Hello, fellow horror lovers. Another year behind us and are you any wiser? Me neither. That’s okay; I think “survival” is a noble trait and we’re still here.
So is horror. It’s as big as ever, and that matters both good and bad; success offers greater opportunities for more creators and stories, but can also lead to a glut of faded copies and misread ripoffs. The tradeoff is worth it; 2025 gave us great takes on vampires, curses, infections, and much more. Ahead is a buffet of bad times for lovers of the genre. Let’s dig in.
As with every blessed year, I do not rank my picks nor is it definitive. (Duh, Drebit.) I miss a bunch of movies every year, and while it doesn’t stress me out, it does shorten time at the water cooler. (I have no water cooler.)
Without any additional stalling, these are my Favorite Movies of 2025:
THE MONKEY: With last year’s Longlegs, Oz Perkins drew horror and comedy from a film housing Nicolas Cage as a satanic killer. Somehow. The Monkey leans heavier on the laughs, emphasizing the dark absurdity of death and all that surrounds it. Twins Bill and Hal (wonderfully played by Theo James) have trouble disposing of their father’s toy monkey years after tragedy struck their family with it. The toy has a habit of carrying out death wishes for its owner, so the brothers try to stop the curse before it finishes them. That’s it plot-wise; it’s more interested in killing folks real good in a variety of jaunty and entertaining ways. The Point? Maybe we shouldn’t be afraid of what we can’t control. The Monkey parades death around with a song in its heart, a chuckle in its throat, and blood on its hands, and is all the better for it.
FINAL DESTINATION BLOODLINES: Yay! More creative deaths! The latest Final Destination—and first in 14 years—is one of the better entries, and audiences agreed; Bloodlines is compelling, gory, and funny in equal measure. The film starts in 1969, and this time our meat-grinding machinery is the grand opening of a revolving restaurant in the sky. The twist here is everyone survives the premonition and the disaster is prevented, but Death does cleanup on all who lived, snaking through generations until the last survivor is gone. When the granddaughter of the woman who had the premonition starts having her own, she realizes that Death has saved her family for last…
Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein bring a muscular energy, with (literal) eye-popping effects and witty gags elevated by a great ensemble. A fitting and poignant sendoff for Death himself, the late and very great Tony Todd.
DANGEROUS ANIMALS: Okay, now I’m on the Jai Courtney train. Nothing against him before now, I just wasn’t that familiar with his work. But Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals puts him right in front of the screen for 90 terrifying minutes. He’s a mesmerizing monster who conducts shark-diving excursions by day, and kidnaps women and feeds them to said sharks, also by day and then at night. The premise seems ridiculous, and it is, but in a way that recalls great exploitation like Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive; the actors are very much in tune with the material, with a strong central performance by Hassie Harrison. Dangerous Animals is about rage and fear and overcoming the latter. It also lets Jai Courtney out of his cage, and he eats really well.
THE TOXIC AVENGER: I’m sure no one could have predicted that we’d see another iteration of Troma Entertainment’s flagship IP all these decades later. What’s even more unpredictable is how much fun it would turn out to be; it’s a smart, slick, yet still scrappy take that has all the heart and over-the-top gore of Toxie’s glory days.
Peter Dinklage plays Winston, our sad sack dad who becomes the Toxic Avenger after being dumped in toxic sludge, natch. He also is trying to be a stand-up dad to his stepson, nicely played by Jacob Tremblay. The bad guys come in the form of snake oil supplement king Kevin Bacon, his right hand Elijah Wood, and a cast of gooey undesirables in true Troma style. Writer/director Macon Blair, usually seen in front of the screens, is having a lot of fun with this playground, and it translates to the viewer. You’ll be bloody, but you’ll be smiling. How did this sit on the shelf for two years?
MAN FINDS TAPE: Found footage is a subgenre that I’ve never been well-versed in; other than The Blair Witch Project and a few others, I haven’t dug deep in those woods. Part of my reluctance is an overreliance on shaky camera movements to convey, well, everything. For many low-budget filmmakers, it can be a crutch, an easy out.
