What’s the greatest slasher-movie franchise of all time?
Round One: Freddy, Jason, Michael, Chucky, and more square off to start our 32-series tournament
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No slasher-movie killer ever really dies. Just ask the unlucky teens of Elm Street, Haddonfield, or Camp Crystal Lake. So long as a monster stays in the black and keeps making the green, it will return to spill the red. Even when these fiends outlive their profitability, the door to their crypt stays open a crack; they can always be brought back to terrorize a new generation in a belated sequel, prequel, remake, or reboot. (Michael Myers, for example, is currently enjoying an umpteenth resurrection in Halloween Kills. And he’ll be back next year with Halloween Ends, a film destined to join The Final Nightmare and The Final Chapter in false advertising hell.)
The slasher movie, that disreputable cycle of masked maniacs making mincemeat out of the randy (and Randy), has itself proven rather impossible to kill. Nearly as impossible as saying when, exactly, the craze started. Does it go back to Psycho and Peeping Tom, twin 1960 progenitors of voyeuristic terror? To Herschell Gordon Lewis or the Italian giallo? To that ’70s trifecta of body-count horror, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Black Christmas, and Halloween? Opinions vary wildly on the subject. Regardless, there’s no denying that the subgenre hit peak saturation in the 1980s, drumming up reliable box office and the outrage of Moral Majority types incensed by the sight of, say, a bloodthirsty lunatic in a Santa Claus costume.
The slasher went the way of hair metal at the onset of the ’90s. But it keeps coming back through self-referential revivals, torture-porn variations, and streaming, zoomer-courting nostalgia trips. What’s really kept the trend alive, though, is franchising—the relentless attempt to squeeze every last penny out of every escaped monstrosity or madman.
Which got us thinking. It’s pretty self-evident what the best slasher movies are. (See that ’70s trifecta above, along with some gloved, hooked, and hooded descendents from the years after.) But what about the best slasher series? Put another way: Which iconic hellspawn of the VHS era and beyond has the best track record, the best run, the best batting/macheting/axing/sawing average?
That’s what we set out to decide with the Ultimate Slasher Franchise Tournament, a five-round, single-elimination battle royale. Over the next five days, 32 franchises—properly seeded by popularity, acclaim, and a general, unscientific sense of just how crappy they get in the later sequels—will duke it out for the title of the best slasher-movie series of them all. Each day, the crop of contenders is halved, until only two franchises remain at the end. We’ll crown a winner on Friday—not the 13th, alas, but just two days removed from Halloween. Take a look at our March Madness-style bracket below.
Some ground rules were naturally laid. For a series to qualify, it had to contain at least two entries. (The Burning is a cult classic, but without any encore killing sprees, one-and-done Cropsey has to sit this reaping out.) We did allow remakes and reboots for consideration, and even took into some account migrations to the small screen, though most of those nightmares in TV land could really only hurt a series. And we stayed fairly conservative on the definition of slasher, give or take a pack of S&M demons and a villain who doesn’t so much stalk his prey as drop them into elaborate death traps. In the end, it came down to: Is there a killer, human or supernatural? And do they knock off a bunch of people, one by one?
Today, we cull the herd as ruthlessly as a vengeful phantom loosed on a summer camp of promiscuous counselors. Tomorrow, we move on to the sweet 16; Wednesday to the elite eight; Thursday to the final four; and Friday to the championship match.
But, hey, what the hell do we know? In acknowledgement that one person’s fear street is another’s boredom boulevard—and also that critics have, historically, been a little tough on the lowly slasher—we’re giving you the opportunity to decide the winners in a parallel readers’ poll; scroll down to the bottom of each day’s post to vote for your own favorites and see how the two brackets diverge.
As for the losers, the franchises that don’t move on today, don’t cry too hard for them. They’re slashers. They always come back.
