These Are The 7 2025 Horror Movies I’m Most Excited For

2025 has many movies for horror fans to look forward to, but seven in particular really stand out to me. With the arrival of every New Year, I’m the kind of person who starts mapping out what he’s looking forward to in the entertainment world immediately. That includes different genres of movies, and picking which upcoming horror movies I’m most looking forward to is always on my New Year’s to-do list from January 1st.

We’re just a few weeks into 2025, but already, the horror movie landscape looks ripe for moviegoers in the mood to be scared during their next trip to cinema screens. If you’re as much a horror movie aficionado as I am, I think this list includes some of the horror highlights of 2025 to watch out for. Here are the seven horror movies of 2025 I’m most looking forward to.

The Monkey

Thanks to the likes of IT films and Doctor Sleep, Stephen King adaptations have been on a roll lately, and in 2025, horror fans will see more Stephen King goodness in The Monkey. An adaptation of King’s eponymous 1980 short story, The Monkey focuses on a pair of twin brothers named Hal and Bill discovering a toy monkey in their attic as children. However, the monkey brings a series of unexplained deaths with it, with Hal and Bill soon coming to realize it is anything but a toy.

Written and directed by Osgood Perkins, The Monkey also has horror maestro extraordinaire James Wan on board as producer. That combined with its lineage in Stephen King’s bibliography earns it plenty of street cred as a horror movie to keep on one’s radar going into 2025. The Monkey arrives in on February 21st, and should hopefully push the Stephen King big-screen winner streak even further.

28 Years Later

2002’s 28 Days Later helped launch the modern zombie craze with its tale of a viral outbreak causing the downfall of society into a zombie apocalypse. 2007’s 28 Weeks Later continued the story, but horror fans will get a chance to truly see a world undone by a zombie outbreak in the upcoming 28 Years Later, the first of a new trilogy in the franchise. Helmed by original 28 Days Later director Danny Boyle, 28 Years Later zeroes in on the remnants of human society that have survived the apocalypse on an island. However, one father and son duo are forced to venture back into the zombie-infested world they left behind.

In addition to being a continuation of one of the greatest zombie franchises of all time, 28 Years Later also might end up being 2025’s most topical and socially relevant horror movie in the time since the COVID-19 pandemic. Human society may have survived the trials of COVID, but any post-apocalyptic movie based on a viral pandemic is bound to hit much more directly for virtually every living person on the planet. 28 Years Later hits theaters on June 20th, admittedly 23 years after 28 Days Later debuted, but forsaking a real-world 28-year time gap should hopefully be worth it in what could be one of 2025’s best horror movies.

Final Destination: Bloodlines

The Final Destination franchise makes clear that death will not tolerate being cheated, and anyone who escapes their intended demise will have to face death coming to collect its due again. Coming 14 years after 2011’s Final Destination 5, Final Destination: Bloodlines brings death back for another round of pursuing victims who dodged fate once before. Not many hard details on the plot are available yet, but Final Destination: Bloodlines is sure to be highly anticipated by Final Destination fans and general horror fans alike in 2025 as the final posthumous appearance of series regular Tony Todd as William Bludworth.

Todd is well-known for his role in many beloved horror movies, including the Candyman franchise, 1990’s Night of the Living Dead remake, and many others, including Todd voicing Venom in the video game Spider-Man 2. Todd’s William Bludworth appears throughout the Final Destination franchise as a funeral director well aware of death’s pursuit of its victims, and on hand to give them a heads up to what’s coming. Final Destination: Bloodlines will undoubtedly bring plenty of the over-the-top gore the franchise is known for upon its release on May 16th, and it will also afford horror movie lovers one last farewell to a revered horror movie icon.

Saw XI

If you had told me that the Saw franchise would not only come back but have arguably its best installment 19 years after its beginning, I’d have never believed it. Nevertheless, that’s exactly what came to pass with the release of 2023’s Saw X, the tenth mainline Saw movie that brought both Tobin Bell’s John Kramer and Shawnee Smith’s Amanda Young for another game against a team of medical scam artists. That game proved to be one well worth waiting for, with Saw X becoming the most universally well-received installment of the Saw series to date. That, of course, could only mean that Jigsaw would return for another game in 2025’s Saw XI.

