Few years in recent memory did more to reshape the horror genre than this one. Critically acclaimed social thrillers, record-breaking supernatural blockbusters, and daring arthouse nightmares all landed in the same calendar year, forcing critics and audiences alike to reconsider what horror could actually be. This ranked list covers the ten best horror movies of 2017 — films that combined craft, cultural impact, and genuine fear into something lasting.
How These Films Were Ranked
Rankings here reflect a combination of critical consensus (Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic), audience reception, box office performance relative to budget, and enduring cultural influence. Films that delivered on multiple fronts — scaring audiences while also saying something meaningful — rank highest. Pure box office performance alone did not determine placement, which is why the highest-grossing horror film of the year sits at number one but earned that spot through quality, not just ticket sales.
10 — Jigsaw (2017)
Director: The Spierig Brothers | Budget: $10 million | Box Office: $104.2 million worldwide | RT Score: 37%
Eight years after the death of John Kramer — the original Jigsaw Killer — a series of murders matching his signature traps throws detectives into a frenzy. Is there a copycat operating? Or did something far stranger happen? Directed by the Spierig Brothers (Peter and Michael), this eighth entry in the horror franchise received mixed critical notices but performed solidly at the box office, earning back ten times its budget. Fans of the Saw series got exactly what they came for: elaborate traps, franchise mythology, and a twist ending designed to make them rewatch from the beginning. The film is far from the critical darling of this list, but its commercial success cemented the franchise’s ability to keep drawing audiences regardless of critical opinion.
The Spierig Brothers brought a slicker, modern aesthetic to the otherwise gritty franchise. Cast members Matt Passmore and Callum Keith Rennie ground the detective procedural thread, while the barn setting — the primary trap environment — delivers the claustrophobic dread the series built its reputation on. The official film site for the franchise can be found through Lionsgate, the studio that has distributed every Saw film.
9 — The Ritual (2017)
Director: David Bruckner | Box Office: $1.3–1.6 million | RT Score: 74%
Four British friends set out on a hiking trip through the Scandinavian wilderness to honor a recently deceased companion. When they take a shortcut through an ancient forest, they encounter something that defies rational explanation. Directed by David Bruckner — who would later helm The Black Phone (2022) and The Night Eater (2022) — The Ritual works because it layers psychological guilt over folk horror mythology. The men are haunted not just by the creature stalking them but by their own cowardice the night their friend died.
Shot in Romania standing in for Sweden, the film’s visual language is deeply atmospheric. Dense, dark forest canopy, rain-soaked trails, and an eerily empty farmhouse create persistent dread without relying on cheap scares. Rafe Spall leads a committed ensemble cast. The film premiered at TIFF before becoming a Netflix acquisition for international audiences. Critics praised Bruckner’s use of the Scandinavian setting and the way the film exploits its characters’ mounting paranoia. It belongs in conversations about folk horror alongside The Witch and Midsommar, even if it never received the same mainstream profile.
8 — Jigsaw Honourable Mention — Raw (2017)
Director: Julia Ducournau | Budget: €3.48 million | Box Office: $3.1 million | RT Score: 93%
French writer-director Julia Ducournau’s feature debut caused a genuine sensation when it screened at the Toronto International Film Festival — allegedly prompting audience members to faint. The story follows Justine, a lifelong vegetarian from a family of veterinarians, who begins her first year at veterinary school and, after succumbing to peer pressure during hazing rituals, consumes raw meat for the first time. What follows is a deeply unsettling coming-of-age story in which her developing hunger for human flesh serves as a visceral metaphor for identity, desire, and the terrifying loss of control that accompanies adulthood.
Raw holds a 93% Tomatometer rating — one of the highest of any horror film from this period. Ducournau’s direction is confident, precise, and uncompromising, pulling from the tradition of New French Extremity while forging her own distinct language. Garance Marillier delivers a physical, emotionally raw performance as Justine, and the film’s body horror sequences are executed with calculated precision — disturbing without being gratuitous. Ducournau went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2021 for Titane, fully validating the critical consensus that Raw announced one of horror’s most important new directors. The film is distributed in France by Wild Bunch.
7 — Gerald’s Game (2017)
Director: Mike Flanagan | RT Score: 91% (critic) / 72% (audience)
Mike Flanagan adapted Stephen King’s 1992 novel — long considered unfilmable — into one of Netflix’s first major horror prestige productions. The premise is deceptively simple: Jessie (Carla Gugino) accompanies her husband Gerald (Bruce Greenwood) to a remote lakeside cabin to rekindle their marriage. During a bondage role-play, Gerald suffers a sudden heart attack and dies, leaving Jessie handcuffed to the bed with no phone, no neighbors, and no immediate means of escape. From there, the film unfolds almost entirely within a single room.