Halloween vs. Urban Legend
Winner: Halloween
Every slasher movie requires some cannon fodder, and placed up against the granddaddy of them all, Urban Legend is as doomed as a cheerleader running screaming through the woods. The original Urban Legend does have a certain coarse charm, typical of the nü-metal-inflected wave of neo-slashers that emerged in the late ’90s. But the premise wore itself out quickly—a charge you could also level against Halloween and its uneven sequels. Now we’re back at the beginning, and when it comes to craft, suspense, characters, and staying power, Urban Legend simply cannot keep up with John Carpenter’s genre-defining original. [Katie Rife]
Fear Street vs. Happy Death Day
Winner: Happy Death Day
This year’s Fear Street was a decent summer slasher trilogy for genre fans, but Happy Death Day takes the cake in a battle between these recent, teen-targeted franchises. The first Happy is a fun, self-aware thriller that gets a surprising amount of mileage out of the premise “What if Scream happened within Groundhog Day?” If the idea of a victim reliving the day of her murder across multiple movies seems repetitive, Happy Death Day 2U dispels the notion by fleshing out the characters and adding some new sci-fi wrinkles to the conceit. Meanwhile, Fear Street, based on the bestselling teen-lit novels by R.L. Stine, isn’t concerned with much more than paying homage to slashers of the past. So this one goes to Tree and Co., even if Babyface (or whatever the killer’s named) is no Ghostface. [Saloni Gajjar]
Sleepaway Camp vs. The Stepfather
Winner: Sleepaway Camp
If these noteworthy slasher franchises share any DNA, it’s of the parental variety—namely, through the conclusion that a bad nurturer can be an absolute disaster. In Sleepaway Camp, a disturbed aunt helps create a teenage killer, whereas The Stepfather combines bad parenting and homicidal impulses into the same person, belying the old adage that father knows best. The two franchises follow similar paths: an impressive first installment, followed by two increasingly dull-witted sequels, before finally sputtering out with a nearly 20-years-later revival/reboot. But while The Stepfather contains an iconic performance from Terry O’Quinn’s titular menace (as well as a sly takedown of Reaganism), we have to give the win to the younger killer; at least those gonzo movies are aware the whole thing is ridiculous. [Alex McLevy]
Psycho vs. Maniac Cop
Winner: Psycho
William Lustig and Larry Cohen’s Maniac Cop will need all of its title character’s superhuman strength to tackle a cultural touchstone like Psycho. He looks scrawny, but Anthony Perkins’ unassuming Norman Bates packs a punch, going four rounds in a mostly okay-to-good series of sequels, with Psycho II passing for one of the classier imitators of Hitchcock’s original. When Perkins leaves, things slow down considerably—though Gus Van Sant’s remake and the Bates Motel series have their fans. Poor Maniac Cop, though. Maniac Cop 2 is a stylish masterpiece and a surprisingly relevant take on policing, with stunts by legendary choreographer Spiro Razatos. The film is a surprise underdog but still no match for, ahem, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. [Matt Schimkowitz]
Friday The 13th vs. Camp Blood
Winner: Friday The 13th
Is it fair to pit amateurs against professionals? Improbable quantity, not quality, earned Camp Blood an eighth seed: Since its very inauspicious start in 1999 as a laughably threadbare direct-to-video “horror movie” (scare quotes necessary to indicate the total absence of scares), this killer-clown franchise has just kept trucking for two decades, last year reaching an unlikely eleventh installment—in other words, one fewer than the series it’s ineptly ripping off, Friday The 13th. Say what you will about the fluctuating dopiness of Jason’s rampages, but the worst of them look downright Hitchcockian compared to every bargain-basement chapter in the Camp Blood saga; these films are so poorly shot, acted, and written that they should be shown in college classrooms to make freshman film students feel better about their own projects. [A.A. Dowd]
Silent Night, Deadly Night vs. Black Christmas
Winner: Silent Night, Deadly Night
