The 21 Best Horror Movies to Look Forward to in 2025
- Rob Binns
- Jan 4
- 13 min read
Updated: Aug 24
Last year was a big one for horror. Longlegs (2024) built up – and then justified – its own hype in ways cinema marketing has done few times before, ever; Smile 2 (2024) was a hit with critics and audiences alike, and – like The Substance – audiences voted with their wallets; Alien: Romulus offered a fresh take on the franchise while paying loyal homage to its predecessors; films like MadS (2024) kept the indie circuit alive and kicking.
Yes, 2024 was a staple, statement year for horror; so what can we expect in 2025?
Below, the team at Talking Terror have pulled together a roundup of the 21 horror movies that should be on your radar in 2025. From cymbal-clanging monkeys and evil dolls to returns of much-loved franchises not seen for decades, we’ll unpack all the familiar (and not-so-familiar) horror films and faces coming to screens in 2025.
Best horror movies of 2025: What to Look Forward to
The best horror movies of 2025 – or at least the 2025 horror movies you should be looking forward to most – are as follows:
Wolf Man
Rabbit Trap
Heart Eyes
The Monkey
Hallow Road
The Woman in the Yard
It Feeds
Sinners
Final Destination: Bloodlines
Bring Her Back
Dangerous Animals
28 Years Later
M3GAN 2.0
I Never Forget What You Did Last Summer
Weapons
Vicious
The Conjuring: Last Rites
Him
The Black Phone 2
Dust Bunny
Frankenstein
(Oh, and to be clear these horror movies aren't ranked at all, but simply listed in chronological order as to when they'll be hitting screens this year. Cheers!)
1. Wolf Man (19 January, 2025)
Recent iterations of the Universal Pictures shared horror universe haven’t gone well, but if anyone can turn the fortunes of the studio’s monsters around, it’s Leigh Whannell.
The Aussie hand who wrote Saw (2004), Dead Silence (2007), and the first two films in the Insidious franchise crushed his adaptation of The Invisible Man (2020) – loosely adapted from H.G. Wells’ 1897 tale – and now turns to a creature first spotted in media only a year later, in Clemence Housman’s poem and short story “The Werewolf”, from 1898.
Really, though, the film is an adaptation of 1941 Lon Chaney Jr. vehicle The Wolf Man – albeit with a more modern touch. Starring Julia Garner (Ozark, Apartment 7A) as Charlotte and Christopher Abbott as her on-screen husband, the titular lycanthrope, this one didn't set critics' hearts on fire upon release – although its full-moon carnage and stellar cast mean that, for my money, Wolf Man (2025) is still worth a watch.
2 Rabbit Trap (24 January, 2025)
Rabbit Trap is a British film set in the early 1970s and starring Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen as a couple who relocate to an isolated cabin in Wales, and who find their relationship changing in strange, unsettling – and perhaps even supernatural – ways. It premiered at the Sundance Festival back in January, but won't hit streaming until later in the year.
3. Heart Eyes (7 February, 2025)
Billed as a romantic comedy slasher film, Heart Eyes unites director Josh Ruben – the man behind Scare Me (2020) and Werewolves Within (2021), and star of 2023’s A Wounded Fawn – with Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy, the brains behind Freaky (2020) and It’s a Wonderful Knife (2023). Heart Eyes stars Mason Gooding and Olivia Holt as a pair of co-workers, working late on Valentine’s Day, who are mistaken by the Heart Eyes Killer – who targets couples – for lovers. A stellar addition to an already splendid Valentine's Day horror canon... just expect a bit more bloodshed than your usual romcom!
4. The Monkey (21 February, 2025)
With horror growing ever more homogenised and IP based – with genre filmmakers leaning increasingly into a pool of ever decreasing originality – the onus is ending up more on the filmmaker. In the same way horror-goers of 2010 eagerly awaited the next Guillermo del Toro picture, the genre-lovers of 2025 are looking for the next offering from Robert Eggers, the next Leigh Whannell; and no one director seems to tap into the beating pulse of that zeitgeist better than Osgood Perkins.
After successes dabbling in horror of a psychological (The Blackcoat’s Daughter, 2015), gothic (I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, 2017), and more recently a more crime-oriented (Longlegs, 2024) flavour, Perkins takes on Stephen King with an adaptation of the Master of Horror’s short story “The Monkey”, from his collection Skeleton Crew.
