NEON's 'It Ends' Just Tied for 2026's Best-Reviewed Horror Movie — And It Didn't Need a Single Jump Scare

2026 has been a strange, glorious year for horror. First came Obsession, the low-budget hit from Focus Features that turned into an unlikely box-office juggernaut. Then Backrooms made liminal-space internet lore cinematic gold. And Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma drifted in from MUBI with a near-perfect score. Now a new film is forcing its way into the conversation: It Ends, a tiny existential road-trip nightmare from NEON that just hit 95% on Rotten Tomatoes — officially tying Camp Miasma for the best-reviewed horror movie of 2026.

A Road That Literally Never Ends

Here's the hook: a group of friends takes a wrong turn in the woods and ends up on a road that simply… never stops. No masked killer, no monster chase, no gore-soaked set pieces. Just an infinite stretch of forest highway and the slow, creeping realization that they might never get off it.

That's the feature debut of writer-director Alexander Ullom, and critics are genuinely impressed. Bloody Disgusting praised how Ullom "nestles an existential crisis within his genre-bending road trip thriller," while The Hollywood Reporter gave him credit for delivering "such a dubious high concept with plenty of directorial craft." If you've ever wished FROM leaned harder into pure dread and skipped the answers, this one's aimed straight at you.

The 2026 Horror Scoreboard Is a Bloodbath

The current critic rankings read like a war report:

• Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma – 95% (recently slipped from 99%)
• It Ends – 95%
• Obsession – 94%
• Send Help – 93%
• Leviticus – 92%
• 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple – 91%
• Hokum – 88%
• Backrooms – 87%

Meanwhile, some heavy hitters are eating dirt at the bottom of the list. Evil Dead Burn is stuck at a rough 71%, Warner Bros.' They Will Kill You managed just 65%, and Whistle bottoms out at 63%. Turns out money can't buy scares — and with roughly five dozen reviews already counted, It Ends' score isn't moving anywhere fast.

What makes this little movie's rise so satisfying is what it represents. While the big studios keep betting nine figures on legacy sequels and franchise reboots, NEON keeps scooping up weird, mid-budget originals and letting word of mouth do the heavy lifting — the same playbook that carried Parasite and Longlegs to worldwide fame. Quiet horror doesn't need jump scares to win the year; sometimes it just needs one impossible road.

It Ends is out now via NEON. Do yourself a favor: skip the trailers, avoid the spoilers, and take that wrong turn blind.