Horror Movies for Teens
There's a point, usually somewhere between twelve and fifteen, when family-friendly scares stop being enough. These are real horror films that suit that age, shown youngest guide age first, so you can stop reading at your teenager's age. Guide ages run from 12 to 15, twelve of the seventeen are PG-13, and every note says what earned the age.
The picks cover the main kinds of horror, because a teen who can't stand one kind may love another. Ghost stories such as The Haunting, The Sixth Sense and Insidious build their dread around the dead. Creature features such as Jaws, A Quiet Place and No One Will Save You run on suspense. Psycho and The Final Girls are the slasher end, light on gore, and Gremlins, Tremors and Drag Me to Hell want screams and laughs in equal measure.
A rating only says so much. The two PG films, Gremlins and Jaws, are the only picks whose violence our guide rates strong, and Psycho, rated R, has no profanity. The parents' guide has the detail on every title. For a gentler start, try Halloween Movies for Tweens and Teens; if blood is the worry, Scary Movies Without Gore. Younger brothers and sisters have Scary Movies for Kids, and for everything that isn't horror, see Movies for 13-Year-Olds and Movies for 14-Year-Olds.
The Haunting
Movie · 1963For a twelve-year-old who can sit still: it's black and white and slow, and the terror is all hammering on doors at night and a door that swells inward. Lonely Eleanor joins an investigation at Hill House and comes to feel the house wants her for itself. The G dates from a 1972 reissue; the backstory includes a hanging, and the ending is a fatal crash that may not be an accident.
Gremlins
Movie · 1984Set at Christmas, but a creature feature first: Billy's cuddly mogwai, Gizmo, gets wet and multiplies, and the newcomers become gremlins that smoke, drink and besiege the town. Billy's mother slaughters three in her kitchen, a teacher is killed, a woman is hurled from a window, and Kate recounts her father's death in a Santa suit. Expect 'goddamn' and 'a--hole,' a xenophobic neighbor and a dated Chinese stereotype.
Jaws
Movie · 1975The film to show a thirteen-year-old who thinks old movies can't be scary; the two-note music alone does it. A great white works its way through a beach town whose mayor won't close the beaches. The 1975 PG undersells it: a boy dies in a burst of blood, a severed leg sinks, a dead man's head appears in a wreck. Expect a nude skinny-dipper in shadow, teens apparently smoking pot, heavy drinking on the boat and one s-word.
Tremors
Movie · 1990One of the least frightening films here, for a teen who'd rather laugh. Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon play handymen trying to save a tiny desert town from giant worms that pull victims underground, mostly off screen. What parents notice is the swearing: constant s-words and goddamns, plus one f-word that survived edits made to avoid an R.
The Sixth Sense
Movie · 1999For teens who like a puzzle with their scares. Bruce Willis is the psychologist who takes on nine-year-old Cole, played by Haley Joel Osment, who sees the dead as they died: hanged figures, slashed wrists, and a girl vomiting because her mother poisoned her. Early on, a former patient shoots the doctor and then himself. A few s-words. Watch it twice; the second time is a different film.
Drag Me to Hell
Movie · 2009Sam Raimi's horror-comedy, for teens who think they're too old to be scared. A bank loan officer refuses an old woman an extension and has three days before a demon takes her soul; her fights with the woman, alive and dead, are funny and gross. The opening drags a boy into hell, and the heroine sacrifices her kitten, offscreen but audible. Two s-words, a muffled f-word, a bleak ending.
World War Z
Movie · 2013The zombie film for a teen who prefers action to dread. Brad Pitt's former UN investigator hunts for the plague's source around the world while his wife and daughters wait on a navy ship. Bites stay mostly offscreen and bloodless; the hard parts are crowds overrun, an outbreak on a plane, a bitten hand cut off and people who kill themselves rather than turn. About ten s-words.
Under the Shadow
Movie · 2016A good first subtitled horror film for a curious thirteen-year-old. Shideh, barred from finishing medical school over her past politics, is left alone with her young daughter in their Tehran building during the Iran-Iraq War, and the girl says a djinn is coming for her. The fear comes from a missile through the roof and a figure in a billowing chador, not from blood.
A Quiet Place
Movie · 2018Seen through a teenager's eyes, this is Regan's film: the eldest child, sure her father blames her for the family's loss, which makes it more than a monster movie. Emily Blunt and John Krasinski play the parents. The hardest scenes put children at risk: a small child killed early, two kids nearly smothered in a grain silo, a birth that must happen in silence, and a parent lost before their eyes.
No One Will Save You
Movie · 2023For teens who want something stranger than jump scares. Brynn, an outcast in her small town, fights off alien intruders in her house one night with barely a word spoken, so there's no swearing to worry about. The body horror is the issue: parasites crawling into mouths, people bent into impossible shapes. She stabs her way through, and a flashback shows the childhood fight that killed a girl, a guilt she still carries.
Five Nights at Freddy's
Movie · 2023Josh Hutcherson plays Mike, a struggling security guard raising his little sister, Abby; he takes the night shift at a closed-down pizzeria. The animatronic mascots look goofy until they kill, mostly in the dark, though one woman is bitten in half. The creepiest part: the ghosts of children killed there, trying to lure Abby, and Mike's guilt over a brother snatched years ago. Our guide puts the 2025 sequel at fourteen.
Psycho
Movie · 1960The R is misleading: it was re-rated in 1984, and the film has no profanity; its two murders are fast black-and-white cuts, with no wounds shown in the shower and only a bloodied face on the stairs. Fourteen also covers a couple in their underwear after a lunchtime tryst, a man spying on a woman undressing, and a corpse revealed near the end. It ties mental illness to violence, worth a conversation.
The Ring
Movie · 2002The American remake of a Japanese film, and the one that put a ghost girl crawling out of a TV into a generation's nightmares. The reporter's young son watches the cursed tape too, putting a child in danger throughout. Fourteen is for two suicides, a horse leaping off a ferry, and a girl murdered by her adoptive mother. Expect about ten s-words, an f-word and teen drug jokes.
Insidious
Movie · 2010One of the scariest PG-13 films around, and the reason our guide says fourteen rather than thirteen. Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne play parents whose son won't wake up, and the answer lies in a dark spirit realm the film calls the Further. A séance turns violent, a woman is strangled, a ghost girl is seen shooting her family, and a clawed, crimson-faced demon stalks the boy. One f-word, no sex.
The Final Girls
Movie · 2015The slasher, taken apart for laughs: Max and her friends are trapped inside a corny 1980s summer-camp movie and must work out its rules to survive the masked killer. Fourteen is for the content around the kills: frequent virginity jokes, a striptease with no nudity, some s-words, and characters drinking, smoking and popping Adderall. A severed head turns up in a fridge, but the grief over Max's mother hits harder.
Lights Out
Movie · 2016Its monster is a long-clawed figure who can only attack in the dark, and she's tied to a mother with depression who has stopped taking her medication. That's why it's here at fourteen: the ending turns on a suicide by gunshot presented as a sacrifice, worth talking through afterward. Also: a couple in bed after sex, with a brief topless glimpse, a bong in one shot, one f-word and about five s-words.
The Orphanage
Movie · 2007The one 15+ pick, for a teen who loved The Sixth Sense and wants something sadder. Laura returns to the orphanage of her own childhood to reopen it, and her adopted son, Simón, vanishes. In Spanish, with no sex and one subtitled f-word; the age is for dead children, a child in a sack mask, a woman's jaw torn away when a vehicle hits her, and a deliberate overdose shown as peaceful.
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Picks are editorial recommendations. Streaming availability changes by region and over time — the “where to stream” links check current availability on JustWatch.