In recent years, there has been a slew of excellent horror films that have graced our screens. These are terrifying tales that go beyond possession by demons and exorcisms. And there are times when the human mind proves to be more sinister than the terrifying beasts that terrorize the planet. Horror films have frequently served as a mirror to society’s ills and as a vehicle for metaphorical storytelling. We have compiled a selection of contemporary horrors whose tales explore not just monsters but also real-life concerns that can take over our lives. Some of the films on our list include heroes who are compelled to confront their inner demons while facing terrifying beasts. If you are not sure which horror film to start with, we have put together a list of thirteen recent monster movies that will give you nightmares for weeks.
Sweetheart (2019)
Sweetheart is the survival story of Jennifer Remming. Jennifer washes ashore a small island after her boat sinks during a storm. She comes across the grave and belongings of a family who once resided on the island. Her severely wounded friend Brad dies shortly after being washed ashore. She buries his corpse on the island only to find his grave uncovered the next morning, with a trail of blood leading to the Ocean. Jenn finds an ominous hole in the ocean floor while retrieving her newly surfaced luggage.
When Jenn uses a flare gun to flag down an airplane, it attracts the attention of a humanoid sea monster. Glimpses of the monster appear throughout the film before its confrontation with Jennifer. The monster with the amphibian face has the appearance of a mutated fish-like creature with a human-like body. The monster displays sensitivity to light but doesn’t seem to have enhanced hearing or seeing abilities.
The monster captures and wounds his prey with super strength and speed. The monster has an appetite for any living being and devours them with his sharp teeth. The monster stays under the sea and only hunts during the night because of his sensitivity towards light. Jenn comes up with a plan to catch and kill the gigantic monster while hiding from him for four days. When her friend Zack’s dismembered body washes ashore, she uses his corpse to bait the monster. When the monster notices her hammock, she narrowly escapes by stabbing him with a sharpened stick.
Her boyfriend Lucas and friend Mia finally arrive on a raft. When Jenn warns them of the danger on the island, they pay no heed and try to gaslight her. It doesn’t end well for them as they end up getting killed by the monster. Jenn manages to defeat the monster after luring him into a circle of fire. Jenn decapitates the monster’s corpse and carries his severed head as evidence of the tragedy on the island.
Her attempt to sail away on the raft fails and she ends up trapped on an island burning up in flames. Sweetheart is an engaging survival horror movie. It keeps you on the edge while Jenn hides from the monster and finally goes after it. The monster in Sweetheart is not only a source of nightmares but will also make you reconsider your next beach vacation.
The Silence (2019)
A cave research team meets a tragic fate after they unearth an unknown pterosaur-like species referred to as the Vespers. The Vespa are the main antagonists of The Silence. The creatures are highly sensitive and attracted to sound. They are blind but they hunt and kill other living creatures by finding the source of the sound. The teenager Ally Andrews is the protagonist of this apocalyptic survival horror. She lost her hearing because of a car accident and lives with her family. The U.S Government declares a state of emergency and instructs people to stay quiet and indoors as the outbreak of the Vesps continues to spread.
Ally’s family decides to move to the countryside thinking it’ll be quieter there. Ally’s family, along with her father’s friend Glenn set out on their journey after Glenn stacks up the car with his guns. Things begin to go wrong when a man tries to hijack their car, Glenn shoots the man in his leg and they drive away. They take the country route to avoid traffic but Glenn ends up hitting a herd of fleeing deer and crashes at the embankment.
He gets trapped in the car. When his friend Hugh and Kelly fail to save him he asks them to leave. The barking of their dog keeps attracting Vesps. Glenn fires his gun to distract the Vesps and gives up his life to save his friends. Hugh lets go of their dog to keep his family safe. They set off for the rest of their journey on foot after burning Glenn’s car as a decoy. When Ally’s cancer-ridden Grandmother begins to cough, it endangers the family.
They finally come across a high-fenced house with a locked gate. Unaware of the Vesp outbreak, the house owner begins to speak which leads to the Vesps ripping her apart. The family enters the house using a storm drain. Jude begins to yell at the sight of a rattlesnake, which attracts the Vesps and they bite Kelly’s leg. Hugh turns on a woodchipper to distract the Vesps, causing them to crush as they fly into it.
