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.

16 of 35

46.0 #18: Omen

One of the least gory of the franchises on our list, The Omen nevertheless follows a familiar pattern: great first film in the '70s, and not much to speak of after that. That first film was directed by Richard Donner and stars Gregory Peck, whose son, Damien, happens to be the Antichrist. Neither Donner nor Peck (nor the original Damien, Harvey Spencer Stephens) returned for the inevitable (and inevitably inferior) sequels in 1978 and 1981, though the third film did feature a then-unknown Sam Neill as Damien, marking his first major role outside of Australia. The inevitable remake arrived in 2006 courtesy of director John Moore (A Good Day to Die Hard), but not even a 06/06/06 release date could help it achieve more than very slight success, and there have been no further films since.

The franchise has crossed over to the small screen twice. In 1991, the nascent Fox network aired a made-for-TV sequel (Omen IV: The Awakening) that served as the fourth and final film in the original series. (It's not included in our average score, but it's safe to say it wasn't any good.) In 2016, the A&E network, as part of a short-lived move into drama programming, aired the TV series adaptation Damien. That show received poor reviews and was canceled after one season.

The films:
62 The Omen (1976)
45 Damien: Omen II (1978)
34 Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981)
43 The Omen (2006)

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