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.

2 of 35 photo by MGM

33.0 #32: Amityville Horror

Originating, like many franchises on this list, in the 1970s, this haunted house series has its origins in a 1977 book by Jay Anson, which in turn claims to be based on the real-life experiences of the Lutz family in Amityville, New York. Critics at the time dismissed the original film despite a decent cast (James Brolin, Margot Kidder, Rod Steiger) and an Oscar-nominated score from the great Lalo Schifrin, but audiences took to it, making it one of the highest-grossing independent films in history. (Box Office Mojo estimates its inflation-adjusted box office haul at an impressive $314 million.)

And you can't have a box office hit without a sequel. Two less financially successful titles followed in the ensuing years (including the obligatory third film in 3D), with a remake arriving in 2005, followed by a reboot/reimagining in 2017. (The latter is most distinguished by its domestic box office gross: $742.00.) Not included in our official tally are another 13 (!) loosely connected films that were released straight to video (or, in the case of 1989's Amityville 4, made for television). Also not included in the average is a 2013 documentary in which one of the Lutz family members recounts the 1970s events in his home that led to all of the above.

The films:
28 The Amityville Horror (1979)
34 Amityville II: The Possession (1982)
28 Amityville 3-D (1983)
33 The Amityville Horror (2005)
42 Amityville: The Awakening (2017)

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