Putting the original films side by side, there’s no competition in this battle of the yuletide slashers: Bob Clark’s seminal, influential Black Christmas is downright classy, with nuanced characters and a classical sense of suspense. By contrast, Silent Night, Deadly Night has Linnea Quigley being impaled on a deer head by a guy in a Santa Claus suit. In the end, however, Silent Night, Deadly Night is a proper franchise, while Black Christmas—which amounts to the formative original plus two remakes, one outrageously trashy and the other more thoughtful and inventive—is not. Add the “Garbage Day” clip from the accidentally hilarious Part 2, plus the fact that Mickey Rooney starred in Silent Night, Deadly Night 5 after saying that the producers of the original “should be run out of town,” and the kookier choice here must prevail. [Katie Rife]
Candyman vs. Wishmaster
Winner: Candyman
Nothing short of a magic lamp could skew the results of this title fight between bogeymen of the ’90s—one created by Clive Barker, the other “presented” by Wes Craven, both summoned by feckless researchers and granted three sequels apiece. The velvet-voiced ladykiller in the mirror might win on pedigree alone: Philip Glass, Bill Condon, and Jordan Peele are among the Oscar royalty classing up his high-minded massacres. Meanwhile, the genie’s schlocky lessons in how not to word your pleas for a cooler job or sexier bod were banished swiftly to DTV hell, with no reboot in sight, unless one counts Wonder Woman 1984. Just don’t get cocky, Clive: The rematch is next round, when Craven returns with a slasher franchise he wasn’t ashamed to keep slapping his name on. [A.A. Dowd]
Scream vs. I Know What You Did Last Summer
Winner: Scream
Kevin Williamson launched two slasher franchises in less than a year with his scripts for Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, both of which secured killer casts, spawned successful sequels, and inspired later TV adaptations. But while Scream reimagined slashers, taking influence from classics while giving the genre a modern spin that inspired horror’s next box office hits, Williamson’s adaptation of the Lois Duncan YA novel played its thrills straighter and more generically, and its whodunit was incidental, making it much easier to care who the next victim would be than who was knocking them off in nondescript fisherman garb.(Speaking of which: Is there a more recognizable slasher uniform in the last 30-plus years than the iconic Edvard Munch getup of Ghostface?) Scream kept us glued across multiple movies with the cat-and-mouse game between Sidney—one of the most likable Final Girls in all of horror—and whoever put on the hooded costume next. Summer’s two sequels didn’t measure up to the first of the trilogy, even with a pre-fame Jack Black in dreadlocks. [Tatiana Tenreyro]
A Nightmare On Elm Street vs. The Gingerdead Man
Winner: A Nightmare On Elm Street
The phrase “not in your wildest dreams” feels appropriate for this matchup between A Nightmare On Elm Street and Charles Band’s The Gingerdead Man. Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger could bake a more threatening and entertaining confection than Gary Busey’s Millard Findlemeyer in his sleep. Freddy is already an accomplished pizza chef, after all. Film to film, few slashers are as creatively reliable or stylistically diverse as Nightmare. What other franchise includes a queer-studies classic, a postmodern deconstruction of horror movies, and a scene where a malevolent dream weaver guides a victim by the veins like a marionette? The Gingerdead Man movies, on the other hand, are almost always better ingested via YouTube compilation. Pair that with a hit from the Evil Bong, and you’ve got a knockout but not a winner. [Matt Schimkowitz]
The Hills Have Eyes vs. Slumber Party Massacre
Winner: Slumber Party Massacre
Wes Craven launched three separate franchises in this bracket (four, if you count his producer credit on Wishmaster), and for that we owe him respect. But one’s gotta go, and The Hills Have Eyes is the most expendable. There is an undercurrent of dark humor in Craven’s take on mutant cannibal clans run amok, but for those not already versed in exploitation sensibilities, the sexual violence in early Craven films (carried over into the Hills remake from the mid-2000s) can be rough. The satire in Slumber Party Massacre is much closer to the surface, taking a screenplay by feminist writer Rita Mae Brown and running it through the Roger Corman boobs ’n’ blood assembly line for a film full of tongue-in-cheek humor and phallic metaphors. It’s also the only classic slasher franchise to be written and directed entirely by women, giving it the edge over Craven’s third-best series. [Katie Rife]
