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Two surprise box office hits have officially turned 2026 into a glorious year for horror cinema. Young filmmakers Curry Barker and Kane Parsons delivered two great horror movies, Obsession and Backrooms, that are making waves in modern cinema. Made on a small budget, both these movies have garnered north of $200 million at the box office.
Obsession‘s $287 million (via Box Office Mojo, as of June 16, 2026) box office is marked by a rare box office achievement in its second and third weekends, which saw a very minimal drop in numbers. Parsons’s YouTube series-turned-movie has earned $262.5 million so far (via The Numbers, as of June 16, 2026), becoming A24’s highest-grossing film to date. With such enormous successes, the audiences look forward to the upcoming releases in the genre. Here are the 10 highly anticipated horror releases in 2026, listed in order of their release dates.
Evil Dead Burn is the sixth installment in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead film series. It is the third standalone entry after 2013’s Evil Dead and 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, and promises to be the scariest of the three. Sébastien Vaniček, who helmed the critically acclaimed French horror movie Vermines (Infested), is directing the new installment. The director’s arthouse debut is exactly the kind of credibility that turned Parsons and Barker into recognizable names.
Souheila Yacoub leads the cast, with supporting performances from Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan, Tandi Wright, and George Pullar. From the short teaser, it appears that the movie will be a demonic mayhem. According to the synopsis, the movie follows a widow seeking solace with her in-laws when the Deadites unleash carnage on this family.
Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson‘s slasher film arrives in theaters after winning the Queer Palm award at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. Einbinder plays a queer filmmaker who is tasked with directing a reboot of the Camp Miasma franchise. Her character gets drawn to Gillian Anderson’s Billy Preston, a reclusive former actress who played the final girl in the original film.
Director Jane Schoenbrun is a fan of the slasher genre, and described the film’s concept as Portrait of a Lady on Fire set in a Friday the 13th sequel (via Filmstage). This movie shares the most DNA with this year’s surprise hits: an indie director behind it, reinventing genre tropes, and festival success. In our review of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Sean Boelman of FW called it “a fun ode to slasher cinema” that is “both enjoyable and thought-provoking.”
The man behind Cabin Fever, Hostel, and Thanksgiving returns with another bone-chilling horror movie. Eli Roth‘s Ice Cream Man doesn’t hold back as it turns innocent children into something terrifying. In the movie, Ari Millen’s mysterious ice cream man serves the children of a suburban town with ice cream that turns them into homicidal maniacs.
The trailer puts it as Roth’s most terrifying and insane film to date, with plenty of gore shown in it. YouTube has age-restricted the trailer, suggesting the violence is too much to handle. If the notoriety converts to dare-each-other-to-see-it word of mouth like Obsession, this movie is set to become a major hit. Nevertheless, the movie is getting released across 2000 theaters on August 7 under Roth’s The Horror Section banner.
Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor lead this survival thriller, where a family with unresolved internal conflicts is thrown into a prehistoric landscape after a cosmic event hits their neighborhood, forced to set aside their issues to survive predators that see them as prey. David Robert Mitchell, who helmed It Follows and Under the Silver Lake, is the director.
Mitchell’s previous movies ride on fear built from mood and concept rather than gore. The style and theme of his current film are somewhat close to Backrooms, but it has the added advantage of two star leads. Maisy Stella, Christian Convery, Jordan Alexa Davis, P. J. Byrne, and Chris Coy play supporting roles in The End of Oak Street. J.J. Abrams serves as a producer of the movie. It is coming to theaters on August 14, 2026. While it’s more of a survival thriller, it does have horror elements.
Insidious: Out of the Further is the latest installment in the Insidious franchise, directed by Jacob Chase and starring Amelia Eve, Brandon Perea, and Maisie Richardson-Sellers. Lin Shaye reprises her role from the previous installments as Elise Rainier. A young mother, Gemma, discovers she can travel into the purgatorial realm of lost souls, and learns she can also drag its demons back into the world of the living.
The trailer suggests that the movie could be the scariest installment in the franchise yet. Insidious has always been a low-budget, high-multiple franchise. It is the same lean economics behind Backrooms and Obsession, though this one comes from a proven brand instead of a new one. The movie will be out in theaters on August 21, 2026.
