New B-Movies Worth Watching Right Now

One of the best-reviewed horror releases of 2024 was a fake 1977 talk-show broadcast made by two Australian brothers. That same year, midnight crowds lost their minds over a black-and-white slapstick comedy in which one man fights hundreds of actors in beaver costumes. B-movies are in their healthiest stretch in decades, and this ranked list covers the 20 new ones I think deserve your night, with year, director and where to watch each one.

Key Takeaways
– Top pick: Late Night with the Devil (2024) is the best new B-movie of the last few years, a cheap, clever, possessed-talk-show nightmare streaming on Shudder.
– Best pure B-movie spirit: Hundreds of Beavers (2024), a micro-budget silent-comedy epic made by two friends from Wisconsin.
– Shudder is the new drive-in. Six of my top 15 picks stream there, which makes it the single most useful subscription for this kind of film.
– Studios still make B-movies, they just spend more: Abigail, Cocaine Bear and Meg 2: The Trench are A-budget pictures with B-movie souls.
– For free options, Tubi remains the best place to dig into older genre cheapies once you’ve worked through the new stuff.

How I Picked and Ranked These

“B-movie” has drifted a long way from its original meaning, which was the cheaper second feature on a 1940s double bill. I’m using it the way most horror and genre fans use it now: a film built on a lurid, sellable premise, made with more nerve than money, and happy to be ridiculous on purpose. Budget matters less than attitude. A $30 million studio movie about a bear on cocaine qualifies; a tasteful $5 million grief drama with a ghost in it does not.

Every film here had its main release between 2023 and mid-2025. I ranked them on four things:

• Premise sell: can you pitch it in one sentence that makes a friend laugh or wince?
• Execution: does it deliver on the poster, or is the trailer the whole movie?
• Craft per dollar: how much invention it squeezes out of its resources.
• Rewatch and group value: B-movies live or die on a Friday night with people talking at the screen.

I left off films I consider straight prestige horror (Talk to Me, Longlegs) and big franchise sequels that play it safe. Platforms are accurate to each film’s distribution deal as I write this. Studio pictures rotate between services more often than indie titles, so a quick search before movie night saves grief.

Quick-Reference Comparison Table

The Ranked List: 20 New B-Movies Worth Watching

1. Late Night with the Devil (2024)

My top pick does what the best B-movies always have, taking one cheap, airtight gimmick and committing to it completely. Colin and Cameron Cairnes frame the film as the recovered master tape of “Night Owls,” a 1977 Halloween broadcast in which ratings-desperate host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian, finally given a lead worthy of him) brings a girl said to be possessed onto live television. The period detail of the set, the sweaty showbiz desperation and the slow curdling of a variety-show format into something unholy are all handled with real precision. The film drew some deserved criticism for using AI-generated images on a few interstitial cards, which the directors acknowledged, and I think that’s worth knowing going in. Even so, IFC Films and Shudder turned it into a genuine hit, reportedly the biggest opening weekend in IFC’s history, and it streams on Shudder and AMC+ now.

2. Hundreds of Beavers (2024)

If you want to show someone what B-movie ingenuity looks like in its purest form, start here. Director Mike Cheslik and co-writer and star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews made a black-and-white, nearly dialogue-free slapstick epic about a disgraced applejack salesman, Jean Kayak, trying to become a fur trapper in a frozen 19th-century wilderness populated by people in mascot costumes playing beavers, rabbits and wolves. It plays like Buster Keaton crossed with a Looney Tunes short and an old NES game, complete with video-game logic and puzzle-solving set pieces. It premiered at Fantastic Fest in 2022 and then spent 2024 on a self-distributed roadshow, selling out repertory-style screenings across the country on word of mouth alone. It’s available to rent or buy on the major digital storefronts, and it’s the rare comedy I’d call essential viewing for anyone who loves movies.

3. Sisu (2023)

Jalmari Helander, who made the killer-Santa film Rare Exports, delivers a Finnish revenge movie with the momentum of a runaway truck. In Lapland in the final months of World War II, a grizzled former commando named Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila, barely speaking a word) strikes gold, and a retreating Nazi tank platoon makes the fatal mistake of trying to take it. What follows is a series of increasingly brutal and inventive set pieces, including a landmine sequence and an airplane finale, that feel like a spaghetti western filtered through First Blood. It’s lean at 91 minutes, beautifully shot, and never winks at the audience. Lionsgate released it in the US, where it’s available to rent digitally, and a sequel, Sisu: Road to Revenge, is on the way.

