New Releases
The Best Horror Movies of 2026 So Far, and What Is Still Coming
2026 has been an unusually strong year for horror, and the best film in it cost less than the catering budget on most of the others. Here is what landed, and what is still to come.
Hero image: Obsession (artwork via TMDB)
Key takeaways
- Obsession is the best horror film of the year and was made by people nobody had heard of.
- Franchise horror had a genuinely good year: Evil Dead Burn and Lee Cronin's The Mummy both landed.
- Zach Cregger directing Resident Evil in September is the most interesting thing on the autumn slate.
- Horror keeps out-earning its budget by margins no other genre matches, which is why the pipeline stays full.
Horror remains the only genre where a film made for the cost of a mid-size studio's marketing lunch can outscore and occasionally out-earn the tentpoles around it. 2026 has been a good demonstration: the highest-rated horror film of the year so far came from a writer-director nobody had heard of, and it is beating most of the studio slate on every measure that matters.
Below is everything worth your time from the first seven months, ranked, plus the autumn slate. Ratings are the current TMDB community scores with vote counts, and anything released since June is still sitting on early numbers.
The best of 2026 so far
Obsession (2026)
- 1h 49m
- TMDB 8.2/10
- Horror, Thriller
The horror film of the year and the best value proposition in cinema right now. Curry Barker wrote and directed it, the cast contains no famous faces, and it sits at 8.2 from over 4,300 votes, above almost every studio release of 2026 in any genre.
The premise reads like a fable: a hopeless romantic breaks a wishing tree called the One Wish Willow to win his crush, gets exactly what he asked for, and discovers the terms. What makes it work is that Barker plays the fable completely straight for long enough that you settle into it, so when the mechanism reveals itself the cost is real rather than a punchline.
It is also the sharpest recent example of the wish-horror structure, which is genuinely hard to pull off because the audience is always ahead of the character. The film's answer is to make the protagonist's want sympathetic rather than stupid, which is the whole game.
109 minutes, no franchise, no obligations. Watch it cold.
Watch it if: you want the year's best horror film and you have no interest in homework.
Colony (2026)
- 2h 3m
- TMDB 8.1/10
- Action, Horror, Science Fiction
Yeon Sang-ho returning to the territory of Train to Busan. A rapidly mutating virus is released during a biotech conference, the building is sealed by the authorities, and Professor Se-jeong has to survive inside it with a small group.
Yeon's particular skill is confined-space geography. Train to Busan worked because you always knew exactly which carriage everyone was in and what stood between them, and Colony applies the same discipline to a sealed facility. The transformations are grim and practical-looking, and the human antagonists are, as always with this director, the actual problem.
Gianna Jun leads with Ji Chang-wook and Koo Kyo-hwan. At 8.1 from around 415 votes the score is promising rather than settled, but this is the best Korean genre film of the year.
Pairs naturally with our Korean cinema guide.
Watch it if: you liked Train to Busan and want the same director doing the same thing well.
Evil Dead Burn (2026)
- 1h 50m
- TMDB 7.9/10
- Horror, Thriller
The fifth Evil Dead film and further evidence that this franchise has become the most reliably good long-running horror series. Sébastien Vaniček directs, and the setup relocates the material somewhere genuinely fresh.
Alice, recently widowed, goes to stay with her husband's remaining family, who turn out to be descendants of a leading researcher into demonic possession. Her in-laws then start transforming, one at a time, into things that feed on fear.
Framing an Evil Dead film around in-laws is both very funny and structurally smart, because the series has always really been about being trapped in a house with people who used to be someone you loved. Souheila Yacoub is excellent as the outsider who married in.
7.9 from around 570 votes, 110 minutes.
Watch it if: you want practical-effects horror from a series that keeps not embarrassing itself.
Lee Cronin's The Mummy (2026)
- 2h 13m
- TMDB 7.9/10
- Horror, Mystery
Lee Cronin, who directed the previous Evil Dead entry, taking on the Mummy and treating it as horror rather than as an adventure franchise.
That distinction is the entire point. Every screen Mummy since 1999 has been a chase film with jokes. Cronin's instinct is atmosphere, decay, and body horror, and applying that to a monster that is fundamentally about a corpse refusing to stay a corpse is the obvious right answer that nobody had tried.
7.9 from nearly 2,450 votes, which is a well-supported number for an April release, and 133 minutes.
Watch it if: you want a classic monster taken seriously for the first time in twenty-five years.
Backrooms (2026)
- 1h 51m
- TMDB 7.1/10
- Horror, Mystery, Science Fiction
The most interesting production story in horror this year. Kane Parsons began making Backrooms videos as a teenager on YouTube, built an enormous audience, and has now directed an A24 feature with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve in it.
The premise is deliberately minimal: a strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom. That is the entire official synopsis, and the restraint is correct, because the appeal of the concept is the endless yellow nowhere on the other side.
