The 7 best horror films of 2025

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

The year 2025 was a very important one for horror cinema, with some high-budget productions in the genre like Sinners (2025) coming out and making a splash.

In this article, I celebrate the great year of horror, listing the 7 best films of the genre released in Brazil’s 2025 commercial window. Check out the list:

7th Nosferatu

I don’t really like the rhythm driven by Robert Eggersbut the image work — especially the shadow play typical of black and white films, very well used in color photography — that the director does in Nosferatu (2024) is one of the most interesting things shown in cinemas this year.

I like how Eggers reimagines this classic as a dark allegory for intimate female repression, and also the way it works with themes of denialism and the authorities’ blind eye to their own internal rot. The most important line in the film is that Willem Dafoe saying: “If we want to defeat the shadows, we must first admit that they exist.“

6th Make Her Come Back

Even with few films in his career, Danny and Michael Philippou have already established grief as a predominant theme in their filmography. Make Her Come Back (2025) is another interesting exploration of this theme.

In times when conventional Hollywood cinema seems to have forgotten the basics, I like how the duo has zeal for images and values ​​rhythm and the development of good characters. Specifically in Make Her Come Back (2025)there is a very strong work in causing agony due to the public’s judgment. After all, what mother wouldn’t do anything to bring back a deceased daughter?

5th Extermination: Evolution

Extermination: Evolution (2025) is a sensorial, impactful and timeless journey about human instincts in conflict with rules and conventions.

Like a great maestro of weirdness, the director Danny Boyle represents this conflict, delivering an unconventional film that is not afraid to disturb and take big risks — and I love the anti-executive style that the film has.

4th Unknown

With its non-linear structure, Unknown (2024) distorts and manipulates the audience’s expectations in a very interesting way, and is a very visually beautiful film. The use of 35mm film brings to the production a nostalgic tone of counterculture films from the 70s, and this also has to do with how JT Mollner drink from fountains Dario Argento and Brian de Palma.

I love the duo Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallnerand I truly believe that Mollner launched itself on the market as an important name in horror. The series of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that the filmmaker is producing for A24 It has everything to be successful, as it is the type of project that suits him.

3rd Sinners

The most ambitious and visually impactful horror film of the year, Sinners (2025) is a very powerful artistic manifestation by Ryan Coogler. It was in this film, about the value of freedom, that the filmmaker was freer to express his vision.

In the end, Pecadores (2025) leaves a question: how far Coogler can go without the constraints of Disney?

2nd The Hour of Evil

Built on a set of allegories of illnesses of the mind, The Hour of Evil (2025) is a terrifying and fun ballad about people manipulated by their fears, and consumed by negative thoughts and paranoia that act like mental parasites. The work is a warning about the invisible threat of the shadows and how the negative energies emanated into the universe will inevitably turn against you.

There are those who don’t like the ending of the film and even find it too silly, but I honestly love how it works as a comforting reward for all the tension generated previously. Furthermore, it was by far the sequence that made me laugh the most in a film this year.

1st Cloud: Cloud of Revenge

Psychological horror about the apathy of the digital world, Cloud: Cloud of Revenge (2024) builds a type of slow burn suspense that becomes increasingly desperate as time passes, as it is not about killers or murderous mythological creatures, but about the loss of humanity in a silent way.

Few things were more impactful to see at the cinema this year than the sequel to Yoshii driving toward the hell of neoliberalism — the kind of immersion in the fantastic that only Kiyoshi Kurosawa could deliver.

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