“The Monkey” tells the story of John, whose family acquires a wind-up monkey toy at a local store. The monkey, which has cymbals that clash together when wound up, seems harmless at first but soon becomes a source of terror. John quickly realizes that the monkey has a dark power: it is capable of causing tragic and deadly events. Every time the monkey is wound up, something horrible happens to someone in his life. The story dabbles in several weighty themes – fate, death, guilt, the past, the unexpected and inexorable power of objects – and, to clarify, the trailer looks AMAZING. With heavy hitters like Theo James and Elijah Wood heading up the cast and a director at the top of his game in terms of confidence and quality, The Monkey is a wild, bloody movie that balances horror and comedy with skill.
5. Hallow Road (7 March, 2025)
Babak Anvari (Under the Shadow, 2016 and Wounds, 2019) is back after the less well-received History of Evil (2024) with a taut, terrifying psychological thriller-cum-horror set amid the dark forests of the Emerald Isle. Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys star.
Seen it? I explain the ending of Hallow Road (2025) here.
6. The Woman in the Yard (28 March, 2025)
Though they aren’t all hits, Blumhouse Studios has been one of modern horror’s driving forces, and they’re back in 2025 with the prosaic – yet ominous – title “The Woman in the Yard”. Details are thin on the ground for this one. Most synopses online simply read: “A woman in black appears on a family's front lawn and delivers a chilling warning. No one knows where she came from, what she wants, or when she will leave.” Oooh.
What we do know is that the film stars Danielle Deadwyler, Okwui Okpokwasili, and Russell Hornsby, and that it’s headed up by legendary genre filmmaker Jaume Collet-Serra – of House of Wax (2005), Orphan (2009), and The Shallows (2016) fame – returning to his horror roots after helming big-budget blockbusters Jungle Cruise (2021), Black Adam (2022), as well as Netflix’s 2024 plane thriller Carry-On with Jason Bateman and Taron Egerton.
Want to know more? Look no further than my The Woman in the Yard (2025) review.
7. It Feeds (28 March, 2025)
First it followed, not it feeds – and, though this low-budget demonic chiller isn't related to It Follows (2014), nor the Insidious and Conjuring franchises it's so obviously inspired by, it certainly channels a lot of the same energy. Ashley Greene (Twilight) and Ellie O'Brien (My Life with the Walter Boys) star, and there are effective performances from Shawn Maloney, Mark Taylor, and Julian Richings. I loved it – check out my It Feeds (2025) review for more.
8. Sinners (18 April, 2025)
In a year dominated by IP (I mean, just count the number of adaptations, sequels, and remakes on this list; or, for a deeper dive, read my take on IP in horror in 2025) it’s refreshingly original to get an addition to the horror movies of 2025 that’s…well, original!
That’s what's on offer with Sinners, a film directed by Ryan Coogler (2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) and set in 1930’s Jim Crow-era South.
The film stars Michael B Jordan in a dual role as twin brothers who, as the most recent synopsis writes, “return to their hometown to start again, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back.” Also starring Wunmi Mosaku of His House (2020) along with Hailee Steinfeld, Jayme Lawson, and Omar Benson Miller, Sinners promises riveting, urgent Easter viewing – and, judging by the overwhelmingly positive noises around this one since it was released, has justified every iota of the hype surrounding its theatrical release. See this one in cinemas!
9. Final Destination: Bloodlines (15 May, 2025)
The Final Destination franchise – last spotted in 2011, with the release of Final Destination 5 – is back for a sixth turn at carving up death-cheating young adults in increasingly barmy and brilliant ways. The early signs for this one look good (especially if the trailer, which gives us a first look at one of the film's particularly creative kills), and it'll be nice to have some familiar faces. Not least of those genre legend Tony Todd (1992's Candyman), who sadly passed away in November 2024, reprising his franchise role as William Bludworth.
Keen to read about some of the new film's kills – and catch up on the entire, 36-kill body of work Death gets through across all six Final Destination films? Check out my list of every kill in the Final Destination franchise: ranked.
10. Bring Her Back (29 May, 2025)
The second big-screen effort from burgeoning genre masters Danny and Michael Philippou – the Aussie duo that brought us 2022's Talk to Me – focuses on a fostered brother-and-sister who witness something terrible and unexplainable involving their new mother.
