Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein is the culmination of a lifelong obsession — a lavish, deeply personal adaptation of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel that the Oscar-winning director had dreamed of making since childhood. Oscar Isaac stars as Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant and arrogant scientist whose hubris drives him to conquer death itself, while Jacob Elordi plays the tragic Creature he assembles and then abandons. Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, and Charles Dance round out an ensemble that treats Shelley's Gothic parable of creation and responsibility with operatic grandeur.

True to del Toro's sensibility, the film is a sumptuous work of practical craftsmanship, built around enormous physical sets, handcrafted creature effects, and painterly cinematography rather than digital spectacle. Del Toro reframes the familiar story as a mournful tragedy told from two perspectives — the maker's and the made — locating genuine pathos in a Creature who is less monster than abandoned child. It is at once a horror film, a lament for fractured fathers and sons, and a meditation on mortality that reflects the director's own preoccupations.

Premiering at the Venice Film Festival to a lengthy standing ovation, Frankenstein was praised as one of del Toro's most ambitious and emotionally resonant works, extending the monster-as-outsider empathy that has defined his career from The Shape of Water to Pan's Labyrinth. Released in select theaters before arriving on Netflix, it stands as a definitive modern rendering of a story that helped invent science fiction. It streams on Netflix.

The Conjuring: Last Rites is the climactic send-off for Ed and Lorraine Warren, the paranormal-investigator couple whose case files have anchored one of the most successful horror franchises in history. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga return one final time as the Warrens, with director Michael Chaves once again at the helm, closing out the main trilogy that began with 2013's The Conjuring. The film is billed as the last chapter for the Warrens, giving the long-running saga a definite endpoint after more than a decade of spin-offs and sequels.

The story draws on the real-life Smurl haunting, a widely publicized 1980s case in West Pittston, Pennsylvania, in which a family reported violent supernatural activity that the actual Warrens were called in to investigate. As Ed and Lorraine confront one of the most dangerous entities of their careers, the film also turns inward to their family, giving their grown daughter Judy (Mia Tomlinson) a central role and treating the case as a deeply personal reckoning rather than just another job. The result is a horror film that leans as much on the couple's marriage and legacy as on its scares.

Last Rites became a phenomenon at the box office, opening to franchise-record numbers and going on to rank as the highest-grossing entry in the entire Conjuring Universe — a rare feat for the ninth film in a horror series. Audiences turned out in force for the promised farewell, and the film's success underscored how thoroughly the Warrens had become horror institutions. It streams exclusively on HBO Max.

Weapons is a supernatural horror film written and directed by Zach Cregger, his hotly anticipated follow-up to the 2022 breakout Barbarian. Produced by New Line Cinema and Warner Bros., the film confirmed Cregger's reputation as one of the most distinctive new voices in American horror, trading conventional scares for a dread-soaked mystery told through interlocking chapters that gradually assemble into a single nightmarish picture.

The story begins with an impossible event: seventeen children from the same third-grade class rise from their beds at exactly 2:17 a.m. and run out into the dark, never to be seen again — all except one. As a grieving father (Josh Brolin) mounts his own investigation and the children's teacher (Julia Garner) becomes the town's prime suspect, the film shifts between perspectives, each chapter deepening the unease. Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Benedict Wong, and a scene-stealing Amy Madigan round out the ensemble.

Made for a modest budget, Weapons became one of the year's genuine phenomena, grossing well over $250 million worldwide and earning near-universal acclaim, with a 93% Rotten Tomatoes score and an A-minus CinemaScore. Critics hailed Cregger as a bona fide horror auteur and singled out the film's audacious structure and its unforgettable, folkloric menace, cementing it as one of the most talked-about genre films of 2025.

Opus is a wickedly inventive horror-thriller that announces writer-director Mark Anthony Green as a major new voice in genre cinema. Ayo Edebiri stars as Ariel Ecton, a music journalist invited to cover the long-awaited return of reclusive pop legend Alfred Moretti (John Malkovich) — an iconic figure who vanished from public life thirty years ago and is now resurfacing with a final album. Ariel arrives at Moretti's remote desert compound along with a handful of journalists and devoted fans, and what begins as an exclusive access story unravels rapidly into something far more sinister.

Green's script draws from the tradition of cult horror — the isolated compound, the charismatic patriarch with terrifying control over his followers, the outsider who sees what others cannot — while filtering it through a sharp satirical intelligence about celebrity worship, artistic legacy, and the parasocial devotion that pop culture inspires. John Malkovich is mesmerizing and deeply unsettling, oscillating between warmth and menace with the precision of a conductor, while Edebiri grounds the film in sharp, credible intelligence. Juliette Lewis contributes a standout supporting turn as a follower whose devotion has curdled into something frightening.

