Maika Monroe’s essential horror movies are It Follows (2014), Longlegs (2024), Watcher (2022) and The Guest (2014), with Villains, Significant Other and Tau rounding out her genre work. We rank all seven below, with spoiler-free picks, honest scare levels and where each film lives, plus a full list of her other films for anyone tracking the rest of her career.
Who Is Maika Monroe?
Monroe was born Dillon Monroe Buckley in Santa Barbara, California, in 1993. She spent her teens competing as a kiteboarder, which matters more than a trivia note suggests. Her performances rely on physical stillness and controlled breathing. Her characters watch, wait and react late, and that restraint is why audiences believe her terror when it finally breaks through.
Her early roles came in prestige dramas: Ramin Bahrani’s At Any Price (2012), Jason Reitman’s Labor Day (2013) and a small part in Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013). Then 2014 brought two genre films within months of each other. The Guest and It Follows established her as a modern horror icon, and a decade later Longlegs confirmed it.
Maika Monroe Movies at a Glance
The table covers every horror and genre-adjacent film we recommend, ranked by how strongly we’d push each one on a horror fan. Streaming homes rotate often and differ by region, so we list US services where a film has a stable home and digital rental where it moves around.
| Rank | Title | Year | Subgenre | Scare level | Where to watch (US) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | It Follows | 2014 | Supernatural slow-burn | 4/5 | Rent or buy digitally |
| 2 | Longlegs | 2024 | Occult serial-killer procedural | 4/5 | Hulu; rent or buy |
| 3 | Watcher | 2022 | Paranoid stalker thriller | 3/5 | Shudder, AMC+ |
| 4 | The Guest | 2014 | Synth-scored action horror | 2/5 | Rent or buy digitally |
| 5 | Villains | 2019 | Horror comedy | 2/5 | Rent or buy digitally |
| 6 | Significant Other | 2022 | Sci-fi horror | 2/5 | Paramount+ |
| 7 | Tau | 2018 | Sci-fi captivity thriller | 1/5 | Netflix |
1. It Follows (2014)
David Robert Mitchell’s second feature premiered in Cannes Critics’ Week in May 2014 and reached US theaters through RADiUS-TWC in March 2015. Monroe plays Jay Height, a Detroit-area college student who learns that a slow, shape-shifting entity is now walking toward her, and that it will never stop. The premise sounds like a campfire story, yet Mitchell films it with wide, patient frames that turn every background extra into a possible threat. We spend the whole runtime scanning the edges of the screen, and that habit follows us home.
Monroe carries this with remarkably little dialogue. Her performance lives in glances over the shoulder and in the exhaustion that builds as Jay stops sleeping. Disasterpeace’s droning synth score does half the work, and the timeless production design (old cars, a seashell e-reader, black-and-white monster movies on CRT televisions) keeps the film from dating. For newer horror fans this is the right starting point: genuinely unnerving, almost bloodless, and built on dread rather than shock.
If you liked this
The Babadook (2014) for grief turned into a monster that refuses to leave.
Under the Silver Lake (2018) for Mitchell’s own paranoid follow-up, starring Andrew Garfield.
Smile (2022) for another curse passed from person to person, with louder scares.
2. Longlegs (2024)
Osgood Perkins wrote and directed this 1990s-set occult procedural, released by Neon in July 2024 after one of the most talked-about marketing campaigns in recent horror. Cryptic teasers and coded messages built curiosity without showing much, and the film went on to earn more than $100 million worldwide, an extraordinary figure for an original indie horror. Monroe plays FBI agent Lee Harker, a socially withdrawn rookie with possible psychic instincts, assigned to a string of family murder-suicides connected by coded letters signed “Longlegs.”
Nicolas Cage takes the title role under heavy prosthetics, and his scenes are as unhinged as the trailers promised. The film belongs to Monroe, though. Harker is clenched and almost affectless, a performance pitched against Cage’s chaos, and her flat reactions make the film colder and stranger than a typical serial-killer thriller. Perkins frames her in boxy, symmetrical compositions that leave too much empty space around her. Viewers who found The Silence of the Lambs too clinical and Hereditary too hysterical will find this sits right between them. Alicia Witt, as Harker’s mother, delivers some of the film’s most uncomfortable moments.
