Not ready to give up just yet, Mickey takes her father, Jake (John Adams), to a remote cabin in search of a cure from Solveig (Tobey Poser). While Jake gets increasingly worried about Solveig’s unorthodox methods and their effect on Mickey’s health, Mickey just wants to grab at the last vestiges of her life, the best she can. Zelda is hauntingly perfect as Mickey – someone who has seen too much pain and suffering too young, but has not let it leave its mark on her. Mickey’s positivity and sheer will to survive are inspiring, but never once played false, no cheap moments of sentiment here. John Adams is so good as Jake, already grieving a daughter that is stood by his side and drowning in fear and guilt at not being able to do more to help her. Toby Poser is otherworldly as the much wronged Solveig, compelled to help Mickey regain her force for life. As is always the case with the Adams’ films, the visuals are a trippy delight, achieving incredible effects on a shoestring budget. True guerrilla filmmaking at its very best.
7- Weapons
Zach Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian went supernova this year, proving to be a huge hit with critics and audience members alike. Aided by an excellent marketing campaign Weapons captured the zeitgeist in the way few films have this year in its tale of a small US town brimming with resentment, taking out its hatred on a teacher, Justine (Julia Garner), whose students go missing in the middle of the night. Unnerving, creepy and camp as Christmas in equal measure Weapons solidified Cregger’s reputation as a new horror maestro. Weapons features an incredibly strong ensemble. Julia Garner is great as the nervy, twitchy alcoholic teacher who hates her life. Josh Brolin is on solid form as the parent of one of the missing children, Austin Abrams gives a fun turn as a scuzzy drug addict and Alden Ehrenreich is brilliant as the useless cop that Justine pines over.
But this movie belongs to Amy Madigan as Gladys, who is justifiably getting Oscar buzz for her role. Gladys is a witch who sweeps into town and leaves devastation in her wake. She is a parasite – a leech in human form who appears in the lives of the Lilly family and systematically destroys them and every single thing she touches. Gladys is cruelty personified but hell, a girl is just trying to live. Gladys is a comic and pitiable figure -all white clown makeup and bright orange hair. A colourful disguise so off-putting that it stops everyone from seeing how incredibly dangerous she is. Madigan’s performance is so brilliantly measured in that she leans into the camp while never letting you forget that Gladys is a viper waiting to strike.
I have reservations about some aspects of it (the brutality of the death of the queer couple has never quite sat right with me, and the imagery of the big gun is wanky nonsense), but overall Creggers is 2 for 2 with Barbarian and Weapons.
6 – It Ends
A group of friends out travelling realise with dawning horror that the road they are on has no ending. Written, edited and directed by Alexander Ullom It Ends does an awful lot with very little. Ullom takes a car, three superb actors and a stretch of road and crafts an existential horror about the unrelenting nature of life and the indomitable nature of the human spirit. This is great, clever filmmaking and goes toe to toe with all the big-name horrors of the year. It Ends debuted on Letterbox’d new rental scheme and was immediately picked up by Neon for a theatrical release next year.
5 – Hallow Road
Babak Anvari’s follow-up to the disappointing Wounds is a short, sharp and thoroughly nasty horror. Hallow Road stars Rosamund Pike as Maddie and Matthew Rhys as Frank – middle-class parents who race out of their home in the middle of the night to help their daughter Alice, who has been involved in a fatal car accident. As the parents race towards Alice, things take a much darker turn. Hallow Road is a deft two-hander with Pike and Rhys stuck in a car reacting to a voice on the phone for the duration of the movie. Anvari builds an air of suffocating, escalating dread as the GPS relentlessly counts down the minutes until the family are united with their daughter. Pike is brilliant as Maddie, all practicality and guilt – desperate to save her daughter from herself. Rhys is on equally top form as the slightly snivelling Frank, who has zero interest in anyone but his darling girl. The ending is vicious and deeply unsettling.
