Even if no more new horror movies were to reach cinemas for the rest of 2026, this year has already been excellent for the genre on the big screen.
There was 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which continued one of film’s best zombie franchises in spectacular and also moving fashion. Send Help served up Sam Raimi’s welcome return to twisted thrills. The Bride! delivered an electric take on a centuries-old classic, while Exit 8 proved one of the best video-game adaptations ever and Hokum did far more than check in for a standard creepy-hotel stay.
Add to this list We Bury the Dead’s take on the shuffling masses, The Plague’s water polo camp chaos, Undertone’s unnerving podcast tale and South Korean box-office sensation Salmokji: Whispering Water – plus the ape antics of Primate and Ready or Not: Here I Come’s sequel savagery, which had their charms as well.
We’re only four months into the year but there are plenty more scary movie standouts on their way. Here are nine films to look out for over the rest of 2026, plus one that arrives in Australia on the first day of 2027.
Horror movies to watch in 2026 – quick links
Obsession – 14 May
That’s a Bad Idea might be the name of Curry Barker’s comedy duo with Cooper Tomlinson, but that phrase would also work if the writer/director’s sophomore feature Obsession needed a different moniker.
Anyone acquainted with monkey’s paw stories or tales of love spells already knows what Bear (Michael Johnston, 9-1-1) learns the hard way: that wishing for the person you like to adore you back rarely ends well.
Here, a strange trinket is the reason for Nikki’s (Inde Navarrette, Superman & Lois) sudden transformation from friend to smitten, and for Bear’s biggest dream becoming a living nightmare. While literally conjuring up romance is hardly a new concept – turning up in 90s favourites including The Craft and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer – Barker uses the premise to fuel an unforgettably unsettling new horror gem.
Backrooms – 28 May
If Severance’s eerie office setup feels familiar, and not just from your own 9-to-5 life, then you, like the series’ creator Dan Erickson, might be familiar with The Backrooms creepypasta. That’s because what started in an online thread in 2019 hasn’t only inspired one of the decade’s biggest TV hits. YouTuber Kane Parsons created the Backrooms webseries, which he has now adapted into an A24 film.
At the age of 20, Parsons is the buzzy studio’s youngest-ever director – aided on his debut feature by big-name producers, such as Australian filmmaker James Wan and Longlegs’ Osgood Perkins, as well as stars like Oscar-nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve.
As clear from the trailer alone, Backrooms’ pitch-perfect production design is instantly perturbing, while its plot follows a man fixated on the strange space beyond a furniture store’s basement.
Leviticus – 18 June
At three of the last four iterations of the Sundance Film Festival, an Australian filmmaker has screened their first feature, which happened to be a horror movie, and scored a distribution deal with a hit US studio. Talk to Me did it. Together as well. In 2026, so did Leviticus. Like its predecessors, it will be in both Australian and international cinemas within six months of its Park City success.
Talk to Me’s Joe Bird stars in writer/director Adrian Chiarella’s Sydney Film Festival-bound debut full-length film, playing one of two teenage boys in love. Taking cues from It Follows while also exploring the traumas of conversion therapy, Leviticus charts not only small-town newcomer Naim being drawn to Ryan, but the aftermath when their community disapproves.
Stacy Clausen (Thrash), Mia Wasikowska (Club Zero) and Ewen Leslie (The Twelve) also feature.
Saccharine – screening at Sydney Film Festival
Like Leviticus, Saccharine is another Australian horror movie that first bowed overseas, then has a date with Sydney Film Festival. This isn’t Natalie Erika James’ first feature, though. The writer/director’s 2020 debut Relic proved expertly distressing and a hell of a calling card for her talents, while 2024’s Apartment 7A achieved the far-from-easy feat that is successfully serving up a prequel to horror masterpiece Rosemary’s Baby.
With Saccharine, James is in body-horror territory, aided by actors Midori Francis (Grey’s Anatomy), Danielle Macdonald (The Last Anniversary) and Madeleine Madden (The Wheel of Time). Together, in a film that seems perfectly timed for the current weight-loss injection boom, they dig into societal body-image standards, consumption and the always-online status quo.
ScreenHub: Saccharine review – freaky, fun body horror for the Ozempic era
Evil Dead Burn – 9 July
One of the joys of Evil Dead Rise, 2023’s addition to the Deadite-battling horror franchise that Sam Raimi started four-and-a-half decades ago now, was that it wasn’t simply content to rehash old ground in new packaging. The same looks to be the case with 2026’s Evil Dead Burn, even with yet another director joining the fold – and everyone that’s seen French filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček’s Infested should be excited.
