The Best Horror Movies of 2026 (So Far)

Do you feel that chill in the air? The cooler winds and crunchy leaves beneath your boots? While Halloween is just around the bend, we’ve seen a slew of hair-raising horror movies all year long.

Back in January, renowned director Sam Raimi kicked off the new year with his delightful horror comedy Send Help, which relishes in the terror of being alone on a deserted island with Rachel McAdams. (On second thought, count us in.)

Later in the year, we saw releases like Undertone and Hokum, which were almost deemed the best horror movies of the year... until a little indie titled Obsession opened in May. The tiny-budget indie thriller, in which breakout star Inde Navarette plays a young woman manipulated into loving her close friend (Michael Johnston), instantly became one of the biggest box office hits of the year.

As summer cooled into fall, more major horror movies like The End of Oak Street and Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil showed that audiences can’t get enough screaming. There’s still a few months left in the calendar, but already there’s too many great horror movies to count on two hands. Here are all the horror movies that Esquire staffers insist are the best of the year.

At last, the Resident Evil video games get a proper big-screen adaptation in Zach Cregger’s standalone reboot. The movie follows a hapless medical courier (Austin Abrams) who is hired to deliver a precious item to Raccoon City General Hospital, unaware that the whole city has fallen to a sudden monstrous outbreak. Though the movie doesn’t have any familiar characters from the games, Cregger masterfully replicates the game’s flavor of white-knuckle survival horror with pinpoint accuracy.

If genre giants like Stephen King and The Black Phone director Scott Derrickson rave about a horror movie, you know it’s gotta be good. From director Dave Boyle comes Never After Dark, a loving homage to the J-horror boom of the 2000s. The movie stars Shogun’s Moeka Hoshi, who plays a psychic hired to exorcise a rural country home where a formidable evil awaits.

It’s been a while since dinosaurs were scary. It Follows director David Robert Mitchell reminds us that carnivorous beasts were fucking terrifying in his late summer sci-fi hi The End of Oak Street. Set in the 1980s, a suburban family—led by Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor—wakes up one morning to find their whole neighborhood has been transported to the distant past, where humongous, meat-eating dinosaurs roam free. Boasting extreme Steven Spielberg energy, The End of Oak Street will have you screaming your head off.

In 2008, The X-Files creator Chris Carter reunited stars Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny for a standalone sequel movie, The X-Files: I Want to Believe. But the studio neutered the theatrical release to meet PG-13 guidelines. Almost 20 years later, Carter finally returned to the editing bay to restore the lost elements—the scarier, darker, gorier stuff—in his expanded “director’s cut,” titled The X-Files: I Want to Believe — Vrach Frankenshteyn. Set after the original series, retired FBI agents Scully (Anderson) and Mulder (Duchovny) return for a new case involving missing women in snowy Virginia.

Na Hong-jin’s buzzy creature feature Hope spends most of its latter runtime as a big science fiction blockbuster, but for the first hour or so it’s one of the most riveting monster movies in recent memory. Set in a rural village near the Korean DMZ, a police chief teams up with local trackers to hunt down a giant monstrosity wreaking havoc everywhere. Although Hope stumbles its way to the end credits, you won’t ever forget the opening act that combines the visceral thrills of Mad Max: Fury Road with Bong Joon-ho’s classic The Host.

Those with arachnophobia, be warned. Adapted from the 2020 horror novel by Impratical Jokers star James S. Murray, Don’t Move stars Lyndsy Fonseca as a widow and grieving mother who joins a church group’s camping trip. The weekend detours into a bloody nightmare when the campers get caught by a giant, prehistoric spider. Sometimes you just want to watch a movie where people run for their lives from a hideous thing, and Don’t Move delivers the goods.

Be careful who you wish for. The buzziest horror hit of the summer, Obsession, is a classic monkey’s-paw tale given new life thanks to fresh talent. YouTube creator turned filmmaker Curry Barker helms this delectable thriller about a young man whose wish for his lifelong crush, Nikki (a breakout Inde Navarrette), to be in love with him turns into a complete nightmare. Following its wide release in May, Obsession has been the movie of the moment due in large part to Navarrette’s explosive performance and its timely narrative about consent, agency, honesty, and the fine differences separating affection and infatuation. Amid the waning power of franchise tentpoles, Obsession stands out for its unadulterated originality.

The king is back! Sam Raimi returned to the big screen in 2026, dishing out what he’s best known for—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, and fish guts. 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.

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.

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 an excellent second season of Apple TV’s Severance. But now that I’ve seen 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.

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.

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.

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.

This story originally appeared on Esquire.com. Minor edits have been made by the Esquiremag.ph editors.

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