Collection Spotlight: Horror Marathon, Anyone?
Photo: New Line Cinema
Ranker list collections take some of the most interesting content and competitive rankings around a given subject and put them in one place for easy perusal. They’re a great way for our readers to explore everything Ranker has to offer on their topics of interest, from NBA players, to television comedy, or in this case, to horror movie franchises. But they also tell us what the consensus among a given fan base or audience is about some of the topic’s most hot-button questions.
With tens of thousands of horror fans voting on lists like The Best Horror Movie Franchises, these collections can be an incredible resource for studios and entertainment marketers hoping to better understand their audience. We’re taking a look at our collection “Horror Marathon, Anyone?” to learn more about how fans of horror mega-franchises feel. As we’ve discovered in the past, these franchise fans are distinct from fans of newer, more cerebral indies like Midsommar and It Follows. But with both Pet Sematary: Bloodlines and The Exorcist: Believer debuting just in the last few months, reaching these fans is only getting more important in Hollywood. Let’s dive into what these fans really love — and hate — about these franchises.
Is the First Movie Always the Best One?
Photo: Paramount Pictures
The “Horror Marathon, Anyone?” collection is largely made up of lists that ask readers to decide which films in a given horror franchise qualify as the saga’s best. These lists include rankings of the best movies in the Saw, Friday the 13th, Child’s Play, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and Scream franchises, and even the parody Scary Movie franchise. The conventional wisdom holds that no sequel can be better than the original, but did that hold true for this famously sequel-heavy genre?
The short answer is, “yes.” For all but one franchise, the movie at the top of each list was the first to be released — for Scary Movie, the list reads in chronological order with Scary Movie ranked #1 and Scary Movie 5 ranked #5. But some franchise fans appear to be more tolerant of new takes on their favorite material than others.
Fans of the Saw franchise, for example, put Saw, Saw II, and Saw III in the top three respective spots. The order varies somewhat after that, with the recently released Saw X already ranking at #5. But rounding out the bottom of the list are Jigsaw (#8), Spiral (#9), and Saw 3D (#10), the three Saw movies that attempted to break from the franchise’s tradition in some way. The Scream franchise’s fans are slightly more forgiving, putting the more recent Screams V and VI ahead of 2000’s Scream III, while still giving the MTV series Scream the last spot.
Halloween, NIghtmare on Elm Street, and Child’s Play all give some favorable rankings to newer sequels: 2017’s Curse of Chucky and the SyFy show CHUCKY sit at #3 and #4, respectively, on their list; Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is ranked #3 on its list; David Gordon Green’s 2018 “requel” is #3 on the Halloween list. But only the Friday the 13th list has a sequel at the top: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter is considered the best of the franchise by the 2,000 fans who voted on it. In fact, the 1980 original is all the way down at #4.
Best and Worst Sequels
Photo: Universal Pictures
Now that we’ve accepted the premise that most reboots don’t live up to their predecessors, let’s see which sequels proved exceptions to the rule — and which ones didn’t.
At the top of our list of The Best Horror Movie Sequels (96K votes) is Aliens, a movie that is right up there with The Godfather II in terms of its ability to provoke arguments over whether the sequel is actually better than the original. Rounding out the rest of the Top 5 are two Evil Dead movies — Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness — as well as Night of the Living Dead sequel Dawn of the Dead and Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects, a follow-up to House of 1,000 Corpses. It isn’t until #6 that we see some entries from the franchises discussed earlier, with Nightmare on Elm Street at #6, Friday the 13th Part II at #7, and Split, a sequel to M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable.
But a lot of these movies are universally regarded as fantastic sequels — what about the movies that deserve more recognition? Our list of Underrated Horror Remakes That Are Actually Worth Watching (6K votes) has the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead at the top, followed by the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead. Meanwhile, the #1 movie on our list of Which Horror Movie Franchises Deserve More Attention Than They Get (5K votes) is the Evil Dead franchise. Then, there are the horror sequels recognized for being particularly bad. Our list of 16 Movie Sequels So Horribly Bad, They Almost Ruined The Original Movies (3K votes) has The Birds II: Land’s End at the very top, followed by S. Darko, Jaws: The Revenge, and American Psycho II.
What Have We Learned?
The results of these lists tell us that horror fans still bring plenty of skepticism to each new reboot of their beloved franchises. But they’re also willing to acknowledge and support well-done reboots, from the 2004 Dawn of the Dead, to the 2018 Halloween, to CHUCKY. And most important, they’re highly opinionated, coming out in droves to see whatever new iterations of their favorite horror sagas are hitting theaters, then voting them up and down on Ranker.
Oh, and we also learned that the #1 franchise on The Best Horror Franchises is Halloween — at least, that’s the conclusion 11,000 of our voters came to.