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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64.8 #3: Psycho

You won't find a higher Metascore anywhere on this list than that 97 for Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 masterpiece Psycho, a low-budget, black-and-white adaptation of Robert Bloch's 1959 novel starring Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh. Shocking for its time (and still highly effective today), Psycho is perhaps the first slasher film in history and contains a shower scene so iconic that it received its own documentary.

After Hitchcock's death, Psycho received two belated sequels. Of course they weren't as good, though they are surprisingly decent—especially Psycho III, directed by Perkins himself. That film, however, was a commercial dud, which meant the fourth film (1990's Psycho IV: The Beginning) was a made-for-television affair. Then, in one of the most inexplicable moves in film history, director Gus Van Sant decided to film a shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's original. The result, released in 1998 to tepid reviews and little interest from moviegoers, featured Vince Vaughn in Perkins' role as Norman Bates and Anne Heche taking Leigh's role as Marion Crane.

A better tribute to the original came on the small screen in the form of Bates Motel, a prequel series centering on a young Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore) that ran for five seasons on A&E.

The films:
97 Psycho (1960)
54 Psycho II (1983)
61 Psycho III (1986)
47 Psycho (1998)

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