Something has shifted in horror. The genre’s biggest recent success stories were not franchise sequels but originals: Sinners and Weapons ruled awards season and the box office in 2025, building on the momentum ignited by 2024’s surprise hit The Substance. So when PEOPLE’s Bailey Richards assembled her ten best horror movies for Halloween after watching 170 horror films this year, she made a telling choice: no blockbusters at all. Obsession, Backrooms and Resident Evil — the year’s loudest genre hits — were recommended, praised, and deliberately left off the list.
The Case for the Underdog
Richards has form here. Last October she shared ten favorites from more than 100 horror movies, and a reader’s comment — “You should get out more” — became the engine of this year’s list. She got out more: to theaters, to premieres, to 170 horror films and more than 350 movies overall. The result is an argument that discovery beats scale. A low-budget film like I Love Paris, a French vampire mockumentary that hinges almost entirely on one performer’s charisma, can out-charm productions a hundred times its size — a point Richards makes by ranking Aminata Thiboult’s turn as Paris among the most amusing performances of the year.
(Teddy Award / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0))Old Movies, New Audiences
The list also argues that horror’s back catalogue is an untapped streaming-era goldmine. See No Evil (1971) sat in the shadow of Rosemary’s Baby for five decades despite a Mia Farrow performance Richards ranks as all-time. Messiah of Evil (1973) drifted through alternate titles — Blood Virgin, Deep Swamp, Dead People — while perfecting an atmospheric horror of empty coastal towns that modern hits now chase. Mario Bava’s The Whip and the Body (1963) smuggled a gothic melodrama inside a horror film, with Christopher Lee as its dark center. And Thesis (1996) anticipated our true-crime, disturbing movie iceberg era by decades: a film student in Madrid, played by Ana Torrent, researches filmed violence and suspects her own university is producing it. These are films that failed no test except distribution — and in 2026, distribution is finally catching up with them.
Festivals Are the New Video Store
Notice where the new picks surfaced: the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. I Love Paris had its U.S. premiere there; The Cycle had its East Coast premiere there, with Deborah Ann Woll and Jeffrey Donovan as a forensic pathologist and small-town cop in a genre blend of crime procedural and creature feature. Taratoa Stappard’s Mārama and Damian McCarthy’s Oddity likewise reached Richards through the festival-and-word-of-mouth circuit rather than a marketing campaign. The film festival has become the genre’s talent scout, and the critic who shows up — 170 films deep — becomes its translator.
(Siebbi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0))Performance Over Spectacle
Read the list closely and a pattern emerges: nearly every pick is anchored by a single, indelible performance. Thiboult’s Paris. Farrow’s Sarah, acting blindness and terror in the same frame. Ariāna Osborne’s Mary, carrying a nation’s colonial grief in a mouth twitch. Desiree Akhavan’s Sara in Creep 2, refusing to run from Mark Duplass’s killer and instead matching his energy — the quality that made Duplass name her his favorite of the killer’s victims. Even The Faculty, the list’s one mainstream title, is remembered as a patchwork cast phenomenon: Clea DuVall, Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Usher, Salma Hayek and Jon Stewart in one high school, trading Kevin Williamson zingers. Spectacle dates; performances compound.
(David Shankbone / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0))The New School Holds Its Own
The contemporary picks are not token inclusions. Oddity weaponizes stillness: a life-size wooden figure with a permanent scream, placed in a grieving sister’s home, generates more dread than a dozen jump scares — and Richards’ route to it, through McCarthy’s Adam Scott-led Hokum, shows how one strong film now functions as a trailer for a director’s whole catalogue. The Cycle fuses two reliable genres — the forensic crime procedural of Memories of Murder and the creature feature of An American Werewolf in London — into something Richards calls an underexplored intersection, carried by Deborah Ann Woll and Jeffrey Donovan. Mārama goes furthest: a revenge film that opens by warning viewers it depicts the desecration of Māori culture, then refuses every easy catharsis. That a list built for Halloween fun makes room for a film that “will shatter you” says everything about where the genre’s center of gravity now sits.
Even the throwbacks argue the thesis. The Faculty was a studio product in 1998, but its afterlife is pure cult: a patchwork cast that touched every corner of pop culture, Kevin Williamson’s quippy dialogue, Robert Rodriguez’s goopy practical effects. Creep 2 began as a micro-budget sequel and became, in Richards’ words, a film “in its own league” — proof that in modern horror, a two-hander shot on a shoestring can outperform a franchise entry if the performances lock in.
The Takeaway for Your Watchlist
Richards’ list is less a ranking than a method. Watch widely. Trust festivals over algorithms. Let a 1963 Italian gothic sit beside a 2026 French mockumentary, and judge both by the same standard: did it get under your skin? By that standard, her ten — from a screaming wooden figure in Oddity to a killer known only by his cowboy boots in See No Evil — earn their places. The blockbusters will find you on their own. The gems need a guide, and this year the guide watched 170 films so you don’t have to.