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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69.3 #1: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Not so much a franchise as a series of remakes, the Body Snatchers films blend sci-fi and horror (and, for some observers, social commentary) with their tales of secret alien invasions that find plant-based alien invaders slowly replacing humans with emotionless, alien clones grown in pods. (Yes, that's the origin of the phrase "pod people.") Typically, the film's hero discovers the plan but finds it hard to convince others that it is indeed happening and is not just a paranoid delusion.

Based on a novel by Jack Finney, Don Siegel's black-and-white 1956 original is widely regarded now as all-time classic. Surprisingly, a larger-scale 1978 remake (starring Donald Sutherland, Leonard Nimoy, and a very young Jeff Goldblum) from director Philip Kaufman is also quite good, with the story proving to be a perfect match to the 1970s trend toward paranoid conspiracy thrillers.

While Kaufman's film is frequently cited as an example of a great Hollywood remake, Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers is not, though it received fairly good reviews upon its release in 1993. His film switched the setting from California to an Alabama army base and made some changes to the characters but otherwise retained elements from the earlier films and the book. In 2007, Oliver Hirschbiegel (Downfall) directed yet another remake that featured major stars (Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig) and a drastically different story. Critics dismissed the result as boring, brain-dead, and inept.

The films:
92 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
75 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
65 Body Snatchers (1993)
45 The Invasion (2007)

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