It’s that time again; we’ve reached the halfway point of the year. What a strange year it’s been so far, with the box office making it clear that audiences aren’t willing to venture out for anything and everything these days. With wallets tightening, it’s event films that are proving to be the biggest draw – […]
And this summer’s only getting warmed up for horror releases, with some of the year’s most anticipated titles on the immediate horizon. I Know What You Did Last Summer, Together, and Weapons are just around the corner, with The Toxic Avenger soon to follow. Beyond that? Expect an insanely packed Halloween season ahead.
As a refresher and to ensure great movies don’t fall through the cracks, here are the ten best horror movies released in the first half of 2025.
Bring Her Back
Danny and Michael Philippou’s follow-up feature to Talk to Me is a downer of the highest order. The filmmaking duo’s brand of grief horror is as visceral and brutal as you’d expect but without any tangible semblance of hope. Sally Hawkins delivers a riveting, powerful performance as Laura, the cunning yet broken-hearted woman desperate to bring back her deceased daughter at any cost. While that involves demonic activity, the true monster here is grief and its shocking ability to erode a once-kind soul. Bring Her Back is a more refined effort from the Philippous, but it’s also more restrictive and simple. It’s impressively bold and shocking in the way the directors continue to push horror boundaries and shatter taboos, especially when it comes to kids, ensuring a nail-biting and grueling experience that’ll leave you wincing and squirming in your seat.
Sister Midnight
In truth, writer/director Karan Kandhari’s energetic, infectious feature debut leans more into magical realism than horror. But it’s such a stylish genre-bender with a winsome and comically put-upon protagonist that it feels tailor-made for the adventurous horror cinephile. Radhika Apte stars as Uma, a young woman horrified to find herself transformed into a disturbing and ruthless figure after entering into an arranged marriage. What begins as a domestic comedy, with Uma begrudgingly navigating her new housewife role, slowly unfurls into an unexpected journey involving stop motion, zany night encounters, and vampirism. It’s unpredictable and vibrant, with Karan Kandhari embracing the absurdity of Uma’s plight with a wry wink and endless panache.
Presence
Unsane director Steven Soderbergh reunites with Kimi screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic World Rebirth) to give an innovative new spin on the quintessential ghost story. Presence frames its haunted events entirely from the perspective of its ghost, but using the camera’s gaze as the ghost’s observing eyes isn’t the only trick up Soderbergh and Koepp’s sleeves. The presence itself may not be something to fear, but that doesn’t mean Presence lacks any intensity or horror. The moody story builds into a thrilling finale that devastates, subverting expectations around the spectral entity haunting a family of four. Soderbergh, working as cinematographer under pseudonym Peter Andrews, wields the camera in breathtaking ways that infuse the incorporeal character with personality. It’s breathtaking in style and form, but it’s the reveal of the actual threat that haunts.
A Desert
Director Joshua Erkman’s feature debut presents a captivating and stylized blend of neo-noir and horror via a road trip through the American Southwest. A photographer (Green Room’s Kai Lennox) sets out to revive his career by capturing abandoned roadside structures and buildings in desolate stretches of the Southwestern desert, but instead finds himself caught in a strange, tangled web. Erkman, who co-wrote the screenplay with Bossi Baker, hangs this genre-bender on the familiar framework of neo-noir. Themes of isolation, alienation, and paranoia saturate the frame and its characters. The debut filmmaker juxtaposes a landscape abandoned and eroded by time with larger-than-life characters, nearly all of them operating in shades of moral decay or corruption. It makes for a deeply engaging journey, one that continues to signal alarm bells from the moment Alex meets Renny right through its bleak final act.
Heart Eyes
Director Josh Ruben (Werewolves Within, Scare Me), working from a script by Phillip Murphy (The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard) and Christopher Landon (Drop, Freaky) & Michael Kennedy (Freaky), gives romance and horror equal weight in this seamless fusion of slasher and romcom, ensuring that the gore hits just as hard as the sizzling hot chemistry between leads Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding. Heart Eyes walks the fine line between a ’90s slasher with a modern savage edge and a romcom with rare, white-hot chemistry without ever feeling gimmicky. It’s simply a breathlessly entertaining ride that leaves you cheering for love and creative kills in equal measure. It’s not the steadfast commitment to intense thrills and suspenseful set pieces that earns easy rooting interest in Heart Eyes, though that certainly helps, but rather its magnetic cast.