Part of my acceptance of, and love for, Man Finds Tape is the different approach it takes. Nothing radical, but it plays more like a Hulu documentary. Using plausible surveillance footage mixed with interviews and creepy video footage, the film has a solid structure that moves without losing course; it doesn’t seem made up as it goes along.
Kelsey Pribilski is a documentarian looking into her brother William Magnuson’s YouTube channel “Man Finds Tape”; the titular tape containing footage of him as a child being fed something in the middle of the night by a stranger. When his channel craps out due to a legal denial he must make, he disappears. He reappears months later and begs his sister for help. When he plays her a horrifying tape of a bizarre incident on main street, she returns home to tiny Larkin, overseen by Reverend Endicott Carr (a very unsettling and terrific John Gholson). As brother and sister dig deeper into his hold on Larkin, they discover Carr’s devotion isn’t just to the Lord.
Kudos to writers/directors Paul Gandersman and Peter Hall, and everyone that had a hand in Man Finds Tape; this is smart and clever found footage done right. More tapes, please.
28 YEARS LATER: Danny Boyle returns to the series with Alex Garland scribbling again, and this post-apocalyptic take on disconnect—from society, from family—resonates hard in a COVID world. It’s a coming-of-age tale told with brutal honesty and clarity. A boy steals his sick mother to the mainland in search of ex-doctor Ralph Fiennes, who may be able to help her. This is Danny Boyle at his most electric, setting the audience up for confrontation in nearly every scene. Extremely tense, 28 Years Later leaves the viewer literally wanting more, and delivering it with this January’s The Bone Temple.
HEART EYES: Here’s a pleasant surprise; Heart Eyes is both a great example of a seemingly traditional rom-com movie, while being an effective holiday slasher to boot. The surprise is how it weaves together the two like it was the most natural thing in the world. Instead of clashing, they combine to create satisfying iterations of both at once.
The “Heart Eyes Killer” moves around the country killing different couples; now he(?) has chosen Seattle as his next kill zone. Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding are new advertising cohorts forced to work together, and when Heart Eyes thinks they’re a couple, he plans on sealing their love forever.
Taken separately, these genre exercises would be fun; together, they inform and highlight the other’s strengths. Neither is looked down upon, and that’s key to the film’s success; director Josh Ruben, writers Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon, and Michael Kennedy, and the cast make a sincere (and tongue-in-cheek) slasher, while the rom-com is sweet and funny. All’s fair in love and murder; Heart Eyes overflows with both.
WEAPONS: I’ll confess, I wasn’t the biggest fan of writer/director Zach Cregger’s previous feature, Barbarian, a box-office hit that gave me tonal whiplash. I’ll also confess I was very excited for what he would do next; the talent was undeniable. Weapons sees that talent coalesce into an ambitious horror film that is somber while also being darkly humorous. Seventeen second graders disappear in the middle of the night; suspicions fall on teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), who is immediately ostracized by the community. One child from the class didn’t disappear, however, and Warner teams with an apoplectic dad (Josh Brolin) to solve the mystery and find out what happened to the children. The film is broken into chapters to offer different points of view of the same events, piecing together a puzzle with both small character beats and large revelations.
Cregger has successfully meshed his dry and dark humor around a sad and poignant tale of the horrible misuse of children, literally and figuratively. Oh, and Amy Madigan as Aunt Gladys? Genuine, gleeful nightmare fuel. Long may she reign.
SINNERS: Ambitious is also doing a period piece on vampires in the South of the 1930s, fueled by powerhouse performances by Michael B. Jordan, Michael B. Jordan, Delroy Lindo, and several others. The music is the lifeblood and throughline of Sinners; the juke joint run by Jordan (brilliantly playing twins) gives rise to their nephew’s preternatural blues, and taps into a space where the Black music of the past and the future vibrate stronger than any outside forces. The Irish immigrants in the area feel like outsiders too; they also seem a lot like vampires. And they’d like to visit the juke joint if they were just asked in.
Sinners is a siege film more concerned with allegiance: to ideals, to family, to culture. Fierce allegiance and protection, at any cost.
—
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Companion, HIM, V/H/S/Halloween, Frankenstein, Wolf Man. I hope 2026 brings you nothing but pretend horror and real joy.
—
Go here to catch up on all of Daily Dead’s Favorites of 2025!