Better late than never? In this episode I run through my favorite horror films of 2025. (Oh, and when I say Pete Postlethwaite, I mean Ralph Fiennes. It happens.)

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Here’s the transcript:

David Dylan Thomas: Hey, welcome everybody to the White Meat Podcast. I’m your host David Dylan Thomas, writer and director of the film White Meat, a movie with the following premise: Underneath Washington Square Park are buried the bodies of hundreds of enslaved people. This is actually true. What if one night they all come back from the dead as zombies, but they only eat white people?

We have made a short film called White Meat: Appetizer, which is making the rounds. You can see us next at the Chain New York City Festival in New York City on August 13th. Hope to see you there, and then at the end of the month this is August while I’m recording this, at the end of the month, you’re gonna see us out in LA at the, at Film Invasion LA, and you can Google that for the time.

So hope to see you at all of those. This week we’re gonna do something a little bit different. We’re not gonna have a guest today. Instead, I’m gonna run you through my top 10 horror movies of 2025. And I know we’re already in August, so it’s a little late for that, but what can I say? Business has been good, so I’ve been very busy.

But I kinda wanna just run through this, and I’m not gonna go really in depth on any of these, but I just kinda wanna fill that space for you. So in, coming in at number 10 is The Monkey, which I loved, and it’s one of those clever kills kinda movies, and it’s, Osgood Perkins, horror perennial for the past five years, but no, he does a lot of good stuff, and this one is a different flavor than, say, Long Legs or The Black Coat’s Daughter. I think that’s what it’s called. This is more poppy, and a lot of fun, a lot of just gory kills. Very Final Destination, Destination-ish, which is funny given where some of this list is going to be going, but a lotta, a lot of fun to check out.

And then we’ve got Final Destination: Bloodlines. See, I told you it was gonna come back. So Final Destination: Bloodlines. I’m not that big into the Final Destination series. I’ve seen the first two, I think. And it’s, it’s fun in and in and of itself as far as it goes, but it’s not necessarily my kind of horror.

But Bloodlines just takes it to this next level with the complexity of the kills. And it’s again, it’s just what weird ways can we kill off these characters? And I gotta tell you this is on a whole other level of sophistication from what I’ve ever seen from this franchise. And in particular, the MRI kill might be the most disturbing kill of the entire year that I’ve seen.

So get yourself ready for that. But yeah, Bloodlines coming in at number nine. At number eight we’ve got Dangerous Animals. This is a lesser-known film from that year. I believe it was a Shudder original. I could be wrong about that. But so the whole shark genre seems to have come back in a big way in the past five years or so, which frankly, some of them are okay.

Like I, I haven’t watched that many of them because frankly Jaws got it so right I’m really not that interested in returning to it as a genre. But what Dangerous Animals does that I think is very clever is they don’t make the shark, or sharks in this case, the focus of the horror. The, the shark is almost like Jason’s machete, right?

Or Michael Myers’ knife, or Freddy’s claws. It’s the instrument that the psychopath, the slasher, is using in the film. So it’s almost more like a slasher movie where the weapon the slasher is using is sharks. Which sounds weird, I know, but it’s really well pulled off. And the slasher himself, Jai Courtney, does an amazing job of being totally unhinged and being absolutely terrifying.

The sharks are not nearly the scariest thing in this movie. It’s this guy. It’s this just completely bonkers guy, and it’s all played out very well. And it’s one of those movies that makes everyone earn their role. Everything that happens in the movie, nothing’s easy for anybody, not even the shark guy.

That keeps the tension high, I think. But really fun lesser-known horror film from ’25. Up at number seven we’ve got Together, which I avoided for so long ’cause even the poster was troubling. This is two people who are being drawn to each other, and their bodies are starting to fuse, is basically the premise here.

And it’s, it… and it’s the kind of thing, like, how are you gonna keep that going for 90 minutes? But they do. They have… add these kind of levels to it, and it ends up being this really interesting dissection of what relationships are like and what does it really mean to be close and do you wanna be close and all of this stuff.

It does it really well. And yes, the body horror is very disturbing. But the leads do a great job with it. It helps that they’re a real-life couple? I don’t know. That- that’s interesting, but I think regardless, they’re both giving great performances here. So definitely check that one out.

But be warned, it’s pretty, pretty troubling body horror-wise. Number six we’ve got Bring Her Back, which I thought was the sequel to Talk to Me ’cause it’s the same directors, and it’s Talk to Me, then Bring It… which is a movie about people who are dead, and you can contact them.

Bring Her Back makes it sound like, oh, you’re gonna take someone from that world, and you’re gonna try to bring them back, right? It’s not. Although, it kinda could be. It could… It’s dealing with a lot of the same themes of death and the beyond and trying to bring someone back from the beyond and contacting the dead.

