10 Greatest Horror Thrillers of the Last 25 Years, Ranked

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Published Jan 24, 2026, 7:00 PM EST

The horror genre has really evolved over the last 25 years. It has slowly shifted away from slashers and pure body horror and moved toward more elevated horror that focuses on bleak atmosphere and deep, unsettling ideas that stay with you long after the credits roll. Instead of just trying to make you jump, these movies want you to sit in discomfort and think about what you just watched.

This shift has led to a fusion of horror and thriller storytelling, where supernatural scares are blended with plot twists and mystery-solving elements that are usually found in thrillers. The dread in these “horror thrillers” comes from dysfunctional families, abusive relationships, awkward social situations, or sometimes, good old-fashioned hauntings, too. So, without further ado, here are 10 great horror thrillers that have defined the 21st century so far.

10 ‘Us’ (2019)

Jordan Peele’s Us starts like a classic home invasion thriller, very much in the vein of The Strangers. A family is vacationing at their beachfront home when four figures dressed in red show up outside. And soon after, the family realizes these intruders look exactly like them. They communicate using guttural, almost animal-like noises, and move in a way that feels both stiff and fluid, like something pretending to be human. It’s pure nightmare fuel.

The film follows the family as they try to survive and escape, while slowly uncovering who these doppelgangers are and what they want. Peele never spoon-feeds the audience. Instead, he fills the movie with unsettling imagery like underground tunnels, murals, rabbits, and lets you connect the dots yourself. And it all builds toward an ending that completely recontextualizes everything that came before it and makes you want to immediately rewatch the film with new eyes.

9 ‘The Invisible Man’ (2020)

the-invisible-man-elisabeth-moss-tech-room

The Invisible Man begins with a woman escaping her abusive partner in the dead of night. But even after she gets away, she feels like she’s constantly being watched, and she becomes convinced that her ex is still around and has found a way to haunt her without being seen. The movie uses silence and empty space incredibly well. Long, wide shots linger on empty rooms, and you find yourself staring at the background, waiting for something to move.

What makes it even scarier is that this is not a supernatural entity. It’s a violent, manipulative man who is always 10 steps ahead. And he never tries to kill her outright. Instead, he gaslights her, destroys her credibility, and slowly isolates her from her friends, her family, and her career. He does all of this so that she ends up with nothing and no one left, and has no choice but to return to him.

8 ‘The Others’ (2001)

Grace (Nicole Kidman) speaks to Anne (Alakina Mann) who has a veil over her face in The Others.

The Others follows a mother living in an isolated mansion with her two children, who suffer from a rare photosensitivity disease that makes sunlight deadly for them. So, the house is kept in permanent darkness. This justifies a dreary, claustrophobic atmosphere where rooms are lit only by candlelight. After her previous staff mysteriously disappear, the mother hires three new servants, and soon after their arrival, strange things begin to happen. Doors open and close on their own, a piano plays by itself, furniture gets mysteriously rearranged, and disembodied voices can be heard whispering in empty rooms.

But the film's crowning achievement is definitely its ending. A third-act plot twist is a hallmark of the thriller genre, and The Others delivers one that is widely regarded as one of the greatest in cinematic history. It is so impactful that it will forever alter the way you experience haunted house movies going forward.

7 ‘Oculus’ (2013)

A young Kaylie and Tim clinging to each other looking scared and upset in Oculus.

Oculus follows a man recently released from a mental asylum. After 11 years of separation, he reunites with his sister and learns that the murders he was convicted of were actually caused by a supernatural entity, the Lasser Glass mirror. Together, they bring the mirror back to their childhood home and set up cameras, alarms, and traps to try to document its evil.

It’s a fascinating concept, running science experiments on a supernatural object, and even more intriguing to watch the mirror fight back by playing tricks on their minds. You can clearly see the elements in this movie that Mike Flanagan later included in The Haunting of Hill House: dual timelines, mind-bending illusions, and the constant push-and-pull between skepticism and the supernatural. If you loved that show, Oculus should absolutely be at the top of your watchlist.

6 ‘It Follows’ (2014)

Maika Monroe as Jay Height and Lili Sepe as Kelly Height in It Follows.

It Follows centers around a teenager named Jay (Maika Monroe) who inherits a deadly curse after a sexual encounter, passed on to her by her boyfriend. The entity, which can take the form of any person and is invisible to others, is always walking toward the cursed person. And if it catches them, they die. From the very first scene, the film forces you into a state of hyper-awareness, constantly scanning the background of every shot and panicking whenever someone starts walking a little too directly toward the camera.

The story spends a lot of time following Jay and her friends as they try to understand the rules of the curse and figure out how to escape it or fight back. They try to stay on the move, board up houses to see if the entity will break in or wait outside, and even try attacking it to see if the entity can be hurt. The way the film shows them testing the rules and slowly realizing how limited their options are is brilliantly written, and it’s this careful buildup of tension that makes It Follows so effective.