4. Infested (2023)

The French title is Vermines, and Sébastien Vaniček’s debut is the best killer-spider movie since Arachnophobia in 1990, possibly better. A young sneaker hustler in a run-down housing block outside Paris buys an exotic spider, it escapes, and it starts breeding at a terrifying rate while the police seal off the building with the residents still inside. Vaniček uses the social realism of the setting, with its neglected tenants and hostile cops, as fuel for the horror rather than decoration. The bathroom sequence alone will ruin your night if you have any arachnophobia at all. It played Venice Critics’ Week before Shudder picked it up, and it earned Vaniček an Evil Dead spinoff gig. It streams on Shudder.

5. In a Violent Nature (2024)

Chris Nash’s slasher takes a dumb idea and makes it formally daring: what if a Friday the 13th movie followed the killer instead of the camp counselors? The camera trails behind Johnny, a hulking undead figure stalking the Ontario woods, often in long, ambient takes with no score, so the movie feels like a nature documentary about an apex predator. Then the kills arrive, and they are some of the most grotesquely inventive of the decade; one involving a yoga pose sent people out of a festival screening. Some viewers find the patience it demands frustrating, and I understand that, but I think the contrast is exactly what makes it work. It premiered at Sundance in 2024, IFC released it theatrically, and it streams on Shudder.

6. The Substance (2024)

Some readers will argue that a film with five Oscar nominations doesn’t belong on a B-movie list. I’d argue Coralie Fargeat made a gleefully trashy body-horror movie that happened to get respectable. Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a fading fitness-show star who injects a black-market serum that spawns a younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley), with the two halves required to swap every week. Dennis Quaid’s shrimp-eating producer is pure cartoon, the satire hits with a sledgehammer, and the final act goes so far into gore that it plays like a Frank Henenlotter movie with a Cannes budget. It won Best Screenplay at Cannes and the Oscar for Makeup and Hairstyling, and Moore won a Golden Globe. MUBI distributed it in the US and it streams there.

7. Dangerous Animals (2025)

Sean Byrne, who made the cult favorites The Loved Ones and The Devil’s Candy, returns with a premise so perfectly B-movie I can’t believe nobody did it sooner. On Australia’s Gold Coast, a shark-tour operator named Tucker (Jai Courtney, having the time of his life) kidnaps tourists and feeds them to sharks while filming it, and his latest captive, a drifter surfer named Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), refuses to go quietly. Byrne plays it straighter and meaner than the logline suggests, and Courtney’s charming-psycho turn carries real menace. It premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at Cannes in 2025, an unlikely venue for a shark thriller, which says something about where genre film is right now. IFC released it theatrically in June 2025, and its streaming home is Shudder.

8. Abigail (2024)

The directing collective Radio Silence (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the team behind Ready or Not) takes a crime-movie setup and flips it halfway through. A crew of kidnappers, including Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton, Kevin Durand and the late Angus Cloud in one of his final roles, abducts a 12-year-old ballerina and holds her in a remote mansion, only to discover she’s a centuries-old vampire. Alisha Weir is wonderful as Abigail, doing pirouettes between kills, and the film loosely reworks Universal’s 1936 Dracula’s Daughter. It’s overlong and the finale gets messy, but the blood-soaked middle hour is as fun as any studio horror picture of the past few years. Universal released it, so it streams on Peacock.

9. Brooklyn 45 (2023)

As a Brooklyn site we were always going to make room for this, and it earns its spot on merit. Ted Geoghegan’s chamber piece takes place in a Brooklyn brownstone in December 1945, where a group of World War II veterans gather to console a grieving friend, and an impromptu séance goes very wrong. It’s essentially a stage play: one room, real time, five or six characters arguing about loyalty and the war, with Larry Fessenden, Anne Ramsay and Ron E. Rains anchoring the cast. The paranoia about a German-born neighbor gives the horror a sour political edge that lands harder than the effects. It’s small, talky and a little stagey, and I found it more memorable than films with ten times the budget. It streams on Shudder.