After the breakout success of Barbarian and Weapons, Zach Cregger tries his hand at a much-established horror IP. The video game series, Resident Evil, still has more fandom than the billion-dollar-grossing movie franchise. An attempt at rebooting the franchise failed earlier, so all eyes are on Cregger for reinventing this long-forgotten film franchise.
Austin Abrams anchors the new era of the franchise, playing a medical courier, Bryan, who is stranded in Raccoon City, where he fights against a viral outbreak of infected monsters. The movie also stars Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, Johnno Wilson, and Paul Walter Hauser. Cregger’s beginnings in the genre are similar to both Barker and Parsons. So, this is what the future probably looks like for these young indie auteurs.
Rob Savage’s new supernatural horror thriller adapts Josh Malerman’s 2024 novel, Incidents Around the House. James Wan backs this movie as a producer alongside Blumhouse, and Jessica Chastain takes on the lead role, which makes this thriller a highly anticipated horror outing in 2026.
In the movie, a paranormal entity known as the Other Mommy starts haunting the home of Chastain’s character, Ursula. Chastain’s terrifying role will be a standout element. Originally set for May, it was pushed to October. Wan and Blumhouse also backed Backrooms and Obsession, respectively, so their involvement in this flick is crucial to its theatrical success.
When DC Studios co-CEO Peter Safran appeared at CinemaCon, he called Clayface a “riveting horror-thriller.” The movie explores the origin story of the Batman villain. Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt Hagen, an actor disfigured in a horrible accident and experimented on by Naomi Ackie’s scientist until his body becomes living clay. Here is the trailer for the movie.
Carrying the tagline, “Look fear in the face,” it is pitched as a body horror movie, following in the footsteps of Demi Moore’s The Substance and McKenna Grace’s Slanted. Even Backrooms, with its deformed humanoid monster Lifeform, proves the appetite for body-warping horror. The involvement of Speak No Evil director James Watkins at the helm also excites horror genre fans. It is slated for a Halloween release on October 23, 2026.
Return of the Living Dead takes us back to the root of the horror film franchise. The sixth installment in the franchise is set in 1985 as a sequel to the original film, The Return of the Living Dead. According to the official synopsis, the movie takes place 18 months after the events of the original, when a new Trioxin 2-4-5 leak puts a small town on the verge of a zombie outbreak during Christmas.
True to the franchise’s satirical take on the zombie apocalypse horror genre, it’s expected to blend horror with comedy. This tone gives it a lane all its own in a season otherwise stacked with straight-faced scares. Moreover, it is an indie-scale revival with a low-budget structure, the exact formula that made Obsession and Backrooms a major hit. Steve Wolsh writes and directs, with Devon Sawa, Casimere Jollette, Kynlee Heiman, and Alexander Ward starring.
As the name suggests, Robert Eggers tackles werewolves in his next horror movie after the critically acclaimed hit, Nosferatu. He co-wrote the movie with Sjón, who previously worked with him on The Northman. Eggers’ unique take on the genre is enough for us to get excited about the new movie, which is set in 13th-century England.
In Werwulf, a mysterious creature from a local folklore becomes a real nightmare for the villagers. Aaron Taylor-Johnson leads the cast as the titular Werwulf. This prestige-horror entry is most likely to rival recent breakouts as Eggers’s movies usually have the same critic-plus-crowd alignment that carried these box office hits this year.
Which of these movies are you excited to catch in theaters? Let us know in the comments below!
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Hashim Asraff is a Senior Entertainment Writer at FandomWire with more than 2.5 years of experience in the industry. He has published over 3,600 articles on celebrity culture, comic book movies, and major TV franchises. With a background in Sociology and a keen interest in pop culture, Hashim brings a unique lens to breaking news stories, character deep-dives, film rankings, and fan-driven perspectives.
His coverage often includes the MCU, DCU, hit network shows, and celebrity profiles, giving readers a rich blend of entertainment and analysis. A longtime fan of crime and investigative series, Hashim has watched thousands of episodes of NCIS, Criminal Minds, Law & Order: SVU, Bones, Blue Bloods, and The Rookie
A passionate storyteller and wordsmith, Hashim has also worked as a ghostwriter and managed multiple social media handles. He brought his writing expertise to FandomWire to also pursue his lifelong love for cinema and television.
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