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 15 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
Heart Eyes
The Monkey
The Woman in the Yard
Sinners
28 Years Later
M3GAN 2.0
I Never Forget What You Did Last Summer
Vicious
The Conjuring: Last Rites
Him
The Black Phone 2
Dust Bunny
Rabbit Trap
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, we’ll only have to wait a couple of weeks for this one now – so keep your eyes peeled on Talking Terror for a review when it lands!
2. 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. Look out for this one in your local theatre the week leading up to Valentine’s Day…just expect a bit more bloodshed than your usual romcom!
3. 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, this will be one of the – perhaps even the – horror films of the year.
Based on Stephen King's short story of the same name, Oz Perkins' The Monkey (2025) is set to be one of the best horror movies of 2025.
4. 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.
This one’s slated to be out in a couple of months, but – given the paucity of details, including a trailer, available – I wouldn’t be surprised if it got pushed back. Which only makes us anticipate it all the more!
5. Sinners (18 April, 2025)
In a year dominated by IP (I mean, just count the number of adaptations, sequels, and remakes on this list; go on, I’ll wait) 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. See this one in cinemas!
6. 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!
7. 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.
8. I Never Forget 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) – the awkwardly named I Never Forget What You Did Last Summer is set to hit screens in July 2025. (That’s the rumoured title, by the way – it’s still officially untitled. Which makes sense, because grammatically, it’d have to be either “I Never Forgot What You Did Last Summer”, or “I’ll Never Forget What You Did Last Summer”. But anyways.) 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!
9. 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!
10. 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?!
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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!
14. Rabbit Trap (TBC)
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.
The film will premiere at the Sundance Festival.
15. 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!
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