Of course! Here is an article about the top 15 most underrated horror movies of the 21st century.
Screams You Might Have Missed: The 15 Most Underrated Horror Movies of the 21st Century
We live in a golden age of horror. Auteur directors like Jordan Peele and Ari Aster have become household names, and franchises like The Conjuring and A Quiet Place dominate the box office. But for every mainstream hit that has audiences screaming in unison, there are dozens of smaller, stranger, and often more terrifying films that slip through the cracks.
These are the movies that didn’t have massive marketing budgets or wide theatrical releases. They are the slow-burns, the foreign gems, the genre-bending oddities, and the straight-to-streaming masterpieces that deserve a much wider audience. They are the underrated.
If you’re ready to dig deeper than the multiplex offerings, here are 15 of the most criminally overlooked horror films of the 21st century that will haunt you long after the credits roll.
15. Splinter (2008)
A road trip goes horribly wrong when a young couple and an escaped convict are forced to take refuge in an abandoned gas station. The threat? A parasitic, crystalline creature that reanimates its victims piece by agonizing piece. Splinter is a masterclass in low-budget creature-feature filmmaking, with incredible practical effects, relentless pacing, and a raw, desperate energy that makes it feel terrifyingly real.
14. The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)
A father-son coroner team (Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch) receives the body of an unidentified young woman. As they begin their examination, they uncover increasingly bizarre and unexplainable clues, realizing that Jane Doe’s secrets are far more dangerous than they could ever imagine. Confined almost entirely to a single location, the film builds an unbearable sense of claustrophobic dread.
13. As Above, So Below (2014)
Often dismissed as just another found-footage flick, this film is one of the most creative and ambitious entries in the subgenre. A team of explorers ventures into the Catacombs beneath Paris in search of the Philosopher’s Stone, only to find themselves trapped in a literal and psychological hell of their own making. It’s an intelligent, historical, and genuinely terrifying descent into madness.
12. The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015)
From director Osgood Perkins (son of Anthony Perkins), this is a film of pure, unadulterated atmosphere. Two students are left behind at their Catholic boarding school during winter break, while a troubled young woman makes her way toward them. Told through a fractured, dreamlike narrative, the film slowly weaves its threads together into a tapestry of loneliness, grief, and bone-chilling evil. It’s less about jump scares and more about a pervasive, soul-crushing dread.
11. Dog Soldiers (2002)
Before he directed the modern classic The Descent, Neil Marshall unleashed this ferocious action-horror hybrid. A routine military training exercise in the Scottish Highlands turns into a bloody fight for survival when the soldiers are hunted by a pack of werewolves. It’s violent, witty, and relentlessly entertaining—Aliens with lycanthropes.
10. Frailty (2001)
Bill Paxton’s stunning directorial debut is a masterwork of Southern Gothic horror. A man walks into an FBI office claiming his brother is a notorious serial killer, and the story he tells is a dark, religious fable of a father who believes he’s been tasked by God to destroy demons in human form. Is he a divine warrior or a delusional madman? The film keeps you guessing until its devastating final act.
9. The Loved Ones (2009)
If you think your prom was awkward, you haven’t seen anything yet. This Australian “torture porn” film is surprisingly heartfelt and darkly hilarious. When Brent turns down Lola’s invitation to the school dance, she and her equally unhinged father decide to host their own private prom for him in their kitchen. It’s a brutal, bubblegum-pink nightmare that is both gruesome and utterly unforgettable.
8. Kill List (2011)
Director Ben Wheatley is a master of defying genre, and Kill List is his most unsettling work. The film starts as a gritty British crime drama about a hitman taking on a new assignment but slowly and inexorably descends into a paranoid folk-horror nightmare. The tonal shift is so seamless and terrifying that it leaves you breathless and deeply disturbed. Do not go in expecting a straightforward thriller.
7. The House of the Devil (2009)
Ti West’s love letter to 1980s satanic panic horror is a masterclass in slow-burn tension. A cash-strapped college student takes a mysterious babysitting job at a remote house during a lunar eclipse. For most of its runtime, almost nothing happens, but the sense that something is deeply, profoundly wrong is suffocating. The meticulously crafted retro style and nerve-shredding final 20 minutes make this an essential modern horror classic.
6. The Invitation (2015)
This is the ultimate dinner party from hell. Will accepts an invitation to a party hosted by his ex-wife and her new husband at the house they once shared. Throughout the evening, Will is plagued by paranoia and the suspicion that his hosts have sinister intentions. The film brilliantly weaponizes social anxiety, forcing the audience to question whether Will is grieving or if he’s the only sane person in a room full of smiling monsters.
5. Triangle (2009)
If you love mind-bending, reality-warping horror, Triangle is a must-see. A group of friends on a yachting trip are forced to board a derelict ocean liner after their boat capsizes. They soon find they aren’t alone, but explaining more would ruin the brilliantly constructed temporal puzzle box at the film’s core. It’s a horrifying and endlessly rewatchable Sisyphus-style nightmare.
4. A Dark Song (2016)
A grieving woman hires a cynical occultist to help her perform a grueling, months-long ritual to contact her deceased son. Sealing themselves inside a remote house, they engage in a dangerous process that could grant them their deepest wish or damn their souls forever. This is not a film about cheap scares; it’s a deeply serious, procedural take on magic that explores the profound depths of grief and faith.
3. Pontypool (2008)
How do you make a zombie-like outbreak terrifying with almost no zombies? You make the virus spread through language. Set almost entirely within a small-town radio station, a shock jock and his producers begin receiving strange reports of people turning violent after understanding certain words. Pontypool is a high-concept, claustrophobic, and brilliantly acted thriller that proves the most terrifying ideas are the ones you can only hear.
2. Session 9 (2001)
An asbestos-removal crew takes a job at an abandoned insane asylum, a place with a dark and violent history. As the pressures of the job mount, the crew members begin to unravel, and the asylum’s oppressive atmosphere seems to seep into their minds. Fueled by genuine dread rather than jump scares, Session 9 is a chilling psychological study of a place and the people it breaks. That final, whispered line of dialogue is one of horror’s all-time great hauntings.
1. Lake Mungo (2008)
No other film on this list better embodies the term “underrated.” Presented as a documentary, this Australian film follows a family trying to cope with the drowning death of their teenage daughter, Alice. After strange occurrences in their home, they set up cameras and uncover images that suggest Alice’s ghost is with them. But Lake Mungo is not a simple ghost story. It’s a profoundly sad and deeply unsettling exploration of grief, secrets, and the terrifying chasm between the living and the dead. The film contains one of the most effective and earned jump scares in cinema history, but it’s the quiet, existential terror that will burrow under your skin and stay there for good.
