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.

13 of 35

43.3 #21: The Hills Have Eyes

The least successful of Wes Craven's slasher franchises (and we'll get to the others a bit later in this list), Hills includes just four films, but they are spread out over a 30-year period. Craven himself directed the first two, including the sole positively reviewed chapter: the 1977 cult classic about a vacationing family targeted by mutant cannibals. Craven produced but did not direct the inevitable 2006 remake, with Alexandre Aja taking over behind the camera. That film performed well enough to merit a sequel the following year (directed by Martin Weisz, who hasn't worked much since), but the result was a critical and commercial dud, putting an end to the series for now.

An unofficial fifth Hills film, titled Mind Ripper, was made for HBO in 1995. That film was produced by Craven and promoted as a follow-up to The Hills Have Eyes Part II, but it doesn't really share anything with the other films in the series.

The films:
64 The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
25 The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1985)
52 The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
32 The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007)

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