But what it’s really about is grief. And Sally Hawkins plays a woman who is going through a lot of grief in a big way. And her performance should have been Oscar nominated the same way that, the Academy was cool nominating Amy Madigan for Weapons or Demi Moore for The Substance, right?

This is a performance in a horror film, yes, but a fantastic performance in and of itself. And I think the Academy and criticism in general is getting over its hurdle with horror more and more, but this is one that should’ve been no question. At least the SAG nom, right? Like the, this is tremendous.

But it is excellent horror film, excellently. And the Philippou brothers, I wanna say is their name? RackaRacka was their YouTube channel. They are showing themselves in their first two films to be absolute masters of horror. I cannot wait to see what they do next. At number five we’ve got Frankenstein.

It’s Guil- Guillermo del Toro doing Frankenstein, the film he was born to make, right? And he does not disappoint. It is lavish, it is grand guignol. It is beautifully acted, beautifully realized, has plenty of that, good old-fashioned de- del Toro gore to it as well. And it’s like the key performances here, obviously Oscar Isaac and blanking on the guy who play- I’m trying to say Delroy Lindo.

It’s not Delroy Lindo. What is this guy’s name? But do an excellent job. You can hear me clicking this up ’cause I’m so embarrassed I can’t remember this guy’s name but Jacob Elordi. See? That kind of sounds like Delroy Lindo, right? No, it doesn’t. Anyway Elordi is like… Here’s the other thing about Guillermo del Toro you have to understand.

His films are so fucking horny. Think about Crimson Peak. This is like the Crimson Peak version of Frankenstein. So you his Frankenstein fucks, is what I’m saying or his Frankenstein’s monster fucks. Although Oscar Isaac, in that red leather fetish outfit, like he kind of fucks, too.

In any case he, there, there’s a horniness here that he’s not shying away from. He’s leaning hard into. And just the, the, the fashion design. Like his dad played by Charles Dance, I think, has this cape. It’s just fucking ridiculous. I want that cape. Everybody here like firing on all cylinders.

But it is like the most del Toro to ever del Toro. And if ex- what you think del Toro’s gonna do with Frankenstein is exactly what it does here. It’s no surprises, but it’s awesome. You want him to do those things. And it is, I wanna the tech bro of it all of Oscar Isaac’s performance and how he’s written I think is perfectly timely.

That arrogance that, that. And the way in which you create the thing and you go through all this sacrifice and create all this harm to create the thing, and then once you’ve made it you lose interest, and you just let it go around causing harm and you don’t care.

That, that is the modern tech age in a nutshell. The only thing this is missing is an IPO, honestly. But no highly recommend. Super happy he finally got to make that. At number four we’ve got Weapons, which I’m sure if you were paying attention last year you know was gonna end up on this list.

So Weapons obviously one of the breakout horror films of 2025. Zach Cregger doing an amazing job, an amazing ode to his friend from The Whitest Guys You Know who had actually died and inspired this story. Which again, also about grief. It goes in all these interesting directions, and it’s one of those movies that you can’t quite pin down.

It’s dealing in so many different themes. You can interpret it any way you want. And that can come off as kind of wishy-washy, but here he’s being so specific that it, it works. For me anyway. It works anyway, even though it’s not tied down to this is exactly what Weapons is about. It just works on almost this primal symbolic level.

Honestly, I think the less you know, the better going in. I think it’s, it has lots of surprises. Even the kind of horror film it is something that it lets it, reveals itself to you. So I’m not gonna say more about that, so hopefully you haven’t been spoiled at all. But I- a- and it was one of those films that was a lot of fun to watch with an audience.

I got to see it in the theater, and it’s a beautiful film. I’ll be honest, I’m a little disappointed that he’s going on to a, I won’t say that. I want I was nervous to hear that he was going on to a franchise next. He’s doing Resident Evil. It’s coming out this year. Now that I’ve seen the trailer, I’m like, “Oh, shit, this might actually be pretty awesome.”

So I’m actually real excited about his next thing. But between this and Barbarians, and now we’ve got Resident Evil coming out, I’m really excited to see what he does next. Number three, we’ve got The Ugly Stepsister. So this is one, again, I think this is a Shudder original. This is one that was, like, lesser known until it wasn’t.

So I was so happy to see this movie show up in the Oscar nominations. I think it was for Best Makeup which it absolutely deserved. But it was a lesser known film, and it’s like the, the cousin to, or in conversation with The Substance. So if Substance is like modern-day horror women writing and directing horror about women’s bodies being used and abused by men, or being made to change themselves to become pleasing to society and pleasing really to men to the male gaze.