5 ‘A Quiet Place’ (2018)

Lee (John Krasinski) keeps Marcus (Noah Jupe) quiet in 'A Quiet Place'

A Quiet Place is easily one of the most iconic monster movies of our generation. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic world overrun by extraterrestrial creatures that hunt purely by sound, which forces the remaining humans to live in near-total silence. The film focuses on a family trying to survive in this world. They only walk on sand paths, communicate entirely through sign language, and inside the house, they’ve adapted every part of daily life around silence. Even when they play Monopoly, the dice are rolled on the carpet instead of the board, and the pieces are replaced with soft wool balls.

It conditions you to that silence. You start holding your breath without realizing it, so when a lantern falls or glass shatters, it triggers this jarring cortisol spike because death suddenly feels seconds away. And John Krasinski treats the premise with the seriousness and gravitas it deserves. When something makes a sound, you watch the characters scramble to eliminate it, and that panic fuels some powerful human drama. The guilt on the children’s faces when they make a mistake is heartbreaking. They can’t explain themselves, and the parents can’t reassure them out loud. It’s absolutely miserable in the best possible way.

4 ‘Bring Her Back’ (2025)

Laura holds Piper's face while talking to her in Bring Her Back.

Coming off the success of Talk to Me, the Philippou brothers knocked it out of the park again with Bring Her Back. The movie follows two step-siblings who move in with a new foster mother, Laura (Sally Hawkins). At first, she seems sweet and caring, but it’s the kind of overly sweet that immediately feels fake. Hawkins delivers a phenomenal performance that feels equal parts cuddly and cruel, like someone hand-knitted a sociopath, as she gaslights the kids and tries to turn them against each other for her own, sinister reasons.

The house itself is full of cultish mysteries, like a white circle painted around the property, and VHS tapes showing footage of possession rituals. Adding to the horror is a strange, mute boy who also lives there, always expressionless, seemingly unable to feel pain, and not allowed to leave the white circle. His presence leads to some of the best scares in the film, including a body horror scene with a knife so extreme it’ll make even the toughest viewers look away.

3 ‘Speak No Evil’ (2022)

James McAvoy, Aisling Franciosi, and Dan Hough portray a perfect family in Speak No Evil.

This is not the 2024 James McAvoy movie, skip that one and watch the original, because it’s leagues better than the remake. The original Speak No Evil follows a Danish family who befriend a Dutch family while on vacation. A few months later, the Dutch couple invites them to spend a weekend at their home. At first, everything seems fine, just a little off. The hosts make weird jokes, dance with each other way too passionately, pressure the vegetarian mom to eat meat, and generally create tiny moments of discomfort.

But those small boundary-crossing moments keep building up. Each new interaction is slightly worse than the last, and you keep thinking this will be the final straw that makes them leave. But they don’t. They smile and stay polite. Much like Creep and Midsommar, Speak No Evil takes the human tendency of tolerating awkwardness and crossed boundaries to stay polite and pushes it to its worst possible extreme. From the moment the family arrives, you can feel it’s not going to end well for them, and the film delivers on that promise with a soul-crushing ending that is extremely bleak and depressing.

2 ‘Hereditary’ (2018)

Alex Wolff as Peter looking serious in Hereditary.

Hereditary starts off as a gnarly family drama. The story opens with a tragic accident where the brother accidentally kills his sister while driving, and the fallout tears the family apart. Then the supernatural elements start to creep in, and everything that was already going wrong is magnified tenfold. The family’s grief and fractured relationships suddenly collide with forces they can’t understand, and the result is pure, escalating dread. At first, it seems like a typical horror movie, but Hereditary expertly subverts those expectations.

The movie avoids the usual trope of “one person sees the supernatural and everyone else thinks they’re crazy.” When the wife tells her husband about the body in the attic, you expect the usual cliché: he’ll go check, and the body will be gone, just like you’ve seen a million times in other horror movies. But in Hereditary, the body is still there. The movie also plays with the idea of “rules” that are supposed to protect you. In a lot of horror films, the characters find a mysterious book with instructions on how to stop the supernatural threat, and if they follow it, they have a chance to survive. In Hereditary, the mother does find what she believes are the rules for stopping the possession. But it turns out she was being tricked the entire time, and following the rules blows up in her face. These subversions keep the tension constantly high and make it impossible to predict what will happen next.

1 ‘Get Out’ (2017)

Rose and Chris smiling while looking in the same direction in Get Out 2017

Get Out starts with Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young Black man, going to meet his white girlfriend's family for the first time. Here, the horror doesn’t come from monsters or ghosts; it comes from seeing the world through another race’s eyes, through awkward conversations and subtle microaggressions. It was such a fresh idea that Peele won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay with his very first movie, and it opened the door for a whole wave of social thrillers.

Peele masterfully builds this eerie, too-perfect atmosphere where everything looks fine on the surface, but you just know something is off. The film layers mysteries that slowly make you paranoid, like the Black people connected to the family acting weird, almost artificial. Or the way the family asks intrusive, fetishizing questions about Chris’s physicality. The tension keeps ratcheting up until you’re literally yelling at your screen, “Get out, Chris!” And true to any great thriller, the film builds to a series of shocking twists and reveals, eventually culminating in a cathartic, blood-soaked finale.