Dead Talents Society
Detention director John Hsu shifts gears from scares to cheers for the endlessly charming horror-comedy Dead Talents Society, which feels like a better answer to Beetlejuice than its recent sequel. It follows the timid and recently deceased Rookie (Gingle Wang) as she tries to navigate life as a ghost. That means learning how to scare the pants off of people before fading away permanently in an afterlife where ghosts strive to become the spookiest urban legends and famous stars in the underworld. And competition is fierce. The Rookie teams with tenured diva Catherine (Sandrine Pinna) to do so, but Catherine has her hands full with her gentle mentee. Hsu, who co-wrote the script with Vincent Tsai, lovingly pokes fun at supernatural tropes without ever losing a sense of heart or horror. It’s a comedy where the characters are endearing and the jokes land, but it’s also surprisingly bloody and, occasionally, spooky. The competition is fierce in the afterlife, yielding one of the year’s biggest crowd-pleasers that’s sadly slipped under the radar. Run to Netflix and watch this gem asap.
28 Years Later
Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland return to the world they created in 28 Days Later with a polarizing start to a new planned trilogy. Instead of venturing down the expected path, Boyle & Garland introduce a quarantined UK largely forgotten by the outside world, with its survivors having forged new communities and simplified ways of life post-outbreak. The infected are merely part of the equation in newcomer Spike’s (Alfie Williams) coming-of-age story that touches on everything from Brexit to the inevitability of death. Boyle plays with form, introducing a sensory assault through rapid cuts, a punishing soundscape, and immersive camerawork that employs a variety of techniques, including strapping cameras and iPhones to actors to evoke danger and suspense. Yet it’s the surprising third act, pivoting from intense horror to a cathartic, poignant meditation on death, along with an insane hook for the second installment, that proves most divisive. That Boyle and Garland are so willing to take drastic risks like this makes 28 Years Later one of the most exciting releases of the year so far; any movie that inspires passionate debate and analysis like this is ultimately a win for the horror genre.
The Ugly Stepsister
Norwegian writer and director Emilie Blichfeldt harkens back to the bloody Brothers Grimm origins of Cinderella for her feature debut. Instead of whimsical romance set in the Renaissance, Blichfeldt gets graphic with the medieval torture women endure in their pursuit of happily ever after. In Blichfeldt’s version, the little ash girl is Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess), but the familiar fairy tale is framed from the perspective of stepsister and romantic rival Elvira (Lea Myren). It’s not just the dedication to the gory transformation that impresses, but the way Blichfeldt adds dimension and new layers to these classic characters. The only true villain here is the society that demands impossible standards and casts aside those who don’t meet them. The production design is stunning and immersive, creating an almost ethereal backdrop to a grim, gory body horror tale, and the characters are wonderfully nuanced and authentic. It’s elegant, stylish, and gnarly. But maybe don’t go in with an empty stomach; the film’s final burst of prolonged body horror might make you lose your lunch.
Dangerous Animals
In an increasingly overcrowded sea of shark horror movies, leave it to the director of The Loved Ones and The Devil’s Candy, Sean Byrne, to give the well-trodden subgenre a welcome shakeup with a potentially game-changing entry. Here, cinema’s favorite ocean predators aren’t the villains but merely the modus operandi of one sadistic and charismatic serial killer. Jai Courtney delivers an electric, career-defining performance as Captain Tucker, a disarming and gregarious behemoth of a man who lives in and operates a shark diving tour boat. For Tucker, it’s less about a source of income and more about luring prey for his true passion: feeding his tortured prey to the sharks he attracts with buckets of chum. The propulsive blend of serial killer thrills and aquatic terror makes for a high-stakes ride that leaves you breathless. This is the type of filmmaker who makes his characters earn their survival, if they can, by plunging them into a grim gauntlet of pain and suffering. The ones who make it come away battered and scarred, but never without hope.
Sinners
Music is a conduit in Sinners, making for an electric, lively first horror effort from Ryan Coogler. Opening text establishes the horror that won’t arrive until much later, revealing that, rarely, a musician comes along with talent so great that their music can pierce the veil between the living and the dead. That it can be a beacon for evil. That’s exactly what happens, of course, but it’s merely one component of Coogler’s engrossing epic that’s so ambitious in form and scale that it firmly holds you in its grip from the outset and never lets go. Sinners is the type of movie that will explore grief with heartbreaking emotion in one breath and feature a swirling Irish vampire jig in the next. It’s this type of cross-pollination between prestige cinema and blockbuster-style entertainment that makes Coogler’s latest feel innovative and daring. The style, ensemble cast, rich world-building, and, of course, the music all make for one of the most epic features of the year.