The 8 Best and Worst Horror Movies of 2025 So Far, Ranked

Looking at the list of horror movies scheduled for release in 2025, it’s going to be another good year. Wolf Man and Companion come out in January, Heart Eyes and The Monkey are set for February, and further into the year we’ll see movies like 28 Years Later, M3GAN 2.0, Sinners, and so much more. Just like the past few years, we’ll be watching as much as we can and ranking everything we see in 2025. From the best to the worst.

This list is an ongoing ranking of horror movies released during 2025. To be considered for the list, the film must have its first wide release in the United States—whether the release is in theaters, on streaming, or on physical media—at some time during 2025. Limited releases, film festival screenings, and international releases don’t necessarily count unless those movies also receive a wide release in the United States during the year. The reason is, this list is intended to rank horror movies that most people have a reasonable chance to see.

The Damned employs a strong sense of dread to tell a story about isolation, survival, and guilt. The story is set in the late 1800s in a frozen fjord in northern Iceland. A fishing crew struggles with poor catches this season, and when they spot a ship sinking not too far away, the decision is made to let the sailors fend for themselves rather than help them and use up their dwindling supplies. After the dead bodies of sailors begin washing ashore, the fishermen and their leader, a widowed woman who inherited the fishing station from her husband, begin having experiences they can’t help but attribute to a monster created by their callousness. Filled with psychological chills and a touch of monster-movie frights, The Damned is the first great movie of 2025.

Read our extended review of The Damned.

In a town where “slasher villain” is a job description and their murders are caught on tape and viewed as entertainment, Abbie feels that she’s ready to enter into her father’s deadly profession. Her dad, Roger Bladecut, has his doubts about Abbie, but he agrees to let her slice and dice the local teens he’d planned to slaughter himself. But stalking teens opens a whole new world to Abbie, a world where friends her own age might be more important to her than her father’s legacy. Bloody Axe Wound is set in a world that is odd and inexplicable a lot of the time, but this gory mashup of a slasher and a coming-of-age teen dramedy works well thanks to its humor and heart.

Read our extended review of Bloody Axe Wound.

The Man in the White Van is a decent serial-killer thriller. Set in the 1970s, it’s about a teenage girl, Annie (Madison Wolfe), who is stalked by a man in a van. The problem is, Annie is known for telling tall tales, so nobody believes her when she talks about seeing the same van everywhere she goes. The movie might be too reliant on the tropes of the genre, and the continued disbelief of Annie’s story can get tiresome, but the film does deliver some nice thrills as the stalker (who is shown to be a violent killer) closes in on his target.

Read our extended review of The Man in the White Van.

Get Away feels very familiar in a lot of ways. That’s likely the intention though, since the movie plays with the audience’s expectations as a way of misdirection. Without going any further into spoilers, the setup of the movie involves a family of four who travel to an isolated Swedish island for a vacation. A special cultural event is about to be held on the island, and the local population is rather upset to have four interlopers in their midst. They’re so upset that they might take drastic action to get rid of their unwanted guests. Get Away is fun enough thanks to its lead actors, but it’s more amusing than funny, and the final act gets too hammy for its own good (though there are still some fun moments to be had).

Read our extended review of Get Away.

Dumb comedies can be hit or miss, but The Yorkie Werewolf is a dumb comedy that hits more than it misses. The setting is a small town where a feud between witches and mobsters has raged for years. Jenny (Isabella Jaimie) is the daughter of a witch, but she isn’t interested in the duties her heritage demands. Then one night during a ritual, Jenny is turned into a yorkie werewolf (well, a were-yorkie, really) when a mafia assassin kills her mother and botches the magic spell. Now Jenny, as a witch and a monster, teams up with a timid vampire to take out the city’s mob boss. It’s very stupid, but the dialogue is often clever, which makes the movie surprisingly funny for the right audience.

Read our extended review of The Yorkie Werewolf.

Kromoleo, set in a village on the Indonesian island of Java, is about a curse that rises up when a young woman returns to the village after being away for a decade. The woman, Zia (Safira Ratu Sofya), knows nothing about the curse. She only knows that the villagers hate her and her grandfather isn’t telling her something. As night arrives, so do numerous ghosts who kill people in very violent ways. Now Zia hopes to survive long enough to find out what her connection to the curse is, and how to stop it. The story of Kromoleo isn’t terribly original, but some of the visuals are good, and the supernatural violence is fun. Really, the death scenes are the best parts of the movie.

Read our extended review of Kromoleo.

From a visual standpoint, The Monster Beneath Us is excellent. The movie is set in a gorgeous historical mansion in Yorkshire, England, and it’s filmed beautifully. However, the story that takes place inside that mansion trudges along so slowly that many viewers will lose interest before anything interesting happens. The film is about a mother and son who move into a house where there is a literal monster in the basement. The boy develops a strange connection with the creature, but all that amounts to is a lot of talking and a lot of walking around in dark hallways. There’s just not much here.

Read our extended review of The Monster Beneath Us.

When It Rains in LA seems confused about the style of movie it wants to be. Is it a cursed-object movie? A slasher movie? A crime thriller? A whodunit mystery? A romance? It’s sort of all of those things, but none of them are done particularly well. There are some unintentionally funny moments, but even those aren’t enough to warrant a recommendation here.

Read our extended review of When It Rains in LA.