Seen it already? My Bring Her Back ending explainer should help you organise your thoughts after the wild, weird way the film ties everything up!
11. Dangerous Animals (12 June, 2025)
It's not been long since we had a shark horror, but you could make the case that it's been a stint since we got a good shark horror – but that's exactly what Dangerous Animals is.
Set in Queensland, Australia, the film follows free-spirited, anti-authoritarian American surfer Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) whose burgeoning new romance with local boy Moses (Josh Heuston) is scuppered when she's abducted by psychopathic local tour guide Tucker (played, in a star turn, by the magnetic Jai Courtney). This one's not to be missed, but if you do you need some more convincing? My Dangerous Animals (2025) review should do the trick.
12. 28 Years Later (20 June, 2025)
Few would argue against Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later being the most hotly anticipated horror sequel of 2025 (and that’s in a year packed to the rafters with them), but I’ll go one further: this is the most hotly anticipated film of the year. (Or, at the very least, in the top 10). 28 Years Later promises to be a direct sequel to the 2002 film 28 Days Later, and a – less direct? – follow-up to 2007’s 28 Weeks Later, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo.
In 28 Days Later, the opening scenes depict environmentalists breaking into a lab where scientists are testing on animals. Those animals turn out to be monkeys infected with the Rage Virus and, after a brief struggle, they’re released – and the virus spreads. Highly transmissible and fast-acting, it turns people into quick, powerful zombie-like creatures and when Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in hospital after a coma, he finds the world irretrievably changed. Now, after 23 years, director Boyle and writer Alex Garland (The Beach, 2007’s Sunshine, 2018’s Annihilation) team up again for what looks to be an incredible, intense – and dare I say worth the wait? – addition to the franchise.
Oh, and the trailer is phenomenal. Set to a Taylor Holmes’s 1915 reading of Rudyard Kipling’s boots, it’s the most anxiety-inducing thing I’ve watched in a long time. The trailer also made headlines for briefly showing a scene in which an emaciated Rage Virus victim – one who’s a spitting image of Cillian Murphy – slowly stands up in a field, prompting fanbase-wide concerns for the fate of his character, Jim. However, those fears were recently assuaged when the identity of the actor portraying the zombie was revealed to be a British art dealer – and his presence in the trailer (and resemblance to Murphy) presumably a strategy to build hype on the part of the film's marketers.
The film stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes, Jack O’Connell, and – of course – Mr Murphy himself. Don’t miss it!
13. M3GAN 2.0 (27 June, 2025)
2023’s M3GAN gave us a look at the darker side of AI with the story of the eponymous doll as she becomes a malevolent, murderous scourge on a young girl and her caregiver.
Now, we’re getting a sequel, with 2025’s M3GAN 2.0 bringing back Jenna White, Violet McGraw, and Allison Williams (who reprise their roles from the first film as Megan, Cady, and Gemma, respectively). One addition to the cast list that jumped out at me was Jemaine Clement – Kiwi comedian of Flight of the Conchords and What We Do in the Shadows (2014) fame – who is a riot, and which suggests to me that the sequel doesn’t just plan to channel the original’s undercurrent of quirky, offbeat humour; it plans, like all good sequels, to double down on it.
14. I Know What You Did Last Summer (18 July, 2025)
27 years after 1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer – and 18 years after I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (2006) – a remake (initially given the awkward title "I Never Forget What You Did Last Summer", if the information I saw was to be believed) is set to hit screens in July 2025. Like the recent reboots of Halloween (2018) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) – which brought back original cast members like Jamie Lee Curtis and Marilyn Burns to reprise the roles that’d first made them famous decades ago – this one looks to be pulling names like Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr out of retirement to return to their roles from the 1997 original and it’s sequel, 1998’s I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, slasher films in which a group of youths – harbouring a terrible secret – find that some things don’t (or won’t) always stay hidden.
Nostalgia porn, sure, but damn – I am so keen for this one!
15. Weapons (7 August, 2025)
A small town is seized by panic after the mysterious disappearance of a whole classroom of kids in the dead of night. Only their teacher (Julia Garner) and the father of one of the vanished children (Josh Brolin) have the means to unlock the mystery. Zach Cregger (2022's Barbarian) directs; Benedict Wong, Austin Abrams, and Alden Ehrenreich co-star.
Want to know more? Check out Talking Terror's Weapons (2025) review now.
