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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63.3 #4: Evil Dead

Well before he would achieve major success directing Spider-Men (Spiders-Man?) 1, 2, and 3, Sam Raimi got his start with a few low-budget indies. His second feature was just such a film: a humorous and inventive supernatural horror tale starring Bruce Campbell as Ash Williams, who is forced to repeatedly battle his friends and loved ones after they become possessed by a demon. That film, and Raimi's two slightly higher-budget sequels, are now considered the primary example of the phrase "cult classic."

Following Army of Darkness, Raimi's plans for a fourth film never came to fruition, though he did continue Ash's story in the recent, well-reviewed television series Ash vs. Evil Dead, which starred Campbell and just concluded a three-season run on Starz. Campbell also briefly appeared as Ash in 2013 in Fede Alvarez's bloodier but less humorous franchise reboot Evil Dead, which mainly focused on the new character of Mia, played by Jane Levy.

Though it's not part of the franchise, 2008's My Name Is Bruce found Campbell playing off of his fame as the star of Evil Dead in his own meta horror comedy. And does the Evil Dead franchise have a bunch of unlicensed Italian "sequels," (aka knockoffs) including one starring David Hasselhoff and Linda Blair? Why yes, it does.

The films:
70 The Evil Dead (1981)
69 Evil Dead II (1987)
57 Army of Darkness (1992)
57 Evil Dead (2013)

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