What makes Gerald’s Game exceptional is Gugino’s performance and Flanagan’s ability to make a constrained, largely dialogue-free premise psychologically rich. Jessie begins hallucinating conversations with her dead husband and with an idealized version of herself, and these internal dialogues peel back layers of childhood trauma that reframe everything the audience thought the film was about. The film is a survival story, a trauma narrative, and a horror movie simultaneously. Flanagan — who would go on to create The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass for Netflix — demonstrates precisely why he became the dominant voice in prestige horror over the following half-decade. The film is available to stream on Netflix, which produced and distributed it.
6 — Annabelle: Creation (2017)
Director: David F. Sandberg | Budget: $15 million | Box Office: $306.5 million worldwide | RT Score: 70%
The Conjuring Universe had already produced one Annabelle film — 2014’s underperforming prequel — before David F. Sandberg was handed the franchise and told to fix it. He did. Annabelle: Creation tells the origin story of the possessed doll, beginning in 1943 with a dollmaker named Samuel Mullins whose young daughter Bee is killed in a road accident. Twelve years later, the Mullins open their home to a nun and a group of orphan girls, and it quickly becomes apparent that something has been waiting in Bee’s locked room since her death.
Sandberg — the Swedish director who made his feature debut with Lights Out (2016) — brings a methodical, old-school approach to the material. Rather than relying on constant jump scares, he builds genuine spatial dread. The best sequences in the film weaponize architecture: a stairlift that stops mid-journey, a cupboard that opens from within, a sheet-covered figure that follows a child across the room. The young ensemble cast — particularly Talitha Bateman and Lulu Wilson — anchor the film emotionally in a way the first Annabelle entirely failed to. Grossing over $306 million worldwide against a $15 million budget, it became one of the most profitable installments in the Conjuring franchise. The full Conjuring Universe catalogue is accessible through Max.
5 — mother! (2017)
Director: Darren Aronofsky | Budget: $30 million | Box Office: $44.5 million | RT Score: 69% (critical consensus: “divisive masterpiece”)
Few horror-adjacent films from this era provoked as extreme a critical and audience divide as Darren Aronofsky’s mother!. Jennifer Lawrence plays a woman — credited only as “Mother” — who is restoring a country home with her poet husband (Javier Bardem, credited as “Him”). Uninvited strangers begin arriving at the house, and the intrusions escalate from mildly discomforting to apocalyptically, viscerally disturbing.
The film operates entirely on metaphorical terms. It is simultaneously a biblical allegory, a commentary on the relationship between artists and the creative muse, an ecological parable, and a domestic horror film about the invisible labor of women. Aronofsky shoots entirely from Lawrence’s point-of-view — the camera rarely leaves her face — creating a suffocating, claustrophobic intimacy that mirrors her character’s increasingly desperate attempts to assert agency over her own home. Critics who embraced it called it a visionary provocation; those who rejected it called it pretentious and assaultive. Both responses are understandable. What is not debatable is that it commits absolutely to its vision, and Lawrence gives one of the most physically and emotionally demanding performances in recent horror. The film is distributed by Paramount Pictures.
4 — Split (2017)
Director: M. Night Shyamalan | Budget: $9 million | Box Office: $278.5 million worldwide | RT Score: 79%
M. Night Shyamalan’s career was in a complicated place before Split arrived. After a string of expensive misfires — The Last Airbender, After Earth — he returned to his roots with low-budget psychological horror produced by Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Productions. Split stars James McAvoy as Kevin Wendell Crumb, a man with 24 distinct personalities who abducts three teenage girls (led by Anya Taylor-Joy, who became a star through this film) and imprisons them beneath a Philadelphia facility. As Kevin’s personalities compete for “the light” — the dominant position within the shared identity — the girls attempt to understand which version of him might help them escape, and which one will destroy them.
McAvoy’s performance is the film’s extraordinary centerpiece. Transitioning between personalities with seamless physical and vocal differentiation — a lispy child named Hedwig, a fastidious fashion designer, a menacing manipulator named Dennis — he commands every frame. The film’s 79% Rotten Tomatoes score understates the performance praise; almost every critic singled out McAvoy as delivering career-best work. Split opened at $40.2 million, held the number one spot for three consecutive weekends, and earned back thirty times its budget. It was also — and this was the film’s final-scene reveal — a secret sequel to Unbreakable (2000). Blumhouse Productions, which co-produced the film, maintains its catalogue at Blumhouse.com.