The danger intensifies when a cult arrives and attempts to recruit Ally. The cult members abduct Ally but her grandmother intervenes in time. She holds down the captors and begins to scream. It gives Ally the chance to escape as her Grandmother and the cult members get devoured by the Vesps. Weeks after their encounter with the cultists, the family arrives at a refugee camp. They are settled in a cold climate as the Vesps cannot survive in cold temperatures.
Adapted from the horror novel by Tim Lebbon, The Silence is the story of a family who protects each other at all costs. The story makes you wonder whether the cult members were more dangerous than the Vespa. What would happen if the Vesps learn to adapt to the cold climate before the humans learn to adapt to the silent life.
A Quiet Place 2 (2021)
A Quiet Place 2 opens the day the alien creatures arrived on Earth. It shows the Abbott family having a normal day as they enjoy a game of baseball. The game gets interrupted by a large meteor falling from the sky. Everyone begins to rush to their car and homes as the alien creatures begin their rampage and goes around killing people on the streets. The story jumps to where the first installment of A Quiet Place left off. Beau had been killed by the creatures and Lee Abbott had sacrificed himself to save his family from an alien creature. Evelyn prepares to leave the farm with her newborn child, Marcus, and Regan as their house gets flooded with water and catches on fire.
Evelyn heads back to the flooded cellar to grab an oxygen tank. Reagan leaves Marcus with the baby and she goes back to the house to grab the amplifier and microphone. She cuts a cord off the amplifier using her clipper. Evelyn and Regan carry the baby in a soundproof trunk covered with blankets. The oxygen tank feeds a baby respiratory mask to help close the trunk lid. A small sound is made when Evelyn’s bag gets caught attracting the attention of the alien creatures.
Marcus begins to scream as his foot gets injured by a bear trap. Regan uses the amplifier to create the sound which repels the alien creatures and Evelyn shoots the alien in his head. They run into an acquaintance who saves them from the alien creature lurking in the ceiling. He brings them to a soundproof vault underground. He informs them they cannot stay due to the shortage of food and water. They catch up and learn about the death of each other’s spouses. As the song “Across the sea” plays on a loop over the radio, it alerts the Abbott’s of other survivors.
Regan traces the origin of the signal to an island nearby. Regan leaves in search of the radio tower and ends up in a train filled with corpses. Evelyn convinces Emmett to look for Regan and protect her after discovering she has left. When Reagan’s scream alerts the alien creature of her presence, Emmet saves her by shooting at the creature. After Emmet and Regan arrive at the docks, they discover the creature’s inability to swim. They find a colony of survivors living on the island who were rescued by the government.
The Death Angels referred to as the creatures, are the antagonists of A Quiet Place. They are an alien species who arrived on Earth, possibly after the destruction of their home planet. They do not kill the humans to feed on them, they simply attack the source of the noise. They cannot see and rely on their ability to hear. They are incapable of tolerating sound as they can be repelled by creating sound frequencies. Their physical build makes them too heavy to be able to swim and they end up drowning. With the help of Regan, the humans can now decapitate the aliens but how long can they survive on an island without running out of supplies?
Beyond Skyline (2017)
Beyond Skyline takes place around the same time as the events of Skyline. Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Corley helps Trent, his estranged son out of jail as the aliens arrive to invade the planet. The blue light on the spaceships sucks the people of the city into the ship. Mark tries to help the survivors through underway subway tunnels to escape but they end up getting either killed or abducted. A homeless man named Sarge is immune to the attacks of the blue light as he is blind. Mark and Trent escape to the marina with Audrey and Sarge as the city gets destroyed in a nuclear attack. They end up getting abducted by a towering alien tanker into the alien flagship.
The aliens display the ability to hypnotize a host and feed or power up themselves. But a blind host is immune to their abilities. The aliens use their mouth-like orifices to eat their prey. The drone aliens are the only ones who have the power to transfix this way. The aliens can regenerate their lost tentacles at great speed. The hypnotizing light is likely to be an alien technology and not a part of their biological evolution. The blue light enhances the creatures who escape the initial hypnosis.
