Sure, you could watch Scream or The Shining for the millionth year in a row this Halloween season, but what if you decided to… switch it up? Cue the gasps and shouts of fear, because sometimes change is the most frightening thing of all.
While there’s definitely something to be said about classic horror hits, there are still so many new scary movies that come out every year and many are well worth checking out this Halloween.
Add some fresh scary season staples to your queue with inventive takes on old tropes, revivals of familiar favorites, or something like nothing you’ve ever seen before. From M3GAN to Talk to Me to Five Nights at Freddy’s and more, we have an entire assortment of terrifying and terrific titles to choose from, all of which were released within the last year.
Here are 11 new movies — all released since Halloween 2022 — you should make sure to watch this Halloween season:
Description: With its wonderful blend of campiness, horror, and humor, M3GAN truly understands the assignment when it comes to creating a hit Halloween movie. The sci-fi horror follows eight-year-old Cady (Violet McGraw) as she is sent to live with her aunt Gemma (Allison Williams) following the death of her parents. Gemma is a robotics engineer at a high-tech Seattle toy company, where she utilizes her expertise and company resources to build M3GAN, a child-sized lifelike doll powered by AI. But after Gemma gives Cady a M3GAN prototype, the doll begins to take on a life of its own with dire consequences.
Description: This supernatural thriller film takes place all on the evening of December 27, 1945, when five military veterans who have been best friends since childhood gather in the Park Slope, New York home of Clive “Hock” Hockstatter (Larry Fessenden) to support him in the wake of his wife’s suicide. But when Hock successfully convinces his friends to engage in an impromptu séance, the ghosts from their collective pasts become all too real.
Description:The Blackening is a horror comedy film that follows a group of seven friends on a weekend getaway trip to celebrate Juneteenth together. However, things begin going awry when they find and begin playing a racist board game called “The Blackening” that is being masterminded by a killer with a vendetta. With an unknown murderer trapped in their cabin with them, the friends must put their knowledge of horror movie tropes and collective street smarts to the test in order to make it out alive.
Description: This Australian supernatural horror has made a name for itself as one of A24’s highest grossing films, quickly becoming an international box office and critical success. Talk To Me revolves around a group of friends whose gatherings feature a severed, embalmed hand of unknown origins. They use the hand as the centerpiece in a high-stakes party game that allows a person to commune with a spirit from beyond the grave, but when 17-year-old Mia (Sophie Wilde) is stuck possessed for too long, a malevolent supernatural force wrecks havoc on their lives.
Description: Inspired by classic Disney theme park attraction, The Haunted Magic, this star-studded supernatural horror comedy follows a widowed doctor named Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) as she moves with her son, Travis (Chase W. Dillon), from New York to New Orleans’ Gracey Manor. There, they intend to open up a bed and breakfast but must put their plans on hold upon discovering that their new home is haunted by ghosts. In order to get their lives back on track, Gabbie and Travis recruit a miscellaneous assortment of supposed spiritual experts to exorcise the Manor of its supernatural squatters.
Description: Kaitlyn Dever does some major heavy lifting as she leads this mind-bending, almost dialogue-free Hulu Original sci-fi horror film about an alien invasion. Dever plays Brynn, an anxiety-ridden homebody who lives alone and is shunned by her town in the wake of her mother and best friend’s deaths. When she finds a humanoid alien intruding in her home, Brynn realizes she has a surprising aptitude for killing that may be her only defense against these powerful unearthly beings.
Description: This prequel to 2019 film Pet Sematary takes place 50 years before the events of that prior film and centers on a young Jud Crandall (Jackson White) in 1969. Jud has always dreamed of leaving his hometown of Ludlow, Maine and never looking back, but the discovery of evil spirits connected to his local cemetery leads him to hunker down in town to get to the bottom of these hidden haunts. With the help of his childhood friends, Jud embarks on a journey to uncover Ludlow’s most sinister secrets and confronts his own unsettling family history in the process.
Description:Totally Killer is a Prime Video Original dark comedy slasher film that sees the return of the infamous Sweet 16 Killer 35 years after his last three gruesome murders to claim a fourth victim. After 17-year-old Jamie Hughes (Kiernan Shipka) has her own brush with the masked killer, she accidentally travels back in time back to 1987, where she must deal with the challenges of fitting into an unfamiliar era, all while teaming up with her teenaged mother (Olivia Holt) to stop the stabbing psycho before it’s too late.
Description: For something more family-friendly this Halloween season, be sure to check on Monster High 2, a Paramount+ Original musical fantasy that acts as sequel to 2022 feature Monster High: The Movie. Clawdeen Wolf (Miia Harris), Draculaura (Nayah Damasen), and Frankie Stein (Ceci Balagot) are now sophomores at Monster High, ushering in a whole host of brand new relationships, powers, and enemies unlike anything they have experienced before. With both their friendship and the fate of the world hanging in the balance, the girls must overcomes their respective obstacles and come together in order to find themselves and save the day.
Description: This recently released supernatural horror acts as a sequel to 1973’s chilling Halloween classic The Exorcist, and continues the original film’s legacy of being utterly unsettling in the best way possible. After adolescent friends Angela (Lidya Jewett) and Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) disappear in the woods for three days after performing a séance, they both are found traumatized and showing signs of demonic possession.
Desperate to save his daughter, Angela’s single father, Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.), reaches out to Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) in hopes that her own experience with successfully exorcising her daughter Regan (Linda Blair) 50 years prior will be the key to saving these two young girls.
Description: Based on the popular video game franchise of the same name, Five Nights at Freddy’s is a soon-to-be-released supernatural horror movie led by Josh Hutcherson as troubled security guard Mike Schmidt. Mike accepts a gig working night-time security at the Chuck E. Cheese-like abandoned family entertainment center, Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, but soon realizes the job is more than he ever signed up for after discovering that its four animatronic mascots can move and murder at will after midnight.
Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