This is that, but back in olden times and as a version of the Cinderella story, except instead of focusing on Cinderella, we’re gonna focus on her stepsisters. Which if you know the original Grimm story is grim. It is fucked up, and it is body horror. So all the different ways the stepsister tries to, or is a- is forced to, tries to just the whole manipulation, the whole self manipulation, which is part of this larger horror narrative of not just what is society doing to you, but what does society make you do to yourself and make you want to do to yourself in this very twisted kind of way.

The competition against other women that you are forced into and all of that. But the body horror resulting from that I would say is even more disturbing than the body horror in The Substance, which was plenty. I- there’s a scene just… I’m gonna s- I’m just gonna say the word eyelashes, and I’m gonna leave it at that.

You’ll know it when you see it, and it’s one of the hardest things to watch I’ve ever watched in a horror film. It is so troubling, and the fact is I haven’t looked it up, but I think this sort of practice probably actually happened or something like it. And you do not need me to tell you all the things that women go through today to try to make themselves look beautiful are versions of body horror in a lot of cases.

So I’m glad this movie and The Substance started to bring that out and recognize that and put it in the light. But Ugly Stepsister is a fantastic version of that. So just, but please check it out. At number two we’ve got 28 Years Later, which I fucking loved. And again, it was one of those movies where I’m like, “Really, we’re going back to this?”

I love 28 Days Later. It’s a great movie, and the sequel’s fine. I didn’t really dislike it in any way. I didn’t think it was necessary, but I didn’t… I thought it was… I enjoyed it. So now I’m like, “Really, Danny?” Danny Boyle, I call him Danny. “Danny, really, are we going back to this?”

But it is so well done and has so many ideas. He found something to play with there that makes it organic, that makes it necessary, especially looking at the world the way it is today. He’s playing a lot with images of masculinity and tribalism that are very relevant. And he’s getting this amazing performance out of Jodie Comer and all of the actors who are doing a great job.

Pete Postlethwaite also doing a tremendous job and the lead. Everybody here is doing a great job and what he’s setting up is something incredible with Bone Temple, which came out earlier this year and still has yet to be beat for my favorite horror film of the year honestly one of my favorite films of the year.

So hats off to Nia Dacosta. But what Danny’s doing, Danny Boyle’s doing here is just outstanding and really finds new material, new themes to explore, new horror to explore from this universe. So I would highly recommend you check out 28 Years Later. The whole series, like just sit down and just run through the whole damn thing.

It’s great. And then finally, number one, I don’t think anyone’s gonna be shocked here, it’s Sinners. I fucking love Sinners. It’s probably my number one film of the year, period and definitely my number one horror film of the year. There’s so many things it’s doing well here, so much. It is it is Black history.

This is Black cinema history, Black horror history, just Black history, period. This film doing so much, coming in at, I think, number seven on the top 10 box office, beating out, like every MCU film of that year. Just this announcement that, yes, Black horror matters, yes, these, these stories matter and are attractive.

They bring people in. People will watch this stuff. You need to fund it. A lesson I’m sure Hollywood will ignore. But in any case, and of course an, an achievement for Ryan Coogler that, that expression of when he finally gets to tell his own story that originates from him. He’s not adapting history or he’s not adapting a franchise.

He is just coming up with something new. It’s amazing. It’s absolutely fricking amazing, and I’m so psyched now for Black Panther 3 and for the X-Files, all these other things he’s doing. But what he does here is singular, and I… There are video essays galore to explore about why this is such an important movie and how well it’s doing and what it’s doing.

And I’ll just say that for me, as a horror filmmaker this sets the bar, like in the same way that Get Out did. It’s like, “Okay, here it is. What are you gonna do? Like what… ain’t nobody gonna top that shit. Here’s your j- here’s g- here’s your challenge.” And I’m like, “Challenge accepted,” right?

Like it’s something to shoot for and it’s inspi- it’s just inspiring to know that this is what’s out there. This is possible. So I don’t know. I’m not gonna go on and on about it ’cause I would be here all day. But but Sinners, number one, no question. And I try to write this up at some point, put it on like Medium or something.

I still have to write up my top 10 movies in general of the year, which a lot of these made it into. It was a very good year for horror. And then my top TV for 2025. I’m way behind, folks. I’m way behind. But I’ll get there, probably by, I don’t know, October? Who knows? But I wanna thank you for listening to me ramble about this stuff, and hopefully I’ve given you some stuff to watch if you haven’t seen all these already.

So for the White Meat podcast, I’m your host David Dylan Thomas, and we will see you next time.