10. Kill (2024)

Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s Indian action film is one premise executed relentlessly: an army commando (Lakshya) is on an overnight train from Ranchi to New Delhi when a gang of armed bandits boards, and his fiancée happens to be one of the passengers. The fight choreography inside cramped sleeper cars is savage and creative, using every berth, door and fire extinguisher available, and the film makes a sharp tonal turn at its midpoint that I won’t spoil. Raghav Juyal is a superbly irritating villain. It premiered in TIFF’s Midnight Madness section in 2023, where it became the talk of the festival, and Chad Stahelski of John Wick fame is attached to produce an English-language remake. In the US it’s available to rent digitally.

11. Suitable Flesh (2023)

This is the closest thing we’ve had in years to a lost Stuart Gordon movie, and that’s by design. Joe Lynch adapts H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep” from a script by Dennis Paoli, Gordon’s writing partner on Re-Animator and From Beyond, and the film is dedicated to Gordon. Heather Graham plays a psychiatrist whose life comes apart after a young patient (Judah Lewis) tells her he’s being possessed, and Barbara Crampton, a Gordon regular, co-stars and produced. The body-swapping is erotic, campy and nasty in equal measure, with Graham clearly enjoying the chance to play several people at once. It’s pure late-’80s Empire Pictures energy delivered with modern polish. RLJE Films released it, and it streams on Shudder and AMC+.

12. Strange Darling (2024)

JT Mollner’s thriller opens with a woman fleeing a man through rural Oregon and then spends six chapters, told out of order, upending every assumption you’ve made about who is hunting whom. Willa Fitzgerald, credited only as The Lady, gives one of the best genre performances of 2024, and Kyle Gallner matches her as The Demon. It was shot on 35mm film by Giovanni Ribisi, of all people, serving as cinematographer, and it looks like a lurid ’70s grindhouse picture restored in 4K. Stephen King publicly praised it, which helped a tiny release find an audience. I think it works best if you know as little as possible going in, so I’ll stop there. It’s available to rent digitally.

13. Terrifier 3 (2024)

Damien Leone’s Art the Clown series is the most commercially successful splatter franchise in years, and the third entry is the moment it fully arrived. Art (David Howard Thornton, a brilliant silent physical performer) returns at Christmastime to torment Sienna (Lauren LaVera), and the gore effects are, by design, the most extreme ever put in a wide release. Released unrated by Cineverse in October 2024, it opened at number one at the US box office, beating Joker: Folie à Deux in that film’s second weekend, an absurd and wonderful outcome for an independent splatter film. The plotting is thin and the runtime indulgent, and squeamish viewers should stay far away. Gorehounds will consider it a holiday tradition. It’s on Screambox and available to rent digitally.

14. Hell Hole (2024)

The Adams Family (John Adams, Toby Poser and their daughters Zelda and Lulu) have been making scrappy, distinctive horror movies on their own terms for years, and this creature feature is their most entertaining. A fracking crew in rural Serbia drills into a buried soldier from centuries past and unleashes a parasitic creature with a very specific reproductive preference for men, which leads to some deeply uncomfortable body horror and a lot of jokes at the expense of toxic masculinity. It’s goofy, gross and practical-effects-driven, and it feels like a mid-’80s video-store discovery. The family shot it overseas on a modest budget, and it shows their knack for doing a lot with little. It streams on Shudder.

15. Thanksgiving (2023)

Eli Roth spent 16 years turning his fake trailer from 2007’s Grindhouse into a real movie, and the result is a better slasher than anyone expected. In Plymouth, Massachusetts, a Black Friday stampede at a superstore turns deadly, and a year later a killer in a John Carver mask starts carving up the people responsible. Patrick Dempsey plays the local sheriff, and the cast of young victims includes Nell Verlaque and Addison Rae. Roth keeps the tone mischievous rather than mean, the kills are staged with real craft (a parade float and an oven both get involved), and the mystery holds up better than most modern whodunit slashers. Sony released it and a sequel has been announced. It’s available to rent digitally.

