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.

11 of 35

42.0 #23 (tie): Texas Chainsaw Massacre

It's yet another horror franchise that started with a well-reviewed '70s hit but never produced another solid release. Tobe Hooper's at-the-time controversial 1974 film, which introduced the cannibal murderer Leatherface (very loosely based on real-life killer Ed Gein), turned out to be a trailblazer of the slasher genre and is widely considered one of the all-time horror greats. But though it was a financial success—to the point where there was even an Atari 2600 spinoff game—it took a dozen years for the first sequel to arrive. That film, and the installments that followed (which eliminated the space in "chain saw"), were even more violent, but critics never took to them like they did to the first. The most recent installment, 2017's Leatherface, was a prequel that barely even reached theaters, and the future of the franchise is now uncertain.

Hooper would spend virtually his entire career in the horror genre, though he would only find critical acclaim one additional time: with 1982's Poltergeist.

The films:
75 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
42 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)
30 Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990)
50 Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995)
38 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
30 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006)
31 Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013)
40 Leatherface (2017)

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