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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66.5 #2: Night of the Living Dead (Romero)

While the zombie movie has been around since the 1930s, that horror subgenre didn't get started in earnest until George Romero's 1968 breakthrough Night of the Living Dead, which established the template that pretty much every zombie film has followed in the 50 years since. (An oversight by the studio, by the way, means that Romero's film is in the public domain, so you can easily find it online anytime you wish to watch it.)

Over the next four decades, Romero would direct five more films in his Dead series, each one in a different setting with its own characters and self-contained zombie story that served as social commentary on issues of the day. Most of the films in the series were greeted with positive reviews from critics, which, as you know if you have paged through this gallery, is a rarity, indeed.

We are including only Romero's films in the average above, since they exist as a discrete series. Excluded are non-Romero remakes of several of the Dead films. This group includes 1990's lackluster Night of the Living Dead from director Tom Savini, Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead in 2004, Steve Miner's effectively straight-to-video Day of the Dead in 2008, and 2018's Day of the Dead: Bloodline.

The original 1968 film was co-written by Romero and John Russo, and a falling out between the two men led to Russo writing his own sequel (as a novel) to the original film, titled Return of the Living Dead. Little of that novel remained in the decently reviewed film version directed by Dan O'Bannon and released in 1985. A sequel to that film, Return of the Living Dead 2, followed three years later, with a third film in 1993. Two additional straight-to-video titles arrived in 2005.

The films:
88 Night of the Living Dead (1968)
71 Dawn of the Dead (1978)
60 Day of the Dead (1985)
71 Land of the Dead (2005)
66 Diary of the Dead (2007)
43 Survival of the Dead (2009)

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