2026's Most Surprising Movie Monster Is A Perfect Kind Of Terrifying

Published Oct 14, 2026, 12:45 PM EDT Zoë Miskelly is an editor and second in command for Screen Rant's Movies team, having covered the entertainment industry for almost 10 years now. Zoë's love of superheroes and all things Marvel & DC started out in childhood, and has blossomed into a career getting to talk about some of the biggest and best movies and shows of all time, having previously focused on comics while working at WhatCulture. Sign in to your ScreenRant account One of 2026's new harrowing-looking horror movies manages to make a terrifying film antagonist out of a surprising place. Over the years, the world of horror has made just about everything imaginable into a source of major scares, including many concepts that would be some of the last possible ideas most people would have in terms of what might frighten them. For example, Perfect Blue made the concept of being a singer and performer into the subject of surreal horror, The Loved Ones made prom proposals the source of infinite terror, and even some of our oldest horror classics take a route less expected, with The Birds famously making its avian subject matter scarier than many other films make far bigger threats. This trend is set to continue onwards thanks to 2026's horror movies. We've already gotten some suitably surreal and unconventional horrors in the form of hits like Backrooms and Obsession, and one of the genre's even more unpredictable releases manages to follow a similar path in terms of ensuring that the central source of its horror comes in a form you simply wouldn't be able to imagine being scary without having seen some of the film itself first. New Group Makes A School Gymnastics Group Into A Terrifying Horror Movie Monster There are plenty of concepts that are naturally primed for horror movies, with ghosts, ghouls, and unhinged axe murderers all being obvious candidates for spooky antagonists. New Group takes a very different approach, though, with its horror being centered around a school wherein many of the students appear to have formed a hivemind of sorts that is tied to their gymnastics practice, leading them to move around less as separate humans, and more as one multi-limbed entity when they decide the time calls for it - or rather, when the principal who appears to be controlling them calls for it. As the New Group trailer shows, this proves to be decidedly unsettling for a whole host of reasons, and gives the movie's protagonists a challenging moral quandary to consider, as the actual students who are part of this faction don't appear to have any free will themselves. This means doing harm to them would be hurting an innocent victim, making things all the more complex, and all the more interesting for those who decide to watch the movie on Shudder when it releases on the platform on November 6, 2026, following its previous release in cinemas in June 2026. Why New Group's Gymnastics Group Is So Terrifying Much in the same way that horror monsters for decades have been shaped into unsettling forms in order to put audiences on edge, New Group having a bunch of people function as one is prime terror territory, particularly with the knowledge that they don't seem to do so of their own individual accords, and that they can move as one bigger, troubling-looking entity. Similarly, New Group's premise and antagonistic forces make this whole idea much more troubling on a deeper level, as the subject matter of a grown adult in a position of power over students controlling them as a mindless seeming mass does appear to work as a symbolic exploration of topics like abuse and grooming, and makes the concept of the group all the more unsettling because of what it might mean on this level for the impending horror movie. New Group Release Date October 1, 2025 Runtime 82 minutes Director Yuta Shimotsu