10 Recent Horror Movies That Had No Right To Be This Good

10. Sinners

It's unlikely anyone thought Sinners would be bad. After all, the cast is great, and the trailers looked intriguing, but expectations probably weren't over-the-moon or anything. Lest we forget, Ryan Coogler's last film was the deeply tedious Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and he'd never made an original genre film before, so it was hard to know exactly how this would turn out. 

Additionally, the marketing wasn't open about this, but Sinners is actually a crazy combination of genres, which might've caused further trepidation. It's a vampire film, yes, but it's also a Southern Gothic, a Western, a period drama... it's even a musical! Such a wacky blend was always going to be hard for anyone to pull off. 

Put it thus: was anyone predicting that this would end up being not only one of the greatest pieces of cinema of 2025, but also the most-nominated movie in Oscars history? Well, if they were, they were psychic. 

Sinners is astonishingly good. All of its disparate genres come together seamlessly in this intoxicatingly creative feast for the senses, a film as exhilaratingly creative as it is thematically rich. Better still, it delivers the gore, scary monsters, and white-knuckle thrills that the marketing promised, making it a horror movie that has something for absolutely everyone. 

More than anything else, this confirms that Ryan Coogler is an artistic force of nature, and here's hoping he'll direct something else away from Marvel soon.