If you liked this
The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015) for Perkins’ earlier, quieter study in satanic dread.
Cure (1997) for Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s hypnotic detective story about killings nobody can explain.
Zodiac (2007) for the obsessive investigation side without the supernatural.
3. Watcher (2022)
Chloe Okuno’s feature debut premiered at Sundance in January 2022, played theaters through IFC Midnight that June and settled on Shudder. Monroe is Julia, an American actress who follows her husband (Karl Glusman) to Bucharest, where she speaks little Romanian and spends long days alone in a new apartment. She notices a figure in the window across the street, apparently watching her, while a serial killer known as “the Spider” is active in the city.
This is the most grounded film on our list and, for many viewers, the most relatable. Okuno builds tension out of being disbelieved: the husband who translates selectively, the police who smile politely, the neighbor who seems pleasant enough. Burn Gorman is unsettling in a near-wordless role. Monroe plays Julia’s growing doubt in her own perceptions with real precision, and the film quietly argues that dismissing a woman’s fear is its own form of violence. It suits viewers who want suspense over supernatural scares, and who can handle a final stretch that turns sharply nastier.
4. The Guest (2014)
Adam Wingard directed this from a Simon Barrett script, with a Sundance 2014 premiere and a Picturehouse release that autumn. Dan Stevens plays David, a polite, impossibly handsome soldier who turns up at a grieving New Mexico family’s door claiming he served with their late son. Monroe plays Anna Peterson, the daughter who suspects the charming stranger long before anyone else does.
The Guest is less a scary film than a gleeful one, mixing John Carpenter’s synth scores with the Terminator and Halloween’s small-town menace. Steve Moore’s soundtrack and a Halloween-maze finale make it a perfect group watch for people who like horror’s style more than its fright. Monroe’s Anna is sharp, funny and stubborn, a final girl who earns the title through suspicion rather than survival luck. This makes an ideal entry point for viewers who can’t handle sustained dread.
If you liked this
You’re Next (2011) for Wingard and Barrett’s earlier home-invasion party.
The Stepfather (1987) for the original charming-stranger-in-the-family nightmare.
Drive (2011) for the same neon, synth-drenched mood in a crime story.
5. Villains (2019)
Directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen and premiering at SXSW in 2019, Villains pairs Monroe with Bill Skarsgård as Jules and Mickey, a pair of lovestruck small-time robbers. Their getaway car runs out of gas, they break into a suburban house for supplies, and they find a chained child in the basement. The homeowners, played by Jeffrey Donovan and Kyra Sedgwick, turn out to be far worse than any burglar.
This is the lightest film here and the most purely fun. Monroe and Skarsgård have easy, goofy chemistry, and their sweetness makes the couple easy to root for even while they’re committing crimes. Sedgwick and Donovan play their roles like a sinister sitcom couple. It has a few nasty moments, but this is the pick for a couple who want laughs with their horror.
6. Significant Other (2022)
Berk and Olsen reunited with Monroe for this Paramount+ original, released in October 2022. She plays Ruth, an anxious woman on a backpacking trip through the Pacific Northwest with her boyfriend Harry (Jake Lacy), who plans to propose. Something strange has fallen from the sky, and the trip changes in ways we won’t spoil.
The less you know, the better it plays. The film’s first half is a tight two-hander about a couple who want different futures, and Monroe sells Ruth’s panic attacks and ambivalence about commitment convincingly. The second half leans into genre in a way some viewers will love and others will find too tidy. We rank it below Villains because the scares are mild and the ideas don’t quite land, but it remains an easy, accessible watch on a service many households already have.
7. Tau (2018)
Federico D’Alessandro’s Netflix original casts Monroe as Julia, a pickpocket abducted by a tech genius (Ed Skrein) and held in a smart house run by an AI named Tau, voiced by Gary Oldman. She survives by teaching the AI about the outside world and turning it against its creator.
Tau is a sci-fi thriller with horror’s captivity structure rather than true horror, and its reviews were rough. We include it because people who search for “Maika Monroe movies” often find it on Netflix, and because her scenes with Oldman’s voice performance have a sincerity the script doesn’t always deserve. Watch it only if you’re a completist or love AI stories; skip it otherwise.