3 — The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos | RT Score: 84%
Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos — best known for The Lobster (2015) and, later, Poor Things (2023) — delivered one of the most formally disturbing horror films of the year with The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Colin Farrell plays Steven Murphy, a charismatic cardiac surgeon who has been quietly befriending a teenage boy named Martin (Barry Keoghan in his breakthrough role). When Steven’s family begins inexplicably losing the ability to walk, then losing the ability to eat, then losing vision entirely, Martin reveals that he is the cause — and that the only way to stop the progression is for Steven to kill one member of his own family.
Lanthimos strips out emotional cues from his filmmaking the way a surgeon removes tissue — deliberately, with precision, and with complete disregard for the patient’s comfort. Characters speak in flat, affect-less tones regardless of the horror surrounding them. The domestic normalcy of Steven’s upper-class life makes the supernatural intrusion feel all the more obscene. Barry Keoghan is genuinely terrifying as Martin: polite, patient, certain. The film is not interested in resolution or catharsis in any traditional sense. It is a moral problem presented as horror, and it offers no comfortable exit. It was distributed internationally by A24.
2 — Get Out (2017)
Director: Jordan Peele | Budget: $4.5 million | Box Office: $259.8 million worldwide | RT Score: 98%
Jordan Peele’s directorial debut is one of the most important horror films ever made. Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) is a Black photographer who travels with his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) to meet her family for the first time. The Armitage household is polite, seemingly progressive, and deeply unsettling. The Black employees at the estate — groundskeeper, housekeeper — behave in a disquietingly detached way. The White guests at a garden party are inappropriately fascinated with Chris’s physique and athletic potential. The film systematically escalates this unease until the full horror of what is happening is revealed.
Get Out earned a 98% Tomatometer rating, making it one of the best-reviewed horror films in critical history. It grossed $259.8 million worldwide against a $4.5 million production budget — a return on investment that virtually no other narrative film from the year matched. Peele won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, the first Black screenwriter to win in that category since the award was introduced. Beyond the awards and the numbers, Get Out achieved something rarer: it changed how audiences and critics discussed horror’s capacity for social commentary. Every prestige horror film that followed it — from Hereditary to Us to Nope — exists in conversation with what Peele built here. The film is available through Universal Pictures.
Why Get Out Holds Up
The power of Get Out comes not from any single scare but from its architecture. Every element — the hypnosis scenes, the Sunken Place, the deer symbolism, the wedding photographs — is functional and intentional. Rewatch it and the film reveals itself as a precision instrument. Peele hides nothing and everything simultaneously.
1 — It (2017)
Director: Andy Muschietti | Budget: $35 million | Box Office: $719.8 million worldwide | RT Score: 86%
It is the highest-grossing horror film ever made. Against a $35–40 million production budget, it earned $719.8 million at the worldwide box office — shattering the previous record held by The Sixth Sense. That commercial dominance alone would not earn it the top spot here. What does is the film’s achievement in balancing a massive crowd-pleasing supernatural spectacle with genuine emotional depth and sustained terror.
Andy Muschietti’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 novel follows seven children in Derry, Maine — a town with an abnormally high rate of missing children — who discover that a shape-shifting entity they call It is responsible. The entity’s preferred form is Pennywise the Dancing Clown, played by Bill Skarsgård in a performance that reinvented one of horror’s most iconic characters. Skarsgård’s Pennywise is not Tim Curry’s theatrical performer from the 1990 miniseries. He is physically wrong in a way that bypasses rational fear — too loose-limbed, too still, with a gaze that never quite tracks correctly. His performance made Pennywise legitimately terrifying for a generation that had grown up on the original.
The Losers’ Club and Why It Works
The genius of It is that the horror lives alongside a genuinely moving coming-of-age story. The Losers’ Club — Bill, Ben, Beverly, Richie, Eddie, Stan, and Mike — are drawn with enough specificity that their friendships feel real. Jaeden Lieberher anchors the group as stuttering, grieving Bill, whose younger brother Georgie was Pennywise’s first victim of the season. Finn Wolfhard, Sophia Lillis, and Jack Dylan Grazer round out an ensemble that generates real warmth.