16. Boy Kills World (2024)

Moritz Mohr’s feature debut, produced by Sam Raimi, is a hyperactive revenge movie that plays like a video game and isn’t ashamed of it. Bill Skarsgård stars as Boy, a deaf and mute fighter trained in the jungle to take down the dynasty that murdered his family, and his inner voice is provided by H. Jon Benjamin, the voice of Bob from Bob’s Burgers, a casting choice that is either the film’s best joke or its most grating one, depending on your tolerance. Famke Janssen, Jessica Rothe, Sharlto Copley and The Raid‘s Yayan Ruhian round out a cast clearly having fun. The fight scenes are inventive and the dystopian world-building is cheerfully ludicrous. It’s available to rent digitally.

17. Cocaine Bear (2023)

The title did most of the marketing, which is the oldest B-movie trick there is. Elizabeth Banks directs a loose comic riff on a real 1985 incident in which a black bear in Georgia ate cocaine dropped by a drug smuggler, though the real bear died and the movie’s bear goes on a rampage. Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Alden Ehrenreich and Ray Liotta, in one of his final performances, all get chased, mauled or both. The pacing sags whenever the bear is offscreen, but the ambulance sequence is one of the funniest pieces of mayhem in recent studio film. It became a genuine box-office success for Universal, which proved there’s still a mainstream audience for a dumb premise sold honestly. It’s on digital and rotates through Peacock.

18. Meg 2: The Trench (2023)

Here’s a B-movie with a nine-figure budget, and I’ve decided to accept that. Ben Wheatley, an unexpected choice given his indie roots in Kill List, directs Jason Statham back into the deep, where an undersea expedition unleashes multiple megalodons, a giant octopus and a pack of small dinosaurs onto a tourist resort. The first two-thirds are murky and plodding, which is the main reason it sits this low. The final 30 minutes, though, are exactly the movie you want from a film called Meg 2: Statham jet-skiing into a shark with explosive harpoons while monsters eat holidaymakers by the dozen. Warner Bros. released it, so it streams on HBO Max.

19. Under Paris (2024)

Netflix’s French shark movie went huge globally and became one of the platform’s most-watched non-English films, and it’s easy to see why. Xavier Gens, who made the brutal 2007 French horror Frontier(s), directs Bérénice Bejo as a marine scientist who tracks a giant mutated mako shark into the River Seine, just as Paris is preparing to host a triathlon in the river. Yes, it’s essentially Jaws with the mayor swapped for a city official who won’t cancel the race, and it’s often unintentionally funny. But the catacombs sequence is legitimately tense, and the ending goes much bigger and bleaker than I expected from a streaming movie. It’s a Netflix original and streams there.

20. Mad Heidi (2023)

The crowdfunded Swiss exploitation film I didn’t know I needed rounds out the list. Directors Johannes Hartmann and Sandro Klopfstein reimagine Johanna Spyri’s children’s classic as a revenge movie in which a fascist Swiss regime, led by Casper Van Dien as a cheese-mogul president, controls the nation’s dairy supply, and Heidi (Alice Lucy) takes up arms after her boyfriend is executed for selling illegal goat cheese. It’s self-consciously “Swissploitation,” funded by fans who were promised a grindhouse movie and got one, with women-in-prison tropes, cheese-based violence and a training-montage parody. It’s uneven and runs out of jokes before the end, but the sheer commitment earns it a spot. It’s available on digital platforms.

Honorable Mentions

These nearly made the 20 and are all worth a look if you’ve cleared the list above:

• Sting (2024): Kiah Roache-Turner’s Australian spider movie, set in a Brooklyn apartment building that is obviously not in Brooklyn. Fun creature work, thin characters.
• Totally Killer (2023): A time-travel slasher comedy on Prime Video starring Kiernan Shipka. Back to the Future by way of Scream.
• It’s a Wonderful Knife (2023): A Christmas slasher riff on Frank Capra, streaming on Shudder. Justin Long plays the villain.
• Lisa Frankenstein (2024): Zelda Williams directs Diablo Cody’s script about a goth teen and a reanimated Victorian corpse (Cole Sprouse). On Peacock.
• Silent Night (2023): John Woo’s dialogue-free revenge thriller with Joel Kinnaman. A fascinating stunt that doesn’t fully land.
• The Wrath of Becky (2023): Lulu Wilson’s teenage avenger takes on a Proud Boys-style militia. Mean, quick and satisfying.
• The Toxic Avenger (2025): Macon Blair’s long-delayed Troma reboot, starring Peter Dinklage, finally reached theaters through Cineverse after sitting on the shelf since its 2023 Fantastic Fest premiere.