4 – The Monkey
“We have to make like an egg and scramble!” No other horror comedy this year was as balls-to-the-wall fun as Osgood Perkins‘ gruesome and hilarious adaptation of a Stephen King short story. Theo James excels as twin brothers (one good, one bad, as befits the trope) whose lives are beset by misery after they discover a toy monkey that kills when you foolishly turn its key. Is this subtle filmmaking? No. This is Perkins working out his parental trauma on a grand scale. Is the inclusion of literal death on a pale horse a bit much? Sure. But no other horror comedy this year has been anywhere near as fun as this. Featuring fun cameos from Tatiana Maslaney and Adam Scott the movie belongs to Theo James vamping it up as the twin brothers – one a nervous basket case and the other completely insane. Plus, the death sequences are all entertainingly horrific. Not all horror needs to be about generational trauma. Sometimes they can just be about cursed monkey toys, and that’s fine.
3 – Frankenstein
Guillermo del Toro finally gets to do his version of Frankenstein, and my god, it was worth the wait. This is a stunning adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novel. Del Toro shifts the story slightly to focus on fathers and sons as a stricken Victor (a fabulously bitchy and flamboyant Oscar Isaac) tells the story of his life and the creation of his monster (Jacob Elordi) to a sailor (Lars Mikkelsen). Elordi is absolutely heartbreaking as the creature – a beautiful soul forced into life only to be reviled by all around him. It’s an impressive physical performance (it is hard to see how Andrew Garfield (who was originally cast in the role would have fared in comparison). The Creature is the gentlest of souls in the body of a cadaver. Victor is appropriately the worst in this – a vain, driven man who instantly abandons his creation when he doesn’t learn quickly enough and uses him to cover his misdeeds over and over again. Isaac doesn’t soften him one iota, making the Creature’s forgiveness of him feel unearned while true to the Creature’s nature. Mia Goth excels in her two roles as Victor’s mother and later his true love (Freud would have a field day). As you would expect from a Del Toro picture, everything looks sumptuously beautiful. I adored this.
2- Bring Her Back
Oh Sally Hawkins we will avenge you. Wrongly overlooked by critics for her incredible performance in Bring Her Back, Danny and Michael Philippou’s follow-up to Talk to Me.
Hawkins plays Laura, a foster mother who welcomes newly orphaned Piper and Andy to her home. Laura is entranced by Piper (who is blind) as she reminds her of her blind daughter, who sadly drowned in her pool. While initially welcoming, it becomes clear that Laura has an ulterior motive for welcoming foster children into her home…
God Bring Her Back is a cruel, cruel film. A movie about the devastation of grief and how it can hollow out a person until only the basest cruelest of motivations remain – a desire to do anything, no matter the consequences, to reverse the cause of the grief. Hawkins (with pitch-perfect Aussie accent) is incredible as a kindly calculating monster who has been driven beyond insanity by the loss of her daughter. A vicious, cold film that leaves emotional devastation in its wake.
1 – Sinners
It’s my blog, so I get to have a joint first. What more is there to say about Sinners that hasn’t already been said? Every year, the critics allow one (and only one, because god forbid we just allow genre movies to stand on their own merits and be taken seriously, along with the Oscar bait) horror movie to thrive, and this year it is the turn of Ryan Coogler’s superlative Sinners. Featuring Michael B Jordan in a dual role as Smoke and Stack – two brothers returned home to set up their own juke joint, only for their night of freedom to be rudely interrupted by vampires.
There is no better directed movie than Sinners this year – Coogler’s masterpiece looks stunning in every frame ratio. Watching the post-credit sequence of Smoke and Stack framed against the sunset in floor to ceiling Imax at the Lincoln Square AMC in New York was a transcendent experience. Jordan breathes life into his dual roles, distinguishing them in terms of physicality and voice. One up tight the other a free spirit with a taste for women that will get him in trouble. The ensemble is incredible – Hollywood hasn’t known quite what to do with the staggering talents of Wunmi Mosaku but Coogler gives her the chance to shine as Annie – Smoke’s estranged wife. Delroy Lindo should be getting Oscar buzz for his role as Delta Slim – the sequence where he describes what happened to his old partner is truly horrifying.