Saw vs. Puppet Master
Winner: Saw
In a straight fight of first films, Charles Band’s premiere moneymaker might actually have eked out a win over Jigsaw and his various descendants; certainly, there are no facial bear traps or pig masks in the first Saw movie capable of matching Puppet Master’s Leech Woman for sheer, visceral horror. But in the subsequent race of diminishing returns, Blade, Jester, et al., quickly rushed ahead, hitting rock bottom and then digging ever downward. For a pair of long-running, single-gimmick franchises like Saw and Puppet Master, it all comes down to how much fresh paint their endlessly rotating creative teams can slap on. Saw, to its credit, at least keeps the moralizing deathtraps relatively new, while the weirdly Nazi-obsessed Puppet Master films fall further and further down the direct-to-video hole (albeit with one obscene upgrade to theaters). [William Hughes]
Child’s Play vs. Hatchet
Winner: Child’s Play
Most good slasher movies have a memorable villain. Hatchet’s Victor Crowley does not rank in this department. There’s a reason you don’t see a lot of masks of his deformed face at Halloween costume shops; there’s little beyond an unimaginative backstory distinguishing this hulking stalker from a dozen other Jason wannabes. Meanwhile, Chucky is the perfect horror icon. What could be better than a foul-mouthed, sex-crazed, overall-wearing evil doll? He’s stealthy and calculating—he’ll kill you in ways poor Victor could never think up. While the Chucky series got campier and funnier with each sequel (especially with the introduction of Chucky’s paramour, Tiffany Valentine, and their child, Glen/Glenda), the Hatchet series just drags on. For the Good Guy doll with the bad guy vocabulary, this round really is child’s play. [Tatiana Tenreyro]
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre vs. Evil Bong
Winner: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Wouldn’t it be hilarious if Evil Bong took this whole thing? As much as we’d enjoy messing with everyone, the fact is that one of these series is widely influential and viscerally terrifying, and the other is Evil Bong. Texas Chainsaw also took a turn for the comedic starting with the first sequel, but there’s a satirical edge to the goofier entries in the series that’s way beyond stale stoner humor. What really cashes Evil Bong’s bowl is that the one thing it has going for it—weed—isn’t even unique to the franchise: As original Leatherface Gunnar Hansen revealed in his autobiography, most of the cast and crew of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were baked out of their gourds on set. [Katie Rife]
Wrong Turn vs. Wolf Creek
Winner: Wolf Creek
Hillbilly horror experienced a revival in the 2000s, with two parallel don’t-leave-the-city franchises—one set in the wilderness of West Virginia, the other against the sprawl of the Australian outback. There’s more conceptual variety in the Wrong Turn movies, which slaughter different kinds of lamb (reality-TV contestants, prison inmates, Henry Rollins), before dipping into the backstory of their inbred cannibals. Wolf Creek, by contrast, repeats itself through a sequel that puts more unlucky tourists in the crosshairs of serial killer Mick Taylor, then inelegantly expands the premise for a so-so miniseries. Still, the returns diminish slower in Mick’s neck of the backwoods, and while the Wrong Turn films are certainly more superficially fun in their cartoon Hills Have Eyes evisceration of city slickers, none possess a fraction of the nasty dread John Jarratt provokes through his Down Under depravity. Do his deformed American challengers even have names? [A.A. Dowd]
Leprechaun vs. Jeepers Creepers
Winner: Leprechaun
Which is worse: having an awful personality or no perceptible personality at all? In the case of Leprechaun versus Jeepers Creepers, we have to favor the interesting irritation over the more visually impressive but far blander monster. Warwick Davis’ scampering magical asshole might be the very worst of Freddy Krueger’s wisecracking killer spawn, but there’s no denying the perverse appeal of a franchise that sometimes resembles a Disney Channel Halloween movie, right up until a guy gets tricked into motorboating a running lawnmower. Jeepers Creepers, meanwhile, is forced to labor under both the reality of writer-director Victor Salva’s sordid legal history and the fact that its one good trick—the reveal of its stalking Creeper’s actual nature—is functionally impossible to repeat. [William Hughes]