Prolonged exposure to the hypnotizing light can cause pregnant women to give birth to transformed beings. Mark comes across Elaine and her transformed husband Jarrod while he searches for Trent in the chambers. Jarrod had managed to retain control over his mind despite being modified into a weaponized soldier for the aliens. Elaine’s pregnancy gets accelerated due to her exposure to the alien technology and she dies giving birth to her daughter, after three months of being pregnant. Mark and Jarrod go up against the aliens.
Jarrod gets killed fighting the alien leader. Mark manages to save Audrey but it is too late for Trent to be saved. The aliens place his brain into a biomechanical machine creature. Jarrod had managed to destroy the alien ship in his dying moments, but his actions didn’t put an end to the nightmare. With the help of the DNA extracted from Elaine’s biologically evolved daughter, Harper the medical officer develops a serum to free the biomechanical soldiers from the alien’s influence.
After an intense battle scene between the survivors and the aliens, Mark manages to restore Trent’s mind. Trent proceeds to kill the alien leader and frees the other biomechanical soldiers from the aliens’ influence. Beyond Skyline is one of the movies which needs to be experienced in a theatre. The possibility of Earth getting invaded by a superior alien species is a likely scenario and the idea is often explored in Hollywood movies. The aliens from the Skyline franchise are not only technologically evolved, but they are out for blood as well.
Sputnik (2020)
An orbital mission for Russian cosmonauts goes wrong when their spaceship bumps into alien creatures. The spacecraft malfunctions and crashes land on Kazakhstan while reentering the orbit. Only Konstantinos survives the crash and gets taken into an isolated military facility. Dr. Tatyana Klimova is brought in to examine Konstantin. She was under review for her controversial approaches which made her the perfect fit for the mission. She was kept in the dark about the real reason behind Konstantin’s quarantine but she ends up making an unsettling discovery. She learns that an extraterrestrial life form has latched onto the cosmonaut and he is blissfully unaware of it.
She is horrified to learn that the creature survives on human flesh and the military needs her help to weaponize the creature. Sputnik is set during 1983 when the Cold War had started heating up. The rivalry between the US and USSR has always been an interesting topic explored by Hollywood and Sputnik gives us a glimpse of the Russian side of the narrative. Dr. Tatyana tries to make Konstantin aware of the creature using his body as a host, only to realize he might have known about it all along.
Konstantin and the creature develop a symbiotic bond and with time they get more codependent on the other. When Dr. Tatyana accuses Konstantin of being a coward and running away from his responsibilities towards his son, it stresses him out. She discovers that Konstantin’s hormone levels affect the creature. Tatyana and Konstantin come up with a plan to escape the facilities. She suggests injecting Konstantin with the disease of his fellow cosmonaut as it would likely eject the creature out of his body. They get ambushed by the guards while trying to escape. Konstantin asks for the syringe after Tatyana ends up injured.
After injecting the serum, the creature jumps out of Konstantin’s body and begins to attack the guards. It is too before Tatyana realizes that Konstantin and the creature cannot survive without each other. Tatyana escapes the facilities and Konstantin kills himself to put an end to the terrors of the creature. Sputnik is a science-fiction horror with a refreshing take. The idea of an alien parasite using your body as the host is a terrifying thought. Even though Sputnik is more of science fiction than horror, the alien creature provides its fair share of scares.
The Wretched (2019)
Back in 1985, when Megan arrives at the Gambel’s home to babysit, she is terrified to see a monstrous creature feeding off the baby. She fails to escape as Mr. Gambel shuts the door on her. A mysterious sign appears on the door. In the present day, Ben Shaw moves in with his father after his parents separate. Ben begins to work at the marina and befriends Mallory. Abbie’s son Dillion comes across a tree, bearing the same symbol as the one on the Gambel’s door. He hears Abbie’s voice coming from the tree and Abbie appears before him.
They hit a buck on the road and bring it home. Something sinister crawls out of the buck’s corpse later that night. Following the strange noises he heard on the roof, Ben ends up at Abbie’s house and finds an animal. He catches a brief glimpse of a witch on the porch but it goes away when Abbie’s husband Ty turns on the porch light. Ben befriends his neighbor’s son Dillion and asks him to share with him if anything strange happens around his house. When Abbie goes to check on her newborn baby, she discovers that her baby has been replaced by a bundle of sticks. The witch attacks Abbie and Ben witnesses her wandering into the forest with a child.