As is common in the lead-up to a new Saw movie, plot details are currently under lock and key for Saw XI, but the time frame of Saw X taking place between the first and second chapter of the franchise could provide clues. If Saw XI also takes place in the same time period, the sequel could focus on Jigsaw and Amanda having another confrontation with Saw X‘s surviving and likely vengeful villainess Cecilia Pederson (Synnøve Macody Lund). Whatever the case may be, Saw XI is set to hit theaters on September 26 for another game with plenty of traps.

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V/H/S/8

Found footage became a full-blown horror movie crazy in the 2010s with the popularity of the Paranormal Activity franchise, and while it has somewhat leveled off since then, there’s still plenty of found footage scares every Halloween thanks to the V/H/S franchise. Kicking off in 2012 as Bloody Disgusting’s opening salvo as a horror movie studio, V/H/S has since become a staple of the horror streaming platform Shudder every Halloween since 2021’s V/H/S/94. The V/H/S franchise has been on a hot streak ever since, and one that is set to continue with V/H/S/8 on Shudder this Halloween.

The longevity of the V/H/S franchise as the new champion of found-footage horror owes partly to its hybrid storytelling style of each movie being a horror anthology collecting multiple terrifying found footage segments. In effect, horror fans and found footage fans are treated to not one but up to half a dozen spooky horror movie shorts compromising an exhilarating whole every Halloween, which consistently makes the series great fun every October. V/H/S/8 doesn’t have a firm release date yet, but it is set to arrive later this year, and will most likely hit Shudder in October just before Halloween.

Predator: Badlands

The Predator franchise had a bit of a dip with 2018’s lackluster The Predator, only to bounce back big time with Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey, released on Hulu in 2022. Indeed, Prey proved to be such a revival for the Predator franchise that not one but two Trachtenberg-helmed Predator movies are on the way this year, with the franchise also returning to theaters due to Prey‘s success. Even better, Predator: Badlands will do what no Predator movie has ever done before and venture into the future (Predator 2‘s then-future setting of 1997 notwithstanding), this time with the Predator going from villain to hero as the movie’s protagonist.

That’s quite a flip from Prey‘s 18th-century setting and a Feral Predator antagonist, but the strength of the Predator universe lies in how easy it is to drop the Predator into any culture or time period. What’s more, the Predator has never graduated any higher than an anti-hero in past installments of the Predator series, so the Predator actually becoming a protagonist is a very intriguing switch and plenty of reason all on its own to get excited for the Predator’s next hunt. Predator: Badlands is set to bring the franchise’s combination of action, horror, and sci-fi into theaters on November 7th.

Thanksgiving 2

Slasher movies outside of the Scream franchise have become surprisingly scarce on cinema screens, but Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving rectified that in 2023 with a holiday season-themed slasher flick for horror-hungry audiences in the midst of turkey season. Thanksgiving made the real-life horror stories of Black Friday’s shopping madness into an essential element of its tale of Sheriff Eric Newton (Patrick Dempsey) seeking vengeance for the death of his pregnant mistress during a Black Friday riot. Thanksgiving‘s ending establishes that Eric is still alive and well, and with the success and overall popular reception of the movie, that could only mean that Thanksgiving 2 was on the way.

With the long-running Halloween franchise establishing a tradition of tying slasher movie villains into a specific holiday, the practice has occasionally been employed elsewhere, such as 2001’s Valentine and 1984’s Christmas-themed Silent Night, Deadly Night. With Thanksgiving, Eli Roth finally brought the eponymous holiday to the slasher movie table to great effect, which places Thanksgiving 2 firmly on my list of 2025’s most anticipated horror movies. Thanksgiving 2 is set to arrive in theaters later this year, and while no official release date has been announced, a week or two before Thanksgiving 2025 seems like the best bet.