Top Five Horror Films of 2025

2025 offered a bounty of horror films, demonstrating the breadth of modes and styles in the perennially popular genre.

The design of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu shows reverence to the Gothic horror of the 1922 film even as the director injects the classical expressionism with disturbing and graphic bodily and spiritual horrors. 

Smile 2 swaps the institutional settings of the original 2022 surprise hit film for the bedazzled but increasingly besieged milieu of a pop singer (Naomi Scott, in what should be a star-making performance).

Zach Cregger follows Barbarian (2022) with the heavily Magnolia-inspired Weapons, a film that [SPOILER AHEAD] uses Amy Madigan’s eccentric folk horror villain to bleed dry/blow up (choose your metaphor) the middle-class lives of a network of anxious characters by targeting their children.

For a more political, dystopian narrative, The Long Walk adapts Stephen King/Richard Bachman’s 1979 novel to convey the desperation of a United States that has no option left but to sacrifice its boys to a competition and a cause that is said to be noble but whose benefits are experienced by a shrinking few.

If these stories leave the viewer with a hopeless outlook for their fellow humans, Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy concentrates the horror movie heroism in the form of a dog, Indy, who plays himself with aplomb, has no idea he is in a movie, but who is more convincingly concerned for and connected to the living and the dead than many horror film performers could ever hope to be.