The 12 Best Slasher Movies Of The 2020s, Ranked – SlashFilm

Good news, horror hounds: we’re in the midst of a full-blown slasher renaissance. The subgenre dominated horror in the 1980s, buoyed by ’70s classics like “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” “Halloween,” and “Black Christmas.” By 1996, when “Scream” was released, everyone knew all the tropes, and the idea of a killer coming back to hunt down a bunch of screaming teenagers no longer seemed as novel.

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Nowadays, there’s Art the Clown. There’s no denying that the “Terrifier” killer is the most iconic new slasher villain of this decade, but those films often amount to little more than showcases for director Damien Leone’s squelchy gore effects. Despite what Leone said in 2025, horror is indeed political. There was a conservative backlash to all that gory mayhem in the 1980s, even though slashers could be thought of as quite conservative, with the villains often punishing people who had sex. There were also some slashers that reveled in nudity and frivolity — an in-your-face critique of the Reagan era. Slashers have always been a space for political anxieties to be worked out, which is part of what makes them so fun!

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The slashers on this list hold up better than the “Terrifier” movies as films, even though Art as a character might rule them all. There are more opportunities now for more types of people to tell stories, meaning many slashers on this list are queerer than ever, more savvy about the gender and racial politics they’re playing around with, and we’re all better for it.

Speaking of slasher films that work through some knotty politics, the Peacock Original film “Sick” attempted to process our COVID-era anxieties through a slasher lens. It’s about a girl named Parker (Gideon Adlon) and her best friend Mia (Bethlehem Million), two college kids who decide to quarantine at a beautiful cabin in the woods by a lake. Unfortunately, there’s a killer on the loose, meaning the girls are trying to outrun not just a person with a knife, but a person who might be breathing a deadly virus into the air.

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“Sick” tries to mine humor from the “please wait while I put on a mask” awkwardness of the early pandemic months. Quarantining and masking were the right thing to do, which leaves one to wonder whether they’re supposed to be on their side as we watch these girls roll their eyes and skirt the rules. Ultimately, the movie lands in an uncomfortable place, asking us to sympathize both with the victims of the killer and with those who were taking COVID seriously. It’s a productive discomfort; there are no easy answers, and “Sick” doesn’t pretend to offer them.

Regardless, as a slasher, this one’s straight-up fun. There’s an excellent chase sequence that ends with Parker trapped on a floating dock with the killer underneath her, stabbing up through the wooden slats; it’s as deliciously tense as you could hope for from a pandemic-set straight-to-streaming slasher.

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When “Halloween Ends” premiered in 2022, capping off the sequel trilogy that began with 2018’s “Halloween,” many fans wrote it off — though Stephen King liked it! After marketing that promised a grand showdown between Michael Myers and Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), the film featured little of the masked killer we’ve come to love. Instead, much of the movie is about Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), who meets Michael in a sewer and takes up killing on his own.

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This movie is cruel, and I mean that as a compliment; it opens with a child being accidentally knocked off a balcony, breaking his neck several stories down. That sets the tone for a lean, mean film about a young man grappling with guilt, ultimately seduced into evil. I love it when a movie takes risks instead of giving me what I thought I wanted. We’ve seen Michael so many times over the years in so many different incarnations; why not try something new?

Plus, it looks great. There’s a shot of Corey on a motorcycle, that pulsating electronic score racing behind him, that plays beautifully on imagery from schlocky B-movies of yore. There’s also a great sequence where Michael kills a bunch of bullies who were after Corey, which is such a classic 1980s fantasy wish-fulfillment that you can’t help but be charmed. Corey Cunningham is the best thing to happen to “Halloween” since Josh Hartnett’s inexplicable “Halloween H20” haircut, and I’m sticking to that.