Miles Caton is the find of the century as Sammie Moore – a ridiculously talented young man who gets the scene of the year in the sequence where he plays and music across the generations and space and time, manifests in one room. And then of course there is Jack O’Connell as Remmick – an ancient vampire who wants to use Sammie’s talents to open a doorway to let him go home. O’Connell gets the honour of having two contenders for line reading of the year with his ebullient “Sammie” and his “Sir” moment of offence when accused of being a Klan member.
A work of true brilliance featuring the soundtrack of the year.
1 – 28 Years Later
Not quite as beloved critically as Sinners, 28 Years Later is my favourite horror of the year. The original (the sequel does not exist) was a hugely influential part of my formative years. The unsettling sequence of Cillian Murphy emerging from a coma to do battle with rage zombies in a deserted London was one that has never left me and which I got to experience in real life, standing in an empty Trafalgar Square at the height of the pandemic. Often imitated since, at the time, there was nothing like Danny Boyle’s brilliant, brash reinvention of the zombie movie. Which is why I was so nervous about the sequels. The original has held up so well (although I always forget about the rapey part with the soldiers), and the set pieces were so spectacular that I just couldn’t see what Danny Boyle and Alex Garland had left to say. As it turns out, they had quite a lot to say.
28 Years Later is a tale about an abandoned Britain, decaying in isolation while its few remaining inhabitants engage in pointless pageantry and ritual. As a Brexit metaphor its a tad on the nose. Spike (Alfie Williams, who should be on every best actor shortlist) is a child born after the Rage virus consumed Britain and left them quarantined from the world. Spike’s dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor -Johnson – fantastic in a tricky role) is the big man of a very small town trying to do the best he can to raise his son while caring for his increasingly erratic wife Isla (a superlative Jodie Comer). Spike and Jamie embark on a coming-of-age ritual where Spike can visit the mainland to hunt the infected. There, he sees a doctor (Ralph Fiennes) in the distance. Spike becomes convinced that the doctor, Kelson, can save Isla, so he sneaks away with her in the middle of the night. But there is a new form of infected – the deadly strong Alpha’s, and they have Spike’s scent.
28 Years Later is a fine sequel to 28 Days Later, continuing the legacy of the original film while being a deeper, richer, and more emotional film. Those looking for zombie action were rewarded with several breathtakingly tense sequences that left viewers on the edge of their seats (the sequence where Spike and Jamie run across the causeway pursued by zombies had me so insanely stressed I wanted to cry with relief when they made it) I can honestly say that no film has affected me as emotionally this year as 28 Years Later. But Danny Boyle isn’t interested in just having zombies run after people – he’s done that before. Halfway through the film, the tone shifts into something more cosmic and spiritual as Spike and Isla meet Kelson, who is effectively a Merlin figure – a mystical man of myth and legend who carries the ability to shape Spike’s life. There really aren’t words for how good Ralph Fiennes and Jodie Comer are in this film. Fiennes’ performance as Kelson in 28 Years Later (and upcoming sequel The Bone Temple, which I was lucky enough to see an early screening of and is equally brilliant) is, to my mind, his finest ever performance. It’s a performance of such grace and kindness that I well up a bit writing about it. Fiennes has simply never been better. Jodie Comer is always a powerhouse (and has also mystifyingly been overlooked for this role), but she is wonderful here as the embattled Isla who knows she is very sick and just wants the best for her son. The choices she makes with Kelson in The Bone Temple left me emotionally fragile for hours afterwards.
Should the introduction of Sir Jimmy Crystal and the Jimmies (wait till you get a load of them) have been moved to a post-credit sequence to avoid giving everyone tonal whiplash? Perhaps. But way to make an entrance.
Exciting, exhilarating and deeply emotional 28 Years Later is a triumph on every level.