The film’s 135-minute runtime never drags because Muschietti understands that horror without investment in characters is simply spectacle. He makes you care about these kids before he puts them in danger, which is why sequences like the Neibolt Street house confrontation and the climactic sewer showdown hit with emotional weight rather than just visceral impact. The film covers only the first half of King’s novel — the childhood chapters — and was followed by It Chapter Two (2019) covering the adult timeline. The complete It experience is available through Max.
The Films That Almost Made the List
Happy Death Day (2017), directed by Christopher Landon, blended slasher horror with the Groundhog Day premise to charming effect, earning strong reviews and loyal fans. The Babysitter (2017), directed by McG, delivered pitch-black horror-comedy for streaming audiences on Netflix. Alien: Covenant (2017), Ridley Scott’s continuation of the Prometheus storyline, received more mixed notices but satisfied fans of the franchise’s body-horror roots. And 47 Meters Down (2017), a shark thriller set almost entirely underwater, proved that stripped-back survival horror still had commercial appeal when executed with discipline. None of these quite matched the films in the main list in terms of combined critical, cultural, and commercial impact — but any list of the year’s best horror that ignores them entirely is incomplete.
Why Horror Peaked in This Period
The cultural moment in which these films arrived matters. Audiences were receptive to horror that reflected real anxieties rather than simply manufactured cheap scares. Get Out turned racial anxiety into a surgical thriller. Split explored identity and trauma through a superpowered predator. Raw used cannibalism to map the violence of female adolescence. mother! weaponized domestic erasure into biblical allegory. The Killing of a Sacred Deer framed moral guilt as cosmic punishment. Even It — the most traditional horror blockbuster on this list — centered the genre on children’s fear, which is the most universal fear of all.
Horror’s critical rehabilitation in this period was not accidental. It was the result of filmmakers who treated the genre as a serious vehicle for ideas, and audiences and critics who responded in kind. The films on this list are not just the best horror movies of their release year. Several of them are among the best films — in any genre — produced in the same window. Exploring the best films of the following year reveals whether horror maintained its momentum, and the answer is an unambiguous yes.
Where to Stream These Films
Streaming availability shifts frequently, but here is where these films tend to live. It and Annabelle: Creation are typically available on Max. Gerald’s Game is a Netflix original and lives there permanently. Get Out and Split cycle across Peacock, Prime Video, and Netflix depending on licensing windows. Raw is available on various digital rental platforms including Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video. Jigsaw cycles across ad-supported platforms. The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Ritual are available through Prime Video and various digital storefronts. For the most accurate current availability on any of these titles, checking streaming availability guides is the fastest approach.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best horror movie of 2017?
By combined critical consensus, cultural impact, and commercial performance, It (2017) is the best horror movie of the year. Get Out is a strong case for the same title from a purely critical and artistic standpoint, holding a 98% Rotten Tomatoes score and winning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Both films make legitimate claims to the top position depending on what criteria you prioritize.
Was Get Out considered a horror film?
Yes. Despite some early awards season debate — the Hollywood Foreign Press categorized it as a comedy/musical at the Golden Globes — Get Out is unambiguously a horror film. It uses the genre’s conventions — mounting dread, isolation, bodily threat, the final reveal — in service of a story about systemic racism. Jordan Peele himself has consistently identified it as horror.
What made 2017 special for horror?
The year produced multiple horror films that crossed over into mainstream critical and cultural conversation simultaneously. It broke box office records. Get Out won an Oscar. Split rehabilitated a major director’s career. Raw and The Killing of a Sacred Deer received arthouse distribution alongside serious critical attention. The genre had not produced that density of important films in a single calendar year in decades.
Is Raw (2017) appropriate for all horror fans?
No. Raw is an extremely graphic, body-horror-heavy film with sequences involving cannibalism, self-harm imagery, and disturbing sexual content. It holds an R rating and is not appropriate for younger audiences or viewers sensitive to body horror. For mature horror fans who appreciate arthouse filmmaking and are not squeamish, it is an essential watch. The film is available on digital rental platforms including Apple TV.
What happened to the directors of these films?
The careers launched or elevated by these films are remarkable. Jordan Peele followed Get Out with Us (2019) and Nope (2022), cementing himself as one of the most significant genre filmmakers working. Julia Ducournau won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for Titane (2021). Mike Flanagan became Netflix’s dominant horror showrunner with The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, and The Midnight Club. Andy Muschietti directed It Chapter Two (2019) and later The Flash (2023). M. Night Shyamalan completed his Unbreakable trilogy with Glass (2019). David Bruckner directed The Black Phone (2022) and The Night Eater (2022). The horror class of this year did not fade quietly.
