10 Recent Horror Movies That Had No Right To Be This Good
The recent horror movies that were way, way better than anyone expected.
As MJ (Zendaya) says in Spider-Man: No Way Home, "If you expect disappointment, you can never be disappointed." There's definitely weight to that, although you could frame it in a more upbeat way - if you don't get your hopes up too high, you're more likely to be pleasantly surprised.
That's very much the case with movies, as unexpectedly good pictures are constantly coming out. And that's certainly the case with horror, for this is a saturated market where a lot of flicks do look fairly 'whatever' before they actually arrive. Still, praise be, we are living through a golden age of horror, and a lot of movies are routinely blowing expectations out of the water. You really do love to see it.
The following ten films are great examples of this. Some were from struggling IPs, others just didn't look all that good from the pre-release materials, but all of them annihilated expectations like nobody's business, and they were better than pretty much anyone was expecting.
Kicking things off with a little film from 2025 which came out of nowhere to be not only one of the year's best, but a fully-fledged Oscars contender...
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.