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.

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59.4 #7: King Kong

With a climax that features a giant ape climbing the Empire State Building, swatting at planes, and clutching a woman (Fay Wray) in his oversized paw, RKO's 1933 film King Kong is one of the most iconic movies in cinema history as well as one of the best-reviewed horror films of all time.

Kong would return to the big screen for an immediate (inferior) sequel that same year, but his further cinematic adventures would occur sporadically after that, with lengthy dormant periods. The ensuing films were often remakes of the original that would take advantage of the latest special effects technology, though they also include some productions from Japan's Toho, including a crossover with the Godzilla franchise. The best film following the 1933 original is Peter Jackson's expensive 2005 remake, which featured a motion-capture Kong played by Andy Serkis. In 2017, Jordan Vogt-Roberts's decent Kong: Skull Island served as the second film in a new "MonsterVerse" franchise that launched with the 2014 Godzilla remake and will feature both monsters in additional films going forward.

Note that we could not calculate a score for 1967's King Kong Escapes, which only has 3 reviews available.

The films:
90 King Kong (1933)
50 The Son of Kong (1933)
40 King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)
61 King Kong (1976)
32 King Kong Lives (1986)
81 King Kong (2005)
62 Kong: Skull Island (2017)

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