Hellraiser vs. Prom Night
Winner: Hellraiser
The underworld beings of Hellraiser are ideal candidates to watch these two franchises, because only creatures incapable of distinguishing pleasure from pain could enjoy every installment of either woefully spotty series. The first Prom Night’s Halloween-aping story was a success, which triggered a reworking of a pre-existing script into a sequel—which, like the three installments that followed, replaced Jamie Lee Curtis and a not-bad twist ending with supernatural schlock. Hellraiser had a killer launch: The first is great and the next two are fun, and though it progressively descends into unwatchability, the franchise has an iconic baddie for the ages in the aptly named Pinhead. Plus, with original creator Clive Barker returning to produce its next iteration, there’s almost no way the new Hellraiser could be as crappy as Prom Night’s 2008 reboot. [Alex McLevy]
READERS POLL
Have we failed to see the secret genius of Wishmaster? Did we pick the wrong backwoods, post-millennial Chainsaw descendent? Should we have given the Maniac Cop an upset over cinema’s most famous maniac? Now’s your chance to right our wrongs by participating in the readers’ poll and maybe swinging this separate version of the bracket in a totally different direction. Vote for the winners in all sixteen match-ups below. (Or click here) And check back tomorrow for the results of the poll, along with a new set of face-offs to vote on.
99 Comments
Maniac Cop should’ve at least made it to round 2. Not a better movie than Hitchcock’s “Psycho”, sure, but for my buck a better slasher franchise. And Leprechaun over Jeepers Creepers? Hardly.
Leprechaun over Jeepers Creepers is insane.
Jeepers Creepers suffers from the fact that it was made by an actual pedophile.
Ugh, completely forgot about that.
“Actual pedophile” on one hand, “In Space” on the other, and you’ve got a blowout for Leprechaun. This was the easiest pick in a roster full of easy picks.
Yeah, I normally don’t have too much difficulty separating the artist from the art but the first two Jeepers Creepers movies are unsettling in an entirely different way when you know the director’s history.
The second Psycho film though is a LOT better than you’d think. I kind of get your point, but also Maniac Cop 2 is literally 25% recycled scenes. Granted you get Larry “King” Cohen for film three if memory serves.I’ll easily take Leprechaun over Jeepers Creepers, which I’ve never understood the love for. The first one, the second one with the bus or whatever…meh. IMO of course.
Psycho 2 is fantastic, back when Richard Franklin was the proper 80s Hitchcock (in a strike that ended in F/X2) and written by Tom Holland (which a Hitchcock For Kids movie with Franklin, Cloak&Dagger)
I give Jeepers Creepers credit for its great tagline:“Every 23rd spring, for 23 days, it gets to eat”
That’s just unsettling.
People are voting for Leprechaun over Jeepers Creepers because – as far as I know – Leprechaun wasn’t made by a convicted sex offender.
Also – if we’re taking sequels into account – when the Leprechaun goes to Vegas, those films become stupid enough to be fun. The Jeepers Creepers sequels are just a sex pervert monster licking his lips at and chasing shirtless teenage boys which serves as a constant reminder that the creator of the franchise Victor Salva raped a child.
This is understandable. One franchise is fun but not scary. The other is scary but not fun.
Hellraiser over Prom Night is ludicrous when you consider that Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II exists, but okay. As much as I don’t care for the franchise, Friday the 13th has to take this whole thing based on consistency, no? It does what it says on the tin pretty much every time (Jason Takes Manhattan notwithstanding), whether it’s the truly unpleasant first entry or goofy ass Jason X. And if we’re counting the likes of the Hellraiser and Wishmaster franchises as slashers, then surely Final Destination should’ve made the bracket?
