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.

21 of 35 photo by New Line Cinema

50.3 #13: Nightmare on Elm Street

One of the most iconic horror series in history thanks to its memorably terrifying central figure, the burnt, razor-fingered serial killer turned dream-invading demon Freddy Krueger (played usually by Robert Englund), Elm Street might be Wes Craven's most successful (or at least most prolific) creation, ultimately spanning nine feature films and one television series (Freddy's Nightmares, which ran in syndication for two seasons from 1988-90).

Craven himself directed only two of the films (and co-wrote a third). Unsurprisingly, those were the only two in the entire series to receive positive reviews from critics. The two most recent chapters, a 2003 crossover with the Friday the 13th series and a Michael Bay-produced 2010 remake of the original film with Jackie Earle Haley playing Freddy, were both panned by reviewers and longtime fans. The series could be rebooted again in the future.

The films:
76 A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
43 A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
49 A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
56 A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
54 A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)
39 Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
64 Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)
37 Freddy vs. Jason (2003)
35 A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Where To Buy