Horror Movie Franchises, Ranked

by Jason Dietz, Metacritic Features Editor – October 22, 2018

If you've ever glanced at our site before, you are probably well aware of the fact that horror movies receive poor reviews from professional critics far more often than they receive praise. Nevertheless, could there be some horror franchises that have distinguished themselves in the eyes of reviewers?

To find out, we have ranked every horror movie franchise by the average Metascore for all of the films in the franchise. (We are only including franchises with a minimum of four films with Metascores.) The results can be viewed in the gallery above.

Note that there is a major caveat: At some point, many horror franchises stop releasing films in theaters and switch to a direct-to-video model. (Or they choose that route from the beginning.) Those straight-to-home-video films tend not to get reviewed by our usual group of critics, and thus we are unable to calculate a Metascore for those films. (Metascores require at least four reviews.) As a result, several long-running horror franchises did not hit our four-films-with-scores minimum and are not included in our ranking. These excluded franchises include:

Critters (only 2 scored films: Critters and Critters 2)

Phantasm (3 scored: Phantasm, Phantasm II, Phantasm V)

Prom Night (3 scored: Prom Night and its 2008 remake, plus Prom Night II)

Puppet Master (of the 13 films, only this year's The Littlest Reich has a score)

Return of the Living Dead (2 of the 5 films first debuted on TV and don't have scores)

... as well as Anaconda, Children of the Corn, Lake Placid, Leprechaun, Pumpkinhead, Silent Night, Tremors, and Wrong Turn, to name a few.

Also excluded are a few very old franchises (like Universal's 1930s/40s Frankenstein series) and foreign franchises that don't have at least four films with proper American theatrical releases. This latter group includes various Japanese monster movie properties as well as more recent titles like Ju-on and The Ring.

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24.8 #33: Friday the 13th

It appears that nothing frightens critics more than the prospect of seeing another Friday the 13th film. To date, there have been a dozen releases (plus three seasons of a syndicated television series) in the slasher film franchise—each centering in some way on the character of Jason Voorhees, often wearing a hockey mask and played by a different actor in almost every film—and every one of them has been savaged by reviewers, resulting in a string of blood-red Metascores.

But those horrific reviews certainly haven't stopped Friday the 13th from developing one of the most devoted fanbases in the genre. As a result, almost all of the films have been profitable, and, adjusting for inflation, the series has grossed over $800 million to date. A planned sequel to the 2009 reboot was put on hold more due to a conflict between rightsholders than to any lack of performance, though it seems very likely that the franchise will continue once the legalities are sorted out. (LeBron James, of all people, is currently in talks to produce a new reboot.) If any series was meant to reach 13 films, it's probably this one.

The films:
22 Friday the 13th (1980)
26 Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
30 Friday the 13th Part III (1982)
33 Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)
16 Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)
30 Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
13 Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
14 Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
17 Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
25 Jason X (2001)
37 Freddy vs. Jason (2003)
34 Friday the 13th (2009)

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