Gothic horror was my starting point in the genre: reading Poe as a kid, attempting to read Byron’s poetry, and becoming lost in dimly lit movies full of monsters, eerie castles, and tortured townsfolk. Of course, that definition of Gothic horror began to include other elements, exploring religious paranoia and folk cultures with pagan-like religions. These stories always feature a general fear that is hard to pinpoint, but you know it when you see it. My younger years were filled with obsessions with films like Alucarda, The Wicker Man, Coffin Joe’s films, Black Sunday, and so on.
While I love this genre, I also comprehend its complexity. I would argue that the genre’s best years predate the 21st century, but there are still many directors excelling in Gothic horror and finding ways to push the genre forward. Ultimately, choosing 12 (with some honorable mentions) was an arduous task, let alone ranking. There were just so many phenomenal mainstream hits, foreign films, and indie gems deserving of discussion. For this list, I picked the movies that have received critical acclaim, along with some of my personal favorites, to offer up the greatest Gothic horror movies of the 21st century (so far).
Honorable Mentions
- Stoker (2013): India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) starts uncovering exactly what her Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) really is after her father’s death. While Park Chan-wook’s first English-language film is gorgeous and chilling, it would be too much of a stretch to consider it a horror film.
- The Devil’s Bath (2024): Agnes (Anja Plaschg) spirals into a religious melancholy so severe it curdles into something monstrous. Based on real 18th-century church records, this is a bleak and brilliant film.
- The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015): Boarding school students Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton) are left behind over a break and become hypnotized by a demonic force. Osgood Perkins’ patient debut might be a little slow for some, but it’s worth watching.
- The Vourdalak (2023): Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfé (Kacey Mottet Klein) takes shelter with a family whose patriarch, Gorcha, returns from war undead and hungry. It’s a vampire movie with a fresh, original style.
- The Devil’s Backbone (2001): Orphan Carlos (Fernando Tielve) arrives at a haunted boys’ home run by the sinister Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega). Guillermo del Toro made the film over a decade before and at a fraction of the budget of Crimson Peak. While it set the template for a lot of modern Gothic horror, and you should watch it, it’s not as good as that one.
Why You Should Trust Me: Having written about film for over a decade, I have focused on and am an expert on the horror genre, including indie and international cinema alongside mainstream and cult classics. As a writer at MovieWeb, one of my focuses has been highlighting horror films.
‘Jug Face’ (2013)
A Hole in the Ground Runs This Whole Town
IMDb: 5.3/10 | Letterboxd: 2.8/5
There’s a pit of red clay at the center of Jug Face that the entire community answers to. The pit speaks through a simple-minded potter, who creates the vision of the next sacrifice to keep their god happy. Ada (Lauren Ashley Carter) is pregnant, unmarried, and next on the list. The young woman struggles with her fate, and weighs leaving against the conviction that her doing so would spell doom for the rest of her family.
The film trades fear of the church for a hole in the ground, and director Chad Crawford Kinkle brings the Southern Gothic to life in his micro-budgeted story of family superstitions and sacrifices. The story centers on Ada, whose plight hits all the beats of unease and paranoia you would expect. The climax here is haunting. The film’s simple, direct approach and unique premise make this one easy to recommend.
‘Possum’ (2018)
The Puppet He Can’t Bury
IMDb: 5.8/10 | Letterboxd: 3.1/5
In Possum, Philip (Sean Harris) returns to the decaying house he grew up in, bringing with him an artifact that haunts him: a cast of his head that rests on a spider-like body. It seems bound to him no matter how he tries to get rid of it — burning it, drowning it, dumping it in a pond — it keeps reappearing. Philip is also tormented by his abusive Uncle Maurice (Alun Armstrong) with the past and stories of the “Possum.”
Folk horror movies and Gothic horror often go hand in hand, and since Possum leans heavily on family trauma, paranoia, and decayed spaces, the film illustrates this combination well. It’s a perfect slow burn, with the macabre vision of the creation haunting Philip, which escalates to generally terrifying moments featuring a creature design rooted in a dark, Gothic aesthetic. The film has some gorgeous shots that meld terror and decay (both mental and material) flawlessly.
‘The Woman in Black’ (2012)
Textbook English Gothic
IMDb: 6.4/10 | Letterboxd: 2.9/5
Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe), a young lawyer still grieving his wife’s death, is sent to settle a deceased client’s estate at Eel Marsh House. It’s a remote property cut off during the mainland’s high tide. He learns about a vengeful spirit that appears before a child dies. With his family at home, Arthur decides to solve the mystery behind The Woman in Black.
I went back and forth on where to place this one. The movie, which happened to be Radcliffe’s first major role after Harry Potter, is ideal for those looking for Gothic horror. It has a faintly lit mansion, Victorian fashion, and a phantom always hovering in the background rather than being an active menace. It’s all atmosphere, no jump scares. However, the 1989 BBC TV movie The Woman in Black is the essential adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel and a personal favorite of mine. Still, since I chose 21st-century cinema for this list, I had to include the 2012 adaptation.
‘Rampo Noir’ (2005)
Tales from Japan’s Edgar Allan Poe
IMDb: 6.2/10 | Letterboxd: 3.4/5
Rampo Noir brings together some of Japan’s most boundary-pushing and inventive directors to celebrate the work of the author Edogawa Rampo, who got his pen name from Edgar Allan Poe. While the two told several stylistically comparable tales of the macabre, Rampo told some particularly memorable stories that have had many Japanese film adaptations.
