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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40.8 #26: Piranha

Critics found something to like in the Roger Corman-produced, 1978 B-movie Jaws spoof/homage Piranha, admiring the tongue-in-cheek tone created by director Joe Dante and screenwriter John Sayles (both near the beginning of their lengthy, successful careers). But they found little redeeming about any of the film's three sequels. (There was also a made-for-TV 1995 remake, also called Piranha, not included in our average score.)

The first sequel, 1981's Piranha II, is notable for one reason: It's the feature-length directorial debut from a man who would go on to become perhaps the most financially successful filmmaker in history, James Cameron. His film was so bad that it took 29 years for a third Piranha to surface.

The films:
71 Piranha (1978)
15 Piranha II: The Spawning (1981)
53 Piranha 3D (2010)
24 Piranha 3DD (2012)

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