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Part of the current slasher renaissance is driven by people who grew up loving the original wave of masked-killer movies. That’s the case with “Heart Eyes,” a 2025 film absolutely steeped in an unabashed love for everything from “Scream” to the 2003 “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” remake and “Freddy vs. Jason.” It’s full of jokes, references, reveals, and easter eggs that pay homage to what’s come before, ending up its own thing in the process.

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We’re experimenting with slasher hybrids more now, and “Heart Eyes” is a slasher mixed with a rom-com. It’s about a woman named Ally (Olivia Holt) who meets-cute a hunky guy named Jay (Mason Gooding) at a coffee shop, not knowing that he’s a freelancer who’s been brought in to fix her mistakes at work. There’s not much time to worry about that, however, because it’s Valentine’s Day, and the Heart-Eyes Killer is once again on the prowl, looking for youngsters in love to slaughter.

Thankfully, both sides of the coin pull their weight. This is an adorable romance; Holt and Gooding have killer chemistry, no pun intended, and the movie is shameless about just how hard it leans into those tropes. It’s also a killer slasher, pun very much intended, with some gleefully gory, twisted deaths sure to satisfy genre aficionados.

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Most slashers feature a killer in a mask. They may or may not be unmasked by the end of the movie, but either way, for the most part, we don’t actually see who’s doing much of the killing. That’s not the case in “Sissy,” an Australian movie from 2022 released by Shudder. In “Sissy,” we know exactly who’s doing the killing. It’s our protagonist.

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“Sissy” is about a woman named Cecilia (Aisha Dee), also known as Sissy. She’s a wellness influencer, spending her time talking to followers online about mindfulness. When she accidentally runs into an old bestie-turned-nemesis and finds herself unexpectedly invited along on a bachelorette party, Sissy must confront a traumatic incident in their past. She does that by killing people off … at first accidentally, and then not-so-accidentally.

There’s some social-commentary stuff that doesn’t really land — it’s not exactly a novel observation to suggest that online influencers don’t act that way in real life — but overall, this is a candy-colored blast, all pinks and blues and bright greens. The kills are demented, unafraid to go for the gore even if the movie pulls its punches thematically. Dee is great too; there’s a loneliness to her performance, and we just can’t wait to watch her go mad.

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If Art the Clown is the most iconic slasher villain of the decade, then surely M3GAN from “M3GAN” is in second place. From the instant that trailer dropped online — featuring the demonically-cutesy killer robot dancing down a hallway — fans were hooked. To paraphrase the great Wendy Williams, “M3GAN is an icon, she’s a legend, and she is the moment, now, c’mon now.” Interestingly, the scene that made M3GAN a horror icon almost wasn’t in the script.

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M3GAN — Model 3 Generative Android — is a kids’ toy that helps with socialization. After she’s brought home by toymaker Gemma (a pitch-perfect Allison Williams), it’s not long before M3GAN starts killing people who come between her and her new friend, Gemma’s niece Cady (Violet McGraw). 

Unfortunately, the PG-13 version released in theaters skimps on the kills; many of them happen just offscreen. There’s an unrated cut that restores the gore, and the movie is better for it; without an actual sense of the danger she poses, M3GAN is just a camp icon — though we love her for that! Still, on-screen blood or not, there’s a giddy sense of play to the whole film; when M3GAN gets down on all fours and scampers after a child through the woods, you’re certain you’re witnessing the birth of a horror legend.

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Adam Cesare’s Bram Stoker Award-winning 2020 novel “Clown in a Cornfield” felt like a breath of fresh air. It’s a funny, yet frightening story, a slasher in book form that contains a resonant message about grown-ups succumbing to xenophobia and abandoning the youth. You can imagine why it felt important in 2020.

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The 2025 film adaptation, on the other hand, loses something in adapting the story: reading slasher tropes in a novel feels, well, novel, whereas seeing them on screen just feels familiar. The movie is about a girl named Quinn (Katie Douglas) who moves to a small town called Kettle Springs so that her father (Aaron Abrams) can be the town’s new doctor. As she begins to make friends, Quinn realizes that the town is obsessed with Frendo, the creepy clown mascot of a defunct corn-syrup brand. Frendo is no friend; instead, he’s a killer.

