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.

22 of 35 photo by Warner Bros.

50.8 #12: The Exorcist

Yet another franchise to follow the by-now-familiar template of great first movie in the 1970s and not much to speak of after that, The Exorcist's first film really is great. Directed by William Friedkin (with writer William Peter Blatty faithfully adapting his own best-selling book), 1973's The Exorcist is an all-time classic of supernatural cinematic horror, collecting 10 Oscar nominations (including one for best picture, marking a first for the horror genre) following a massively successful run in theaters.

But after that? Yeah, not much to speak of. The first sequel, arriving four years later from director John Boorman, is a truly terrible movie and a commercial disappointment. It would take another 13 years for the third film to arrive, and that one (directed by Blatty himself) was a bit better, though a conflict between the director and the studio over the final edit probably didn't help the final product. The following century, Paul Schrader was brought in to direct a prequel, but he was fired toward the end of filming and replaced with Renny Harlin, who wound up re-shooting the entire film. Eventually, each of their visions would find their way to the big screen, and while Schrader's (Dominion) was by far the better of the two, neither was good. In fact, the only Exorcist follow-up to secure decent reviews was the recent television series spinoff, which ran for two seasons on Fox.

The films:
82 The Exorcist (1973)
39 Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
48 The Exorcist III (1990)
30 Exorcist: The Beginning (2004)
55 Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (2005)

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