Dillion begins to notice that his mother is behaving differently and begins to get afraid of her. Ty dismisses Dillion’s claims, but worries about his wife. Ben gets worried when Dillion doesn’t show up for his sailing lesson. He goes to his neighbor’s house to check up on him only to discover that his parents have forgotten about his existence. Ben’s suspicions lead him to discover a witch known for feeding on the forgotten and possessing people. The witch referred to as the Dark Mother does more than just kill and eat children.
She devours the entire family in the process. She is born of roots, rock, and trees and her presence drains the life out of nearby flowers and vegetation. The witch goes around possessing Ben’s neighbors and friends and they begin to forget about the existence of their family members. The witch’s powers in the film are not fully explained but she doesn’t erase Dillion or Mallory’s sister from Ben’s memory. In an unexpected twist, Ben’s brother turns up whom Ben seems to have forgotten about. The Witch’s powers contradict themselves throughout the movie but it adds to the eerie atmosphere and works out in the film’s favor.
The Ritual (2017)
The Ritual opens with a group of friends planning a hiking trip to Sweden. A few moments later, two of them Luke and Rob leave to get more alcohol but they get held up by a robber. The thief ends up killing Rob as Luke continues to hide from them. The remaining friends set off on their trip six months after the tragic incident in memory of Rob. After Dom injures his knee, Hutch suggests taking a shortcut through the forest. The worst is to come after the group enters the forest when they begin noticing strange things. They come across a gutted elk hanging from several branches, and strange symbols carved on the trees surrounding them.
They seek shelter in an abandoned cabin to wait out a torrential rainstorm. The cabin is filled with strange symbols, statues made of twigs, dismembered human carcasses with antlers for hands. The group wakes up to find Luke’s chest bleeding from strange puncture wounds. The whole group gets haunted by nightmares and Luke continues to have recurring dreams about the robbery. The group gets awakened from their slumber after hearing Phil scream. They split and search for Phil after finding his tent empty and partially collapsed.
One by one the friends from the group begin to die. Hutch gets gutted and impaled and Phil gets dragged away by a mysterious creature stalking the group from the shadows. The surviving members encounter a cult worshiping Moder, the illegitimate offspring of Loki. When someone is marked, they are given a chance to submit to Moder or get killed. The unmarked members were offered to Moder as a sacrifice for blessing her followers with eternal life. Luke was brought before Moder by the cult members but he manages to escape.
Enraged by her followers’ incompetence, Moder kills every single one of them. She is unable to follow Luke out of the forest as she is trapped inside the boundaries. Luke ends up as the sole survivor amongst his friends after the un-fateful trip. Moder is kind to her follower unless they prove to be incompetent or anger her in other ways. Adapted from the novel of Adam Nevill, The Ritual is the story about a vacation where everything goes wrong, in a bloody and disgusting way.
The Thing (2011)
An alien spaceship is discovered buried in Antarctica in the winter of 1982. The discovery leads to more scientists arriving at the scene to examine alien technology. When the group of scientists comes across an alien body buried in the ice nearby, they decide to excavate it. When the excavated box of ice begins to melt in storage, Jameson witnesses the alien bursting from ice while the team is busy celebrating their discovery. The team finds the dead body of Lars’s dog while searching for the creature.
When the alien is found, he drags Henrik into himself and ends up killing him. Olav ends up getting drenched by the splattered blood. A metal implant of Henrik is found outside his body during the autopsy. While the alien copies Henrik’s cell, Olav began to fall ill. When Olav departs with the helicopter crew for McMurdo, Kate discovers the remains of his dental fillings in a bloodied shower. After Kate tries to flag down the helicopter, Griggs transforms into a monstrous creature and attacks Olav.
It causes the helicopter to lose control and crash on the mountains. Set a year prior to the events of John Carpenter’s movie, The Thing is the prequel to the 1982 film. Though both of them follow a similar storyline, the prequel offers new information about the alien creature. It is Kate who discovers that the creature has the ability to clone his victims, but he cannot regenerate metal, leaving out anyone with dental implants as a suspect for being the imposter. The creature displays signs of his superior intelligence throughout the movie. He probably would have gotten away with imitating his victims if it not for its inability to regenerate metal.