Thankfully, that’s only a first-act issue. “Clown in a Cornfield” takes a hard left turn somewhere around the halfway mark, ratcheting up the suspense and humor brilliantly. This is a bloody movie with some devilish kills, and thankfully, that important message is still there. It’s maybe even more resonant now than it was five years ago, because as the book’s tagline warned, “The kids are not all right.”

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The first three “Scream” movies satirized slashers, taking their cues from the tropes that were popular in the genre at the time. “Scream 4,” which premiered in 2011, played into the endless glut of remakes that saturated the 2000s. In “Scream” – the 2022 film, that is — the characters tackled a new horror trend: The “requel.” Neither remake nor sequel, a “requel” is something that reboots the events of a dormant franchise, bringing back legacy characters while sending the story in a new direction. Think “Halloween” (2018), for example, or Netflix’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” — both of which just reused their original film’s titles, as did “Scream.”

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In this case, Sydney (Neve Campbell), Gale (Courteney Cox), and Dewey (David Arquette) are back to hand the franchise off to a new group of horror-savvy teens. “Scream” assembled a great young cast of up-and-comers, including Jack Quaid, Mikey Madison, Jenna Ortega, Melissa Barrera, Mason Gooding, and Jasmine Savoy Brown, and they’re all a joy to watch as they flee Ghostface once again. “Scream” is a very funny, very bloody sequel, and even though later films were plagued by casting drama, this one stands as an example of a requel done right — it pleases the fans, introduces the newbies, and gives us what we know we love.

Much as “Heart Eyes” crossed the slasher with the rom-com, 2020’s “Freaky” was a genre mash-up also written by Michael Kennedy. This time, he blended the slasher with the body-swap film, and in “Happy Death Day” director (and co-writer) Christopher Landon’s hands, the resulting film is one of the best slashers of the decade so far.

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“Freaky” is about a bullied girl named Millie (Kathryn Newton) who just wants to go to Homecoming. Unfortunately, after the football game, she runs afoul of a serial killer called the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn). When he stabs her with an enchanted dagger, they switch bodies. That means the serial killer now looks like Newton — no one would ever suspect that she’d be a murderer! — while the awkward outcast is trapped in Vaughn’s body. Hijinks, as you might imagine, ensue.

There are a couple of really great kills in “Freaky” — I’ll never be able to see a cryotherapy tank without thinking of this movie – but the main attraction is seeing Vince Vaughn act like a high school girl while Kathryn Newton morphs into a cold-blooded, blood-splattered slasher. It’s a very funny movie, but the cross-gender body-swapping also opens up all sorts of queer possibilities that the movie is happy to explore. It’s got a tender touch; unlike the “Jumanji” reboot, which finds it hilarious that someone who looks like Jack Black might be crushing on Nick Jonas, “Freaky” treats A Girl in Vince Vaughn’s Body’s crush seriously. It’s delightful.

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If you’re a “Terrifier” fan who’s disappointed that the movies on this list aren’t sadistically gory enough, then you’ll want to check out the Brazilian film “Skull: The Mask.” The movie premiered internationally on Shudder, and we’re lucky that the streamer brought this movie to worldwide audiences, because it’s an absolute blast.

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We might call this a slasher-noir, as it takes elements from something like “Friday the 13th” and mashes them up with a detective story. Natallia Rodrigues plays Beatriz, a woman looking into an ancient artifact called the Mask of Anhangá. When it comes to life — spawning a hulking, goopy-gory-gross killer that walks like Kane Hodder on steroids — she races to stop it before it kills again. “Skull: The Mask” is occasionally all over the place tonally, but that’s totally fine by me, because there’s a gonzo, go-for-broke spirit here that’s hard to ignore.