7.1 from over 2,500 votes. The honest assessment is that it is more effective as atmosphere than as narrative, and viewers who need a plot will find the last act frustrating. As a piece of sustained unease it works.
111 minutes, and best watched alone with the lights off.
Watch it if: you find liminal spaces unsettling and you do not need every question answered.
Deep Water (2026)
- 1h 47m
- TMDB 7.2/10
- Horror, Thriller
Renny Harlin, who made Deep Blue Sea in 1999, returning to sharks. A flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai crash-lands in shark-infested water, and the surviving passengers have to escape a sinking aircraft.
It is exactly what it says it is, and it is executed with a competence that this sub-genre rarely receives. Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley are both taking it seriously, which helps enormously.
7.2 from around 355 votes, 107 minutes. Nobody is going to call it important. It is a genuinely tense creature feature that knows precisely what it is.
Watch it if: you want a shark film made by someone who has made a good one before.
Also released
The Devil's Mouth puts college friends in submerged Thai caves with a predator and low oxygen, which is a strong premise executed at 6.5. Soulm8te is a Blumhouse AI-companion horror from Kate Dolan, currently at 6.5 but from only around 50 votes, so genuinely too early to judge. And Scary Movie is the Wayans brothers returning to the parody series twenty-six years on, sitting at 6.5, which is roughly where these have always landed.
What is still coming in 2026
The autumn slate is unusually strong, and one entry on it is the most interesting genre appointment of the year.
Resident Evil - 16 September
- Horror, Science Fiction
Zach Cregger directing Resident Evil, with Austin Abrams, Kali Reis, and Paul Walter Hauser.
This is a genuinely unusual pairing. Cregger came out of sketch comedy and his defining quality as a horror director is structural mischief: he builds films that hand the story to a different character partway through and change genre while you are watching. Every previous Resident Evil adaptation has been an action franchise with zombies in it.
Applying a structure-first sensibility to a series that started as a haunted house with a monster problem is the most promising idea in horror this year. It is also the film with the widest gap between what people expect and what it could plausibly be.
Watch it if: you had written off video game adaptations, which was defensible until now.
| Date | Film | Director | The pitch |
|---|---|---|---|
| 19 Aug | Insidious: Out of the Further | Jacob Chase | Sixth entry, Lin Shaye returns |
| 2 Sep | Fall 2: Deadpoint | The Spierig brothers | More height, more panic |
| 16 Sep | Resident Evil | Zach Cregger | The one to watch for |
| 21 Oct | Wicker | Wilson and Fischer | Colman, Skarsgård, Dinklage, Debicki in folk horror |
| 11 Nov | Ebenezer | Ti West | A Christmas Carol played as an actual ghost story |
Wicker deserves particular attention. Olivia Colman, Alexander Skarsgård, Peter Dinklage, and Elizabeth Debicki in a folk-horror film is an absurd cast for a project almost nobody is discussing, and folk horror is the sub-genre with the best recent hit rate.
Why horror keeps winning
The economics are the whole explanation. A horror film can be made for a few million and still open wide, because the audience shows up for the premise rather than for a star. That means a studio can take fifteen swings a year and only needs two to connect, which produces a pipeline where genuinely strange ideas get funded.
It also means the genre is where new directors get their first feature. Cregger, Cronin, Vaniček, Parsons, and Barker are all on this page, and none of them would have been given a hundred million dollars to try something. Horror let them try it for considerably less.
For horror beyond this year, our guide sorted by type of scare covers the all-time list, and the horror catalog has everything else.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best horror movie of 2026?
Obsession, written and directed by Curry Barker. It sits at 8.2 from over 4,300 votes, above almost every studio release of the year, and it has no franchise attachments or required viewing.
What horror movies are coming out in late 2026?
Insidious: Out of the Further on 19 August, Fall 2: Deadpoint on 2 September, Zach Cregger's Resident Evil on 16 September, Wicker on 21 October, and Ti West's Ebenezer on 11 November.
Is the new Evil Dead movie good?
Evil Dead Burn sits at 7.9 and continues the series' unusually strong run. Sébastien Vaniček directs, and relocating the story to a family of possession researchers gives the material a genuinely fresh frame.
Is Backrooms worth watching?
If you respond to atmosphere over plot, yes. It is more effective as sustained unease than as narrative, and viewers who need clear answers will find the final act unsatisfying. It sits at 7.1 from over 2,500 votes.
Why are horror movies rated lower than they deserve?
Because some viewers rate a horror film low for upsetting them, which means the film worked. Genre baselines differ: a 7.0 horror film is roughly equivalent to a 7.5 drama in terms of how well it was received by its actual audience.
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Ratings, runtimes, and artwork come from TMDB and can change over time. teasertrack is a free discovery site, not a streaming service: every pick links to its full movie page where you can check trailers, cast, and current availability.