Opus premiered to strong notices at Sundance 2025 and was acquired by A24, the studio that has made prestige horror its signature. It is one of the most formally playful genre films of the year — genuinely funny, genuinely scary, and genuinely interested in what it means to sacrifice reason at the altar of genius. For Edebiri, it represents another leap into full leading-lady territory; for Green, it is a debut of remarkable confidence and singular vision.

Three decades after 28 Days Later transformed the zombie genre and became a cultural touchstone of early 2000s British cinema, Danny Boyle returns to the infected world he helped create. Set in a Britain that has quarantined itself from the rest of the world, 28 Years Later follows Isla (Jodie Comer), a nurse living in a survivor settlement, whose son's dangerous curiosity sets in motion a journey into the infected zones that will upend everything she thought she knew about the outbreak and its origins. The island is now a strange, enclosed ecosystem of communities built alongside — and in constant danger from — the rage-infected who still roam the countryside.

Boyle shoots the film in a raw, immediate style that recalls the original's documentary aesthetic while pushing further into painterly expressionism in its more hallucinatory sequences. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays a charismatic outsider whose motives remain opaque throughout, and Ralph Fiennes appears in a mesmerizing supporting role as a reclusive doctor who has spent decades studying the infected — and who may know far more than he's willing to share. The film expands the mythology of the franchise in meaningful ways without letting backstory overwhelm the moment-to-moment dread.

28 Years Later is the first of a planned trilogy — a confident, terrifying return to form that works equally well as a standalone thriller and as a setup for what's to come. Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland have constructed a film that earns its place beside the classics of the genre, delivering genuine horror while engaging seriously with questions of isolation, community, and what it means to survive in a world permanently altered by catastrophe. A Sony Pictures release.

Companion opens on what appears to be a perfectly ordinary romantic getaway — Iris and Josh have arrived at a lakeside retreat with two other couples, the kind of weekend that movies use as shorthand for comfortable modern life. Within minutes, something is wrong in ways the film refuses to name directly, and by the time it does name them, everything you thought you understood about the power dynamics in the opening scene has inverted completely. Drew Hancock's debut feature is the kind of thriller that requires total viewer participation from the first frame.

Sophie Thatcher plays Iris with calibrated uncertainty — she conveys something between contentment and suppressed something else that the film slowly reveals to be the most precisely accurate emotion available to her. Jack Quaid is unsettling as Josh in ways that only register gradually, and the supporting cast (Harvey Guillén, Lukas Gage, Megan Suri) each carries their own secrets that amplify the story's central revelation rather than distract from it. Hancock's screenplay is meticulous about planting information the audience will retroactively recognize as obvious once the film declares its hand.

Companion was released by Warner Bros. in January 2025 and became one of the year's most discussed genre films — a word-of-mouth phenomenon driven by audiences who insisted on telling people to see it without revealing what they were about to experience. The film earned praise for its wit, its central performance, and its willingness to use a genre premise as the vehicle for something more interesting than genre alone provides. It streams on Max, and is best experienced knowing as little as possible before pressing play.

Twenty-two years after Jurassic World burned, the world's dinosaur population has contracted to isolated pockets in equatorial regions, where the animals have retreated to environments most hospitable to their biology. Zora Bennett, a mercenary played by Scarlett Johansson, is hired by a pharmaceutical company to extract genetic material from three of the largest surviving dinosaurs — DNA that may hold the key to a revolutionary medical breakthrough. The mission requires navigating territory no sane person would enter, alongside a team of specialists who are each motivated by something more complicated than money.

Director Gareth Edwards, whose previous films include Rogue One and Monsters, brings his signature patience and awe for large-scale spectacle to the Jurassic franchise with results that feel genuinely revitalized. The film treats its dinosaurs not as monsters to be defeated but as ecological wonders whose existence creates terrible pressures on everyone who encounters them. Johansson is at her most capable here — practical, funny, and occasionally frightened in ways that ground even the most outlandish sequences. The supporting cast includes Jonathan Bailey and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as her reluctant mission partners.

Jurassic World Rebirth debuted in summer 2025 to the franchise's strongest critical reception in decades, with many reviewers noting that Edwards' restraint and his gift for building dread before releasing it made it the most effective entry since Spielberg's original. The film crossed $1 billion at the global box office and is considered a successful creative reset for a franchise that had been coasting on nostalgia. It is available for streaming on Peacock.