The best horror movies of 2025 (so far)

A family of British holidaymakers heads for a remote Swedish island to experience a culty ritual called Karantän performed by weird, possible serial-killing locals. Nick Frost’s first solo screenwriting project has everything you might expect from the Shaun of the Dead man: an ironclad appreciation of genre, a sweary streak a mile wide, and some canny casting (Aisling Bea is the MVP as the mum). But he also throws in an outlandish twist that’ll blindside the unsuspecting. If it runs out of steam in the final stages, the OTT gore keeps the silliness levels high.

Shirley’s Odessa Young and Peaky Blinders star Joe Cole star in this chilling nordic-set noir from Icelandic director Thordur Palsson. Set over the course of a harsh winter in the 1800s, it sees a small group of workers haunted by a fatal decision involving shipwreck survivors. Could the undead be coming for revenge? An unsettling psychological horror, it draws you slowly into its eerie, claustrophobic setting.

Leigh Whannell, the co-creator of the Saw and Insidious franchises, continues his one-man reanimation of Universal Monster movies with this atmospheric and occasionally majestically icky werewolf flick. Wolf Man never hits the heights of the Aussie horror auteur’s 2020 take on The Invisible Man, but with the underrated Christopher Abbott going full Jeff Goldblum-in-The-Fly as a dedicated dad who crosses paths with the wrong lycanthrope, it’s a thoughtful and fun fright night at the movies

It’s not horror in the jumpy, screamy sense, but Steven Soderbergh’s ghost drama is haunting in multiple ways. It’s shot from the perspective of an entity silently living in a house occupied by a family with multiple strange secrets. Soderbergh’s POV gimmick flips the haunted house genre on its head and makes for a film that’s as saddening as it is unsettling. 

FW Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu lurked so Robert Eggers’ amped-up version could roar in this erotically-charged update of the classic Dracula riff. The Lighthouse director gives his Carpathian monster a psychic bond with Lily Rose Depp’s young bride and unleashes untold terrors on Nicholas Hoult’s guileless young realtor and the people of his German town. Moody in parts, genuinely scary at others, it’s infused with a particular kind of looming menace, with Bill Skarsgård’s vampire every bit as unsettling as his Pennywise in It.

Drew Hancock’s directorial debut delves into the darkly comic chaos of an AI ‘companion’ bot gaining sentience and spiralling into madness. Sophie Thatcher (Yellowjackets) cements her status as a rising star in the horror world, delivering a standout performance amid a whirlwind of campy, satirical mayhem set in an unsettlingly near future.