It not only imitates their appearance but also their voice and personality. It observes his surroundings before deciding his next step and goes out of control mostly when he gets discovered. The horror of The Thing lies not only in the monstrous creature but its ability to mimic others. No one ever discovers who the creature is passing off as. The isolation and the paranoia caused by the creature are what makes the movie truly scary.
Krampus (2015)
Based on the Alpine folklore of a demonic Santa’s helper who goes around punishing the naughty kids, Krampus is a Christmas-themed Horror-Comedy. When Max Engel begins to lose his Christmas spirit after being mocked by his cousins for believing in Santa, a blizzard begins to engulf the town. The gigantic horned creature goes around abducting kids. The creature captures by leaving Beth a Jack-in-box which attacks her. As the Engel family searches for a missing Beth, they find her boyfriend’s home vandalized and large goat-like hoof prints left behind the scene. Tom and Howard get attacked by an unseen monster under the snow.
The duo rushes to their home and closes the windows. But that is not enough to escape the terror as the Christmas ornaments now begin to come to life. A living gingerbread man uses his hook to lure Howie Jr to the chimney and drags him up there as the family watches in horror. Omi realizes that the entity they are dealing with is Krampus. He is an ancient demonic spirit known for punishing those who have lost their Christmas spirit. According to Alpine folklore, Krampus scares the kids on the naughty list during Christmas.
He leaves behind punishment and birch rods instead of gifts for the kids who didn’t behave well all year round. The family gets skeptical of Omi’s theory until monstrous toys begin to invade their house. After losing Stevie, Jordan, Dorothy, and Chrissie to Krampus, the family decides to seek shelter in an abandoned snowplow. Krampus continues to terrorize the family until Max apologizes for losing his Christmas spirit. Krampus resets the day to the morning after the disaster but leaves behind the memories of the disaster for many Christmases to come.
Love and Monsters 2020
The chemical fallout from an asteroid headed for earth causes the cold-blooded animals on the planet to mutate into large monsters who stomp around killing humans. While the town is being evacuated, Joel has to separate from his girlfriend Aimee, whom he promises to search for later on. Moments after their separation, Joel’s parents get killed in the monster rampage. Seven years have passed since the monsters took over and Joel now resides in the underground bunker with some of the other survivors.
The loneliness begins to get to Joel as the other survivors in his bunker seem to have paired up with a romantic partner. Joel mostly ended up with kitchen duty because he tended to freeze up during dangerous situations. When Joel’s friend Connor ends up dead after their colony gets attacked by a giant ant, it motivates Joel to set out on a journey to reunite with Aimee. He had recently reconnected with her over the radio. His bunkmates were scared for his safety but they let him go after presenting him with weapons. On his way, Joel gets attacked by a Toad Monster, but he is saved by a dog named Boy.
The boy begins to follow Joel on his journey and keeps him safe by warning him of poisonous berries and other dangers. Clive and Minnow rescue Joel from the sand gobblers and teach him the survival skills he requires to defend himself against the monsters. They teach him that not all of the monsters are hostile, and you can tell by looking them in the eye. After setting off to meet Aimee, Boy gets trapped by a giant centipede monster, Joel initially freezes but he manages to save Boy with his crossbow. As the title suggests, Love and Monsters is the story of a boy hoping to reunite with his first love, but he must fight and survive the monsters to get to her. Joel encounters various monsters on his way to Aimee. Despite being light-hearted in nature, the monstrous animals do pack enough scares to keep you on the edge of your seat.
Holidays (2016)
Holidays is an American horror anthology consisting of several short horror films, all of them revolving around a different holiday. The first installment in the anthology is Valentine’s Day. A story about a high school student in love with her coach. Maxine is often bullied by Heidi. She nearly drowns after being pushed off the diving board but gets rescued by her coach. After Maxine discovers that he is suffering from an illness, she organizes a fundraiser for his treatment. The coach leaves a letter in Maxine’s locker to show his appreciation for all that she has done for him. Maxine gets so euphoric after reading the letter that she stalks and chases Heidi into a creek and kills her, instead of simply standing up to her. The coach gets horrified when Maxine turns up at his doorstep with Heidi’s severed head.
