The Best Horror Movies of 2026
Watching horror movies is good for your health. At least according to some psychological studies, scary stories can assuage people’s real-life anxieties. Toss that Lexapro in the trash—your new tranquilizer is going to the movies.
Until horror films can replace actual medication, you still can pick up your prescription of adrenaline-induced catharsis at the AMC A-Lister line. We’re just a handful of months through 2026 so far, and theaters are serving up even more horror hits than last year. How is that even possible? After all, 2025’s crop received nods from the Academy Awards! (Sinners was robbed, by the way.) Well, take a look at this packed lineup so far and decide for yourself.
Sam Raimi returned to rated-R horror in Send Help, which cemented his status as a genre icon. Spooky sequels arrived strong in Ready or Not 2 and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. Plus, there was no shortage of monsters and ghouls in Hokum and Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. New directorial debuts like Undertone even placed us on the edge of our seats, and there’s much more to come in the months ahead. Evil Dead Burn, Backrooms, Werewulf, and Zach Creggar’s Resident Evil all lurk around the corner.
Strangely enough, horror is one of the best places to look for inspiration and creativity right now. So if you’re ready for a good scare, check out the best of the best below.
Send Help
The king is back! Sam Raimi returned to the big screen in 2026, dishing out what he’s known for best—buckets of blood and jaw-dropping violence. Send Help focuses most of its screen time on the tense situation between a temporarily handicapped CEO (Dylan O’Brien) and their employee (Rachel McAdams) after they’re stranded on a deserted island off the coast of Thailand. As the two characters learn how to trust each other to survive, Raimi has a ball onscreen. The Evil Dead director conjures up maniacal performances out of both of his leads—covering them in boar’s blood, goo, fish guts, and, of course, even more blood. But luckily, in Raimi’s skilled hands, Send Help is no ordinary episode of Survivor. It’s a whiplash paranoia fest packed with the dark humor, isolated madness, and creative gore that we’ve come to expect from Raimi.
Ready or Not 2
In 2019, Ready or Not became an instant horror classic. Fans loved the slasher’s straightforward cat-and-mouse concept—not to mention a powerhouse performance from Samara Weaving. She played an unwitting new bride in the original film who is thrown into a sadistic murder game by her in-laws. The film spawned an iconic Halloween costume and a new final girl to go toe-to-toe with heavy hitters like Laurie Strode and Sidney Prescott—proving that horror films really are carried by their main leads. Weaving delivers more of what we loved in the sequel, Ready or Not 2. The film features crazy kill scenes and hilarious zingers. Plus, we’re joined by two other bona fide scream queens: Sarah Michelle Gellar and Kathryn Newton. It’s the kind of horror follow-up that all sequels should aspire to be.
In Theaters
Hokum
Expectations were already high when Hokum was announced. Damian McCarthy made a name for himself in horror with just two feature films under his belt—2020’s Caveat and 2024’s Oddity—and Adam Scott was fresh off of an excellent second season of Apple TV’s Severance. But after seeing the film, Adam Scott acting frightened in an elevator might be my new favorite genre.
Set in a haunted hotel in Ireland, Hokum centers on Scott’s downtrodden character, Ohm Bauman. He’s staying at the hotel to fulfill his late parents’ wishes by scattering their ashes in the woods. Irish folklore, tales of witches, and creepy shadows unfold in the spooky yet quaint setting. The film contains great, slow jump scares that McCarthy has pretty much patented at this point, but there’s also a healthy dose of subverted expectations that keep the audience on their toes. McCarthy is an expert at directing the audience’s gaze, and he can’t help but sprinkle in a dose of sweet-natured charm in his characters. Even if Hokum plays with very similar circumstances, tropes, and imagery to those McCarthy explored in his previous films, each receives a spit shine resulting in a thoroughly satisfying exercise in suspense.
In Theaters
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy
If you’ve seen Evil Dead Rise or The Hole in the Ground, then you already know how Lee Cronin’s filmography isn’t shy around fake blood and messed-up family relationships. So that’s why the dark auteur’s work didn’t necessarily translate to feeling like the right fit for a Mummy remake. Thankfully, it’s a disservice to name this film The Mummy, because this movie is as far away from booby-trapped pyramids and Brendan Fraser as Egypt is from New Mexico.
In Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, an American family living in Cairo experiences a tragedy when the eldest daughter is abducted. Eight years later, the family—now living in New Mexico—finally get the daughter back after she’s found inside an ancient sarcophagus. That doesn’t seem like an ominous sign or anything! As expected, the daughter doesn’t quite resemble a human anymore, let alone a living one. What ensues is the kind of domestic terror and body horror that Cronin perfected in his previous horror features. The scares are thrilling, though a little too sparsely spaced between the family drama, and The Mummy leaves a lingering chill.
In Theaters
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
Every horror fan I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with this year has talked my ear off about The Bone Temple. “It’s demented,” they say. “It’s for the real sickos.” Sure, I’ve heard that plenty of times in my life only to find myself disappointed—as evidenced by some of the missing entries on this list. But to my surprise, the decades-old 28 Days Later franchise somehow manages to pull some tricks out of its sleeve.
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland know how to scare their audience, and they’ve certainly polished their skills in the latest installment. Jack O’Connell, playing the psychopathic cult leader Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, is savage and terrifying. Following Sinners, he easily proves that he’s earned the title of Scream King. There are also a couple moments of stunning violence inflicted by children in this film—and if that doesn’t haunt you, you might be infected with the virus yourself.
Undertone
Audiences underestimate the use of sound in horror films. The scariest part of a thunderstorm isn’t the lightning—it’s the loud, unexpected clap of thunder. And Undertone, a horror film built solely around the auditory experience, multiplies that startled feeling by a thousand. Actress Nina Kiri plays Evy, a woman who watches over her comatose mother while recording a paranormal podcast. But when an audio recording of an alleged haunting surfaces in her headphones, the experience begins to wreak havoc on her life.
Undertone reportedly borrows from director Ian Tuason’s own experience providing palliative care for his parents, who were both diagnosed with cancer. He established himself as a buzzy horror director to keep an eye on when he debuted the film at the Fantasia International Film Festival, and his ingenious use of audio in Undertone generates visceral scares that are hard to shake—even after the movie fades to black.
