The 3 Best Horror Movies Released In 2025 So Far
To be considered for the list, the film must have its first wide release in the United States—whether the release is in theaters, on streaming, or on physical media—at some time during 2025.
By Chris Catt
Looking at the list of horror movies scheduled for release in 2025, it’s going to be another good year. Wolf Man and Companion come out in January, Heart Eyes and The Monkey are set for February, and further into the year we’ll see movies like 28 Years Later, M3GAN 2.0, Sinners, and so much more.
But for right now, these are the 3 best horror films released into major circulation thus far in 2025.
1. The Damned
The Damned employs a strong sense of dread to tell a story about isolation, survival, and guilt. The story is set in the late 1800s in a frozen fjord in northern Iceland. A fishing crew struggles with poor catches this season, and when they spot a ship sinking not too far away, the decision is made to let the sailors fend for themselves rather than help them and use up their dwindling supplies. After the dead bodies of sailors begin washing ashore, the fishermen and their leader, a widowed woman who inherited the fishing station from her husband, begin having experiences they can’t help but attribute to a monster created by their callousness. Filled with psychological chills and a touch of monster-movie frights, The Damned is the first great movie of 2025.
2. Bloody Axe Wound
In a town where “slasher villain” is a job description and their murders are caught on tape and viewed as entertainment, Abbie feels that she’s ready to enter into her father’s deadly profession. Her dad, Roger Bladecut, has his doubts about Abbie, but he agrees to let her slice and dice the local teens he’d planned to slaughter himself. But stalking teens opens a whole new world to Abbie, a world where friends her own age might be more important to her than her father’s legacy. Bloody Axe Wound is set in a world that is odd and inexplicable a lot of the time, but this gory mashup of a slasher and a coming-of-age teen dramedy works well thanks to its humor and heart.
3. The Man in the White Van
The Man in the White Van is a decent serial-killer thriller. Set in the 1970s, it’s about a teenage girl, Annie (Madison Wolfe), who is stalked by a man in a van. The problem is, Annie is known for telling tall tales, so nobody believes her when she talks about seeing the same van everywhere she goes. The movie might be too reliant on the tropes of the genre, and the continued disbelief of Annie’s story can get tiresome, but the film does deliver some nice thrills as the stalker (who is shown to be a violent killer) closes in on his target.