What These Films Say About B-Movies Right Now

Looking at the whole list, I see three things worth naming.

First, the specialty streamer has replaced the drive-in and the video store. Shudder, owned by AMC Networks, works with sister label IFC Films to release films theatrically and then stream them, and that pipeline gave us Late Night with the Devil, In a Violent Nature and Dangerous Animals. A low-budget film with a strong hook can now get a real theatrical run, a streaming home and a cult afterlife in the same year, which is closer to the old Roger Corman model than anything Hollywood has offered in decades.

Second, the studios have rediscovered the B-movie, but they spend accordingly. Universal in particular has gone all in, with Cocaine Bear, Abigail, Renfield and Lisa Frankenstein arriving within roughly a year of each other. These films are slicker and safer than indie efforts, and they often run 20 minutes too long, but they keep the lights on for genre filmmakers and put people like Radio Silence in a position to keep working.

Third, international genre film has become the most reliable source of new B-movie thrills. Sisu from Finland, Infested and Under Paris from France, Kill from India and Mad Heidi from Switzerland all outperform most American films of the same type. If you’re ignoring subtitled genre films, you’re missing roughly a third of the best new B-movies being made.

Where to Watch New B-Movies (and Where to See Them in NYC)

If you only pay for one service for this kind of viewing, make it Shudder; it carries more of this list than any other platform, and its back catalog is deep enough to keep you busy for months. Peacock is the second most useful, because Universal’s genre output lands there. For older and stranger films at no cost, the Tubi free catalog is the best hunting ground I know, packed with decades of direct-to-video monsters, cheap slashers and half-forgotten Full Moon titles alongside the occasional real gem.

Seeing these films with a crowd makes a real difference, and New York is spoiled for it. Nitehawk Cinema runs midnight programming at both its Williamsburg and Prospect Park locations, the Alamo Drafthouse in Downtown Brooklyn regularly books genre premieres and repertory oddities, and Spectacle in Williamsburg remains the place to find the truly obscure. For whatever has just opened, I check new movies in movie theaters each Friday, because films like Dangerous Animals and Terrifier 3 tend to play best in their first weekend, with a crowd that knows what it signed up for.

FAQ

What makes a movie a B-movie today?

Originally a B-movie was the cheaper second feature on a studio double bill. Today the term describes attitude more than budget: a lurid or ridiculous premise, a focus on genre thrills such as monsters, gore or revenge, and a willingness to embrace its own silliness. A film can cost very little, like Hundreds of Beavers, or a lot, like Meg 2: The Trench, and still qualify.

What’s the best new B-movie to watch tonight?

My pick is Late Night with the Devil (2024), streaming on Shudder and AMC+. It’s short, clever and easy to recommend to people who don’t usually watch horror. If you want comedy instead of scares, rent Hundreds of Beavers.

Where can I stream new B-movies for free?

Most of the films on this list require a subscription or a digital rental, since they’re recent releases. Tubi, Pluto TV and similar ad-supported services carry large libraries of older B-movies at no cost, and they occasionally pick up newer indie genre titles once their first streaming deals expire.

Is The Substance really a B-movie?

I think so, despite its Oscar nominations. Its premise is pure exploitation, its satire is deliberately unsubtle and its finale goes into Troma levels of gore. It shows how far B-movie sensibilities can reach when a filmmaker with a strong vision gets a real budget and a star like Demi Moore.

Which new B-movie is best to watch with a group?

Cocaine Bear, Abigail and Thanksgiving are the easiest crowd-pleasers, because they’re funny, gory and paced for people talking at the screen. For a group with stronger stomachs, Terrifier 3 is the ultimate endurance test. Hundreds of Beavers works for almost anyone, including people who claim to hate old movies.

Are more new B-movies coming soon?

Yes. Sisu: Road to Revenge continues Jalmari Helander’s Finnish revenge saga, a sequel to In a Violent Nature has been announced, Eli Roth is developing a follow-up to Thanksgiving, and Sébastien Vaniček of Infested is working on an Evil Dead film. Shudder and IFC also release new genre titles almost every month, so the pipeline isn’t slowing down.