Directors Armando Fonseca and Kapel Furman have made a film featuring some of the most vicious, wet-looking practical effects you’re ever likely to see. There are broken bones and buckets of blood, globs of gore and shredded skin. People are crushed and stabbed and violated and penetrated in all sorts of ways with all sorts of weapons, and the result is glorious.

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How do you make a satisfying prequel to a movie where everybody knows the twist? That’s a tall order, but it’s one that director William Brent Bell tackled handily in “Orphan: First Kill.” The original “Orphan,” released in 2009, starred Isabelle Fuhrman as a killer little girl with a secret: she’s actually a 33-year-old Estonian woman who’s only pretending to be a child. We all know that now, so “Orphan: First Kill” seemed like a silly idea until the news broke that Isabelle Furhman would be returning to the role she originally played when she was a kid.

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The prequel follows Esther as she comes to America from Eastern Europe, claiming to be a little girl who disappeared years earlier from a family headed by Tricia Albright (Julia Stiles). Of course, people start to drop dead, leading the family to look sideways at the child who says she’s their daughter.

Fuhrman is a grown woman now, but she played a younger version of her childhood character anyway, reportedly without the use of CGI. Instead, Bell used some classic tricks like forced perspective, even occasionally putting the other actors in tall platform shoes so they towered above Furhman. The result is a campy film that leans into the absurdity of it all, especially when we realize that this film, too, has an incredible twist. All praise to Julia Stiles, because that woman can sell anything.

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We’ll get this out of the way up top: yes, “In a Violent Nature” is slow. This isn’t your average slasher movie, full of shocks, jolts, and surprises. Instead, this is a movie about what a slasher-killer does in between those moments. Mostly, that means lots of lurking, lots of plodding around the woods, watching and waiting to catch their victim alone.

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“In a Violent Nature” opens on a group of people disturbing a grave. We mostly hear them off-camera, and they leave before the killer, Johnny (Ry Barrett), rises from the dirt. He’s a brute, an undead zombie kind of like Jason Voorhees in the later “Friday the 13th” films, and he’s got a thirst for blood. It’s the slasher film reimagined as arthouse fare, as much about the quality of the amber light through the trees as it is about watching teenagers get slaughtered.

The movie has a sly sense of humor, though, as those kills eventually reveal. We’re not actually watching Johnny’s first rampage; instead, this is essentially a “requel” of something we haven’t seen. Eventually, he battles the Final Guy from the last time he went on a killing spree, leaving us to put the backstory together ourselves. It becomes clear that what’s happening just off-screen isn’t like if they pointed the camera the other way on “Friday the 13th;” it’s like if we watched Jason during his downtime while Taking Manhattan … silly and campy, in other words. What a riot.

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If Art the Clown and M3GAN are the top two horror icons of the decade, then Mia Goth’s mesmerizing performance as Pearl is close behind at No. 3. Ti West worked with the actor to develop a trilogy around the character, beginning with the 1970s-set “X,” jumping back for a prequel called “Pearl,” and then heading into the 1980s for “MaXXXine.” All three have something to offer, but as slashers go, “X” isn’t just the best of the three but the best slasher of the decade so far.

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In “X,” Goth pulls double duty as both an elderly slasher-killer named Pearl and a starlet called Maxine. Maxine is an adult film actress who’s on Pearl’s farmhouse to shoot some porn in the barn. Pearl becomes fascinated with Maxine, desperate to recapture her youth; soon, her co-stars (played by a great cast including Kid Cudi, Brittany Snow, and Jenna Ortega) begin to drop dead.

There have been many, many films that owe a debt to “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” and “X” is one of the best. It’s a sun-drenched nightmare of a movie, saying something about America — about purity culture and pornography, about sensuality and repression — even as it indulges in the pleasures of watching pretty naked people be slashered to death. Plus, Ortega gives us a scream for the ages.

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