Vaniček is turning his focus to a grieving woman battling the Evil Dead saga’s unwanted transformations in her in-laws’ home. After the shift from woodland cabins to domestic spaces worked well for Evil Dead Rise, hopefully it does the same here.
This time Raimi produces, as he did on 2013 remake Evil Dead.
Penny Lane Is Dead – 23 July
It’s 1986. Penny Lane Is Dead’s namesake (Bailey Spalding, Scrublands) is celebrating getting into university with her pals Toni (Tahlee Fereday, Videoland) and Amy (Alexandra Jensen, The Moogai). But when Penny’s cousin Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn, Year Of) shows up with her boyfriend Angus (Ben O’Toole, Boy Swallows Universe) and his friends Rodowsky (Fletcher Humphrys, Inside) and Merrick (Steve Le Marquand, Deadloch), partying isn’t all that their night at an isolated beach house entails.
Since Wake in Fright, so for more than half a century, Australian cinema has examined the toxicity lurking beneath the nation’s supposedly carefree facade. Penny Lane Is Dead’s take on that concept hails from Mia’Kate Russell, marking the feature directorial debut from this experienced makeup and special effects artist with credits on Wilfred,I, Frankenstein, Clickbait and Seven Snipers.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma – 6 August
It was true after the exceptional We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and it remained just as accurate following the also-sublime I Saw the TV Glow: when writer/director Jane Schoenbrun is behind the lens, whatever results demands attention.
For their involvement alone, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is immediately one of the year’s horror must-sees. The fact that it stars Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson? What a bonus.
Premiering at Cannes, then playing June’s Sydney Film Festival before a general Australian release in August, Schoenbrun’s latest casts Hacks star Einbinder as a filmmaker with ample love for horror, so much so that resurrecting an 80s slasher franchise is on her slate. As for The X-Files icon Anderson, she plays the original movie’s final girl – and when the duo crosses paths, things won’t just get bloody.
Resident Evil – 17 September
A big-name horror franchise unveiling a fresh instalment. A director with proven skills in the genre giving a hit saga a spin. Combine the two and you don’t just get Evil Dead Burn, but also Resident Evil circa 2026.
While director Zach Cregger also has Weapons prequel Gladys in the works – reportedly just as a co-screenwriter and producer, not director – his reboot of Capcom’s best-selling games is on its way first.
Austin Abrams follows Cregger over from Weapons, and everyone who enjoyed watching him run for his life in last year’s horror smash can do so again. As medical courier Bryan, he’s in for a terrifying evening, in a film that tells a new tale for Resident Evil as both a gaming and movie franchise. Cregger’s masterful handling of mood, as was also evident in Barbarian, already filters through in the trailer.
Screenhub: Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil – everything to know
Other Mommy – 8 October
Thirteen years after Mama, Jessica Chastain stars in another horror movie with a maternal angle, Other Mommy. It might also share James Wan as a producer with this year’s Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, but expect a haunting entity in the closet and not bandage-wrapped remains in this supernatural flick with eight-year-old Bela (The Housemaid’s Arabella Olivia Clark) at its centre.
Other Mommy’s title springs from the sinister presence lurking in the girl’s wardrobe. With his Zoom-shot indie Host, more so than his studio debut The Boogeyman, director Rob Savage has demonstrated that otherworldly scares are firmly in his wheelhouse.
Here’s hoping that Chastain provides a feast of reaction shots, as part of a cast that also includes Jay Duplass (Dying for Sex) and Dichen Lachman (Severance).
Werwulf – 1 Jan
When you’ve just remade an all-time horror great with the meticulous attention to historical authenticity that’s marked your entire career, and done so with breathtaking gothic flair, what comes next?
For Robert Eggers, following up Nosferatu means swapping vampires for werewolves – but still featuring Lily-Rose Depp and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, as well as his regulars Willem Dafoe and Ralph Ineson, in the cast.
In Australia, Eggers’ latest film arrives in cinemas on 1 January 2027, just under a week after its Christmas Day release in the US. Local audiences might need to wait a few extra days to see Werwulf, however, if it’s up to The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman and Nosferatu’s standards, the writer/director’s 13th-century England-set lycanthrope tale should be more than worth it.