In Easter, the third installment of the anthology is the story of a little girl who’s afraid of the Easter Bunny. The mother tells her of the Easter Bunny’s connection to Jesus to ease her fears and manages to tuck her in her bed. After getting up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water, she witnesses a crucified Easter Bunny leaving chicks and candies in the living room. The little girl is forced to take the Easter Bunny’s place as she was not supposed to see him. Holidays is filled with creepy as well as light-hearted horror stories. The St. Patrick’s Day installment is full of gore as Elizabeth Cullen gives birth to a reptile-like creature. Not all of the stories have a paranormal entity acting as the antagonist, some of them just consist of humans doing terrible things to each other, as shown in the Valentine’s Day story.
Sinister (2012)
Sinister revolves around Ellison Oswald, the true-crime writer who just moved into a new house with his family. Their new house is a precious crime scene, where a whole family was slaughtered and their daughter Stephanie had disappeared. Ellison wanted to use the tragedy as an inspiration for his next book and figure out the whereabouts of Stephanie. Ellison comes across a box of home movies in the attic, and all of them depict the murders of various families. While investigating the noise in his attic, he finds childlike drawings predicting the murders and a mysterious Mr. Boogie standing next to the victims.
Ellison hands over the tapes to the police for investigation and consults an occult professor to decipher the symbols appearing in the tapes. Ellison learns of Bughuul, a pagan deity who slaughters entire families and takes one of the children to consume their soul. The professor suspects that videos show some kind of initiation ritual for Bughuul. The investigation reveals that the tapes have been recorded all over the country and all of them have been residents of the house Ellison is staying in.
The haunting only began once the families moved out of that house. Intrigued, Ellison decides to move out of the house, and in doing so he puts his family in grave danger. Bughuul manipulates children into murdering their families and then takes them away to consume their souls. He also makes the children record them murdering their families and there are about six of these films, the first one being from 1966. The films often begin with the families having a good time until things get dark and everyone gets killed by the child controlled by Bughuul. Moving into a new house is a common trope over-explored in horror movies but the haunting of Bughuul commences once you move out of it.
Annihilation (2018)
Lena gets questioned after returning as the sole survivor from an expedition of “the shimmer”. The shimmer had emerged from a meteorite that landed inside a lighthouse three years prior. Lena’s husband Kane, a member of the previous expedition, had been missing for a year. After finally returning home, he is unable to explain the circumstances of his disappearance. His health begins to deteriorate and he gets sent to the hospital. His doctor informs Lena that the answer to his condition and treatment is lying in the shimmer. She informs Lena that many exploratory teams have been dispatched to the shimmer over the years but Kane is the only one who has returned. She prepares a new scientific expedition into the shimmer and the team consists of Lena, Josie, Cassie, Anya, and Ventress.
Lena gets a vision of Kane having an affair with a colleague before leaving as soon as the team enters the shimmer. The group wakes up with no memory of what has happened for the past four days and their equipment is no longer functional. The shimmer is full of mutated plants and animals. An albino alligator with shark-like teeth attacks Josie but she manages to survive the attack. The team stumbles upon a tape from Kane’s mission which shows one of the soldiers with mutated organs while undergoing surgery.
The team continues to get attacked by mutated animals but things get a lot worse. The shimmer had driven Kane mad and eventually, he ended up taking his own life. It was his mirror self who had escaped the shimmer. Lena goes through a similar struggle with her mirror self. The team discovers plants that have taken up human-like forms and Josie theorizes that the shimmer functions as a prism for any kind of information including DNA.
They discover that all of them have begun to mutate. Ventress makes it her life’s mission to learn the truth behind the shimmer and leaves for the lighthouse. Josie and Lena discover that the shimmer’s refractions are already in their bodies. Lena comes across the tape of Kane’s suicide. When the two finally reunite, neither of them is sure about their own identity. Adapted from Jeff VanderMeer’s novel of the same name, Annihilation not only keeps you guessing about what happens next, but it also sends your brain into an override trying to figure out the mysteries of the shimmer.