The cast is phenomenal too, headlined by Tadanobu Asano as the recurring detective Kogoro Akechi, who has since built a major international career. Each short varies in style and visuals, but all of them embrace that dark storytelling, often accompanied by motifs of love, death, mystery, and horror, with an emphasis on creating an atmospheric viewing experience. Some of the shots here are utterly gorgeous and lean into the more romantic side of the genre. Consider this a proper introduction to Japanese Gothic film and fiction; it’s certainly worth checking out.
‘Hokum’ (2026)
A Haunted Hotel With a Body Already in It
IMDb: 6.7/10 | Letterboxd: 3.3/5
Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott), a novelist struggling with writing a book, checks into a remote Irish hotel to scatter his parents’ ashes. Ohm finds himself charmed by the hotel’s bartender, Fiona (Florence Ordesh). Feeling indebted, Ohm becomes involved when she disappears, which eventually leads him to being trapped in the room with her dead body and a malicious spirit.
Director Damian McCarthy built his reputation on dark Gothic folk horror with Caveat and Oddity (both of which are also worth a watch), turning cursed objects and blind faith into real dread. Hokum feels like the culmination of his work, as he was given a bigger budget to create a visually oppressive environment that hides a sinister figure. While this is the most recent movie I have included here, I would bet on it holding up. The reveal of what caused the paranormal events makes for one of the most bone-chilling scenes ever committed to film.
‘A Tale of Two Sisters’ (2003)
The House Remembers What the Family Won’t Say
IMDb: 7.1/10 | Letterboxd: 3.7/5
Su-mi (Im Soo-jung) comes home from a psychiatric stay with her younger sister Su-yeon (Moon Geun-young) in tow. However, it’s not a happy return as the two find themselves under the thumb of their father’s new wife, the increasingly unhinged Eun-joo (Yeom Jeong-ah). What starts as ordinary domestic tension curdles fast into something even more sinister and haunting.
Kim Jee-woon structures A Tale of Two Sisters around a brutal, devastating rug pull, and it’s one of the best-executed twists in all of horror; it doesn’t feel forced or predictable. This classic Korean movie features a slow build of an atmosphere of dread that feels somber and tragic, right in line with Gothic horror’s greats.
‘The Orphanage’ (2007)
A Dark Game and a Hopeless Mother
IMDb: 7.4/10 | Letterboxd: 3.6/5
In The Orphanage, Laura (Belén Rueda) wants to run the orphanage she grew up in as a home for disabled children alongside her adopted son, Simón. While Simón plays a harmless game with invisible friends soon after they move in, the game becomes deadly when Simón vanishes. Laura embarks on a desperate search that unearths secrets of the place’s past.
From producer Guillermo del Toro and director J.A. Bayona, The Orphanage shares Del Toro’s fascination with childhood grief told through a ghost story. The film earns its scares in the traditional Gothic horror fashion through slow-building dread behind real emotional stakes. The utterly devastating ending features a blend of shock and sorrow that still hits hard almost 20 years after the film’s debut. This is the rare horror movie that will make you cry as hard as it makes you feel tense.
‘November’ (2017)
Souls as a Bargaining Tool
IMDb: 7.1/10 | Letterboxd: 3.8/5
The locals of Rainer Sarnet’s November barter with the Devil to obtain kratts, bizarre scrap-made creatures made of household objects that steal from other farms. The story focuses on one member of the family, Liina (Rea Lest), who loves Hans (Jörgen Liik), who is fixated instead on visiting a Baroness who sleepwalks through the woods. A love triangle plays out against a backdrop of black magic.
Shot in stark black and white and adapted from Andrus Kivirähk’s novel Rehepapp, November is the most purely folkloric and the least accessible film on the list. It opens with a skull-topped kratt spinning its scythe blades like helicopter rotors to airlift a stolen cow to another farm. While November is certainly an odd film, it offers Gothic horror stripped down to something more primal and darker than a haunted mansion. The feature is visually sharp, wonderfully bizarre, and radiates Gothic vibes; beneath its more surreal moments there is a solid story exploring religion, family, and superstition. This is a must-watch you have likely overlooked.
‘The Others’ (2001)
A Fog-Bound House Full of Rules
IMDb: 7.6/10 | Letterboxd: 3.8/5
Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman) raises her two children in near-total darkness inside a fog-shrouded mansion, enforcing a strict set of rules around light because of a rare photosensitivity condition. When new servants, led by the watchful Mrs. Mills (Fionnula Flanagan), arrive to replace the previous staff who disappeared, supernatural presences start making themselves known throughout the house.
Alejandro Amenábar wrote, directed, and scored the film himself, and that level of control shows in the story’s tight construction toward its now-famous reveal. Kidman gives one of her best performances as a woman clinging to rigid order in an attempt to save her family from a horror she doesn’t even quite grasp herself. The Others rewards a rewatch; it’s twist-driven horror at its best.
‘The Lighthouse’ (2019)
“Why’d Ye Spill Yer Beans”
IMDb: 7.4/10 | Letterboxd: 4/5
In The Lighthouse, Wickies Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) and Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) are stationed alone on a remote New England island in the 1890s. The two endure four weeks of isolation and bad weather, as their relationship becomes something closer to a myth torn from the pages of classic, Gothic fiction.
Shot on 35mm in a boxy, near-square aspect ratio, the film gets progressively suffocating the longer the two men are stuck together. Robert Eggers’ writing here is impeccable, and Dafoe and Pattinson fully commit to the role. Dafoe, in particular, brings an eccentric menace to his character. The gradual descent into madness and myth is as Gothic as anything else on this list. For my money, this remains Eggers’ best work, even if he has another film higher up on this list that hits those Gothic horror vibes much better.