16. Vicious (8 August, 2025)
What do you get when you pair star Dakota Fanning (of 2009’s Coraline and 2024’s The Watchers) with director Bryan Bertino (2008’s The Strangers – that's the original, not the much-maligned 2024 remake The Strangers: Chapter 1) and add in a mix of actors including Devyn Nekoda, Rachel Blanchard, and Mary McCormack? You get 2025’s Vicious – a horror film starring Fanning as “a woman spending the night fighting for her existence as she slips down a rabbit hole contained inside a gift from a late-night visitor.” Sign me up!
17. The Conjuring: Last Rites (5 September, 2025)
When The Conjuring (2013) hit screens over a decade ago, it felt fresh and urgent: the jump scares lively, the characters rich, the plot deep and dynamic. Since then, it’s been diminishing returns – both for The Conjuring’s two sequels, and the films in the wider Conjuring Universe (including The Nun and Annabelle franchises) – as well as for the broader subgenres of haunted house/object/rectory horror they’ve inspired.
That said, I’m still excited for another entry into the canon. We’re now getting this with The Conjuring: Last Rites, the fourth film in the original The Conjuring timeline, and – presumably, given the title – also the last. Michael Chaves – who helmed The Curse of La Llorona (2019), The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021), and The Nun II (2023) – returns to the franchise as director, with Vera Farmiga and Patrick Warren reprising their roles as Lorraine and Ed Warren, respectively. Taissa Farmiga also returns to her role as Irene Palmer from The Nun (2018), with Ben Hardy (2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody) and Mia Tomlinson (The Beast Must Die) playing the Warrens’ daughter, Judy.
Plot details for this one are thin on the ground at the moment, with one source claiming it’s about the Warrens confronting “mysterious entities”. Well, aren’t they all?!
18. Him (19 September, 2025)
Another film that stands out from the rest of 2025’s most anticipated horror films for the sheer fact of its originality is Him: a Jordan Peele-produced, Justin Tipping-directed sports horror film hitting theatres this September. The premise, which sounds recycled from many sports films – ”an up-and-coming athlete goes to train with a legend who is about to retire” – is all we’ve got in terms of plot information, but you can be sure this won’t all be Rocky-esque training montages and slowed-down, Chariots of Fire-type victory parades – if Peele’s involvement is anything to go by, expect a sick infusion of horror to come with it.
19. The Black Phone 2 (17 October, 2025)
I’ve loved the story of The Black Phone ever since reading it in Joe Hill’s 2005 short story collection 20th Century Ghosts (which, incidentally, makes it the second short story from the King family to inspire a film on this list), and Scott Derrickson’s adaptation was a frightening, fast-paced film that remained faithful to the source material.
Now, we’re getting a second.
I’m not super sure which direction Derrickson and co plan to take this in, given that (SPOILERS FOLLOW) Ethan Hawke’s serial killer, The Grabber, was dispatched at the end of the first film – but he’s on the cast list, and it’s not a prequel, so we might be getting some sort of supernatural resurrection of Hawke’s masked butcherer. The original film involved The Grabber’s deceased previous victims communicating with his current victim, Finney (Mason Thames), through a phone as he sits trapped in the killer’s basement, and it remains to be seen how the sequel – written by Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill and without, by the looks of it, Hill's penmanship – will continue the film’s lore. Thames and Madeleine McGraw (who played Finney’s sister, Gwen) reprise their roles along with Hawke.
20. Dust Bunny (TBC)
Written and directed by Bryan Fuller and starring Mads Mikkelsen and Sigourney Weaver, Dust Bunny is about an eight-year-old who asks her scheming neighbour for assistance to kill the monsters under her bed – the monster she claims ate her family.
Promising to be full of intrigue and no small measure of insanity, this is one to look out for, so check back here for release date and more plot details when they emerge – we’ll be updating this page as soon as we know more!
21. Frankenstein (TBC)
And, if all that wasn’t enough, we’re also getting a Guillermo del Toro-helmed adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for Netflix. The ensemble cast for this is wildly good – think Jacob Elordi, Ralph Ineson, Mia Goth, Oscar Isaac, Christoph Waltz, Charles Dance, David Bradley and more – and it’ll be amazing to see Shelley’s novel rendered in del Toro’s beautiful, inimitable style.
Thanks for reading, folks. What horror film of 2025 are you most looking forward to? Let me know in the comments below!