The Full Maika Monroe Films List
Beyond horror, her filmography moves between studio blockbusters, coming-of-age dramas and political thrillers. These are her other notable feature films.
| Year | Title | Director | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | At Any Price | Ramin Bahrani | Drama |
| 2013 | Labor Day | Jason Reitman | Drama |
| 2013 | The Bling Ring | Sofia Coppola | Crime drama |
| 2016 | The 5th Wave | J Blakeson | YA sci-fi |
| 2016 | Independence Day: Resurgence | Roland Emmerich | Sci-fi blockbuster |
| 2017 | Bokeh | Geoffrey Orthwein, Andrew Sullivan | Sci-fi drama |
| 2017 | Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House | Peter Landesman | Political thriller |
| 2017 | Hot Summer Nights | Elijah Bynum | Crime drama |
| 2020 | Echo Boomers | Seth Savoy | Crime thriller |
The studio films (The 5th Wave and Independence Day: Resurgence) gave her visibility but little to do. Her best non-horror work is Hot Summer Nights, a hazy 1991 Cape Cod crime story opposite Timothée Chalamet, where she plays the town’s untouchable girl with a sharp, wary intelligence.
Why She Became Modern Horror’s Defining Final Girl
Horror has always had scream queens, from Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween (1978) through the slasher boom. Monroe belongs to a different lineage. Curtis’s Laurie Strode is resourceful and expressive; Monroe’s characters internalize everything. Jay, Julia and Lee Harker all spend long stretches watching something nobody else believes in, and the films make us share that isolation rather than cheer a fighting comeback.
Her peers took a different path. Mia Goth reached horror fame by playing both victim and monster in Ti West’s X trilogy, while Jenna Ortega became a franchise face through Scream and Wednesday. Monroe has stayed largely in auteur-driven, original projects, repeatedly collaborating with directors at turning points in their careers: Mitchell’s breakthrough, Okuno’s debut, Perkins’ commercial peak. Every one of her major horror films is an original story rather than a remake or sequel, which is rarer than it should be.
It Follows: The Ending and the Sequel
Spoiler warning
This section spoils the ending of It Follows (2014).
After the failed swimming-pool trap, where the entity appears to Jay in the form of her father, Jay sleeps with her childhood friend Paul, who has loved her for years. Paul is later seen driving slowly past sex workers, implying he is considering passing the curse on. The final shot shows Jay and Paul walking hand in hand down a suburban street, with a figure walking behind them in the distance. Mitchell never confirms whether it’s the entity or a stranger, and that ambiguity is the point: the dread doesn’t end, it simply becomes part of life.
That open door is now being walked through. In late 2024, distributor Neon officially announced They Follow, with Mitchell writing and directing and Monroe returning as Jay. This is an official, confirmed sequel, not rumor. Plot details and a release date remain under wraps, so we treat any specific claims about the story as speculation until Neon releases footage.
FAQ
What is Maika Monroe’s scariest movie?
It Follows and Longlegs tie at 4/5 on our scale, but they scare differently. It Follows builds slow, lingering dread with almost no gore, while Longlegs is colder, bloodier and has one truly brutal jump scare. Viewers sensitive to violence should start with It Follows.
Is Maika Monroe in It Follows 2?
Yes. Neon officially announced the sequel, titled They Follow, in late 2024, with Monroe returning as Jay Height and David Robert Mitchell writing and directing.
Which Maika Monroe movie is best for someone new to horror?
The Guest. It has thriller pacing, an ironic sense of fun and a great synth soundtrack, with violence rather than sustained fear. Once that lands, move on to It Follows.
Is Maika Monroe in Stranger Things?
No. She has never appeared in Stranger Things. Her genre reputation comes almost entirely from feature films, especially It Follows, The Guest, Watcher and Longlegs.
Was Maika Monroe really a professional kiteboarder?
Yes. She competed seriously as a teenager before acting took over, and she has spoken about the sport in interviews. Her physical control on screen, especially the stillness in It Follows and Longlegs, is easy to trace back to it.