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The Best Upcoming HORROR Movies 2020 & 2021 (Trailers)

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Nine trailers, one grim promise: 2020’s theatrical drought won’t kill horror’s biggest slate in years.

KinoCheck’s latest trailer reel rounds up nine of the genre’s most anticipated releases heading into 2020 and 2021, from a wendigo stalking rural Oregon to a South Korean zombie sequel racing across a quarantined peninsula. The compilation arrives at an odd moment for the industry — theaters shuttered, release dates in flux — but the footage itself makes clear these projects were built for the big screen. Studios from Sony to Lionsgate to Universal all have skin in this game, and the trailers show why.

• Scott Cooper’s Antlers, produced by Guillermo del Toro from Nick Antosca’s short story “The Quiet Boy,” follows an Oregon schoolteacher (Keri Russell) and her sheriff brother (Jesse Plemons) as they confront a flesh-eating wendigo tied to one of her students.
• The New Mutants, directed by Josh Boone, traps young mutants played by Maisie Williams, Anya Taylor-Joy and Charlie Heaton inside an isolated psychiatric facility — Marvel’s first real attempt at a horror-tinged superhero film.
• The lineup also spans A Quiet Place Part II with Emily Blunt, Spiral: From the Book of Saw with Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson, and Yeon Sang-ho’s zombie thriller Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula.

Antlers Leans on del Toro’s Fingerprints

Antlers has been positioned as one of the year’s more atmospheric entries, trading jump scares for dread. The story centers on a troubled student harboring something ancient and monstrous, and the trailer footage leans into that slow-burn horror rather than spectacle. With del Toro producing and Cooper directing off Antosca’s source material, the pedigree here reads more prestige-horror than franchise cash grab.

The New Mutants Finally Gets Its Moment

Few titles on this list have had a rockier road to release than The New Mutants, and the trailer reel treats it as one of the marquee inclusions. Maisie Williams, Anya Taylor-Joy and Charlie Heaton play young mutants confined to a facility where their powers spiral into something far darker. Readers who want the deeper backstory on the film’s delays and Comic-Con rollout can check the New Mutants Comic-Con teaser breakdown for more.

Nine trailers deep, the throughline is clear: horror in 2020 isn’t hiding in found-footage cheapies anymore — it’s got A-list casts, franchise budgets, and Guillermo del Toro’s name attached.

Franchise Sequels Carry the Weight

John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place Part II picks up Emily Blunt’s fight for survival against sound-hunting creatures, while Lionsgate’s Spiral: From the Book of Saw reboots the long-running franchise with Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson leading a new investigation. Overseas, Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula extends the 2016 zombie hit into a wider, post-outbreak landscape. All three trailers signal studios betting that established IP is the safest way through a scrambled release calendar.

The Genre-Benders Round Out the Slate

Not everything here plays it straight. Janelle Monáe’s Antebellum builds a psychological mystery around a slavery-era plantation setting, Joe Wright’s The Woman in the Window puts Amy Adams inside a Hitchcockian thriller, and Romola Garai makes her directorial debut with the arthouse chiller Amulet. Sony’s Morbius, meanwhile, brings Jared Leto into the studio’s expanding Spider-Man-adjacent universe as the vampire antihero — a film covered in more detail in the Morbius teaser trailer roundup.

With theatrical release dates still shifting week to week as of July 2020, several of these nine — Antlers and Morbius chief among them — remain the titles distributors are most reluctant to move off the calendar entirely, which says plenty about how much studios are counting on them once theaters reopen.