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.

28 of 35 photo by 20th Century Fox

59.5 #6: Alien

With direction from Ridley Scott, creature design from H.R. Giger, and a star turn from then-unknown Sigourney Weaver, the 1979 classic Alien not only kicked off an ongoing multimedia franchise, it effectively created a new genre: the outer space horror film.

What followed can be broken down into three distinct groups. Alien itself received three (somewhat belated) sequels featuring Weaver's character, Ripley. James Cameron's Aliens quickly established itself as another classic, and boasts the highest Metascore and highest box office gross (adjusting for inflation) in the franchise. David Fincher made his directorial debut with the third film—the only one of the sequels without a green Metascore—while French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's fourth film received slightly better reviews though was a box office disappointment.

Overall, those four Alien films averaged an impressive 72.3. A pair of crossover films with the Predator franchise, however, each scored a lowly 29. Director Scott returned to the franchise with a pair of prequels in recent years, averaging 64.5 between them.

The films:
83 Alien (1979)
84 Aliens (1986)
59 Alien 3 (1992)
63 Alien Resurrection (1997)
29 Alien vs. Predator (2004)
29 Aliens vs. Predator - Requiem (2007)
64 Prometheus (2012)
65 Alien: Covenant (2017)

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