A terahertz bandpass filter with the sandwich structure consisting of thermally tunable vanadium dioxide (VO₂) thin film, silica substrate and subwavelength rectangular Cu hole arrays is designed and theoretically analyzed. The results show that the transmittance of the filter can be actively tuned by controlling the temperature of VO₂, the narrow band terahertz (THz) waves with the transmittance from 85.2% to 10.5% can be well selected at the frequency of 1.25 THz when the temperature changes from 50 ℃ to 80 ℃, and the maximum modulation depth of this terahertz bandpass filter can achieve 74.7%.