I like the cut of your gibe. As an overall franchise I’d also go the Prom Night route. Other than some choice moments in the first two films and the club scene in the third one I’ve always thought the Hellraiser series was a bit over-rated.
Gory as fuck, but over-rated.
The Friday movies are relatively consistent, but that’s a low bar they are clearing. Just mostly interchangeable, cheap-ass, crap-ass movies.For my money the best franchise here is Nightmare on Elm Street. The first one is the second-best movie of all of these after Halloween. The third one is silly and endlessly rewatchable. New Nightmare is a shockingly solid late entry in a series that had seemingly run out of gas, and in a quiet way was influential on a horror sea change that followed it with Scream. Many of the others are too dumb or outlandish, but three good-to-great movies is more than any of these others can claim.I wish I could say it was Halloween, as the original is absolutely iconic and near-perfect. And I like the wacky anthology-style third movie, and David Gordon Green’s sequel was decent (albeit over-praised). But I would put it a tick behind Nightmare, probably.
it’s NOES or Scream for me. Nightmare is the most consistently creative, with even the worst entries having one or two absolutely inspired kills (the comic book kill in I think 5 is one of my favourites). Scream probably has the highest hit rate (the 3 written by Williamson are all genuinely great) and makes up for being less scary with some good comedy
Lowkey, on rewatch 5 and 6 are actually quite good if you get on their wavelength; the 5th is far darker and more nuanced than it has any right to be bc of the way it uses its recurring characters, and 6 is also intentionally high camp with some Thoughts on slasher formulas. Really its only 4 and FvJ of the mainline series that are outright stinkers.
Definitely think the Scream series has the highest batting average of all of these, though I love the original (and best) Scream a lot less than the original Nightmare or Halloween. That whole knowing wink aspect hasn’t aged super well for me—it was very bracing when the movie came out, but felt so tired by the time they were on movie #3 or so. That said, if you can tune some of that out, at least the first two Screams are pretty solid slasher movies in their own right.
Yeah, there should be some kind of special award for the series with the best movie made when well into what should have been diminishing-returns territory: New Nightmare had no reason to be even watchable never mind actually good, and yet there it was.
I’ve seen the original NOES, The Dream Master (I was a little black girl with asthma and that one scene terrified me), New Nightmare, Freddy vs. Jason, and that bad remake; I should check out some other entries. I’ve heard 2 is worth watching for the camp factor, and 3 has been recommended to me by multiple people as straight up fun to watch.
2 is a weird, problematic movie that I still enjoy. 3 is genuinely good although the cheese factor is sky-high. The ones between 3 and New Nightmare are all watchable although it just got ridiculous a lot of the time. Don’t think any of the Nightmares are as bad the crummiest Fridays (which is about half of them) or as dull and rote as the worst Halloweens.
Yeah, as a kid, I really didn’t understand Freddy’s Revenge. It’s still dark, even with some of its campier scenes, it’s not as tongue n’ cheek as the later sequels. I have better appreciation for it now and I recommend anyone a fan of the franchise and horror in general to check out the 2019 documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street on NetFlix.It’s an interesting and informative journey through the production of Elm Street 2, focusing on actor Mark Patton’s experience and life before, during and after the movie.
Rewatching Nightmare on Elm Street 4 was what turned my opinion on that whole series – I used to think it was the more creative and watchable of the 80s horror series, but that movie is just noisy and unpleasant. Part 5 and 6 are also forgettable, and Part 3 is just competent. I actually think Friday the 13th has a better hit-miss ratio. All of that said, Nightmare on Elm Street 2 is a treasure. The camp factor (and the Clu Gulagher factor) are significant, but it’s also a fairly enjoyable horror movie.
Until the 2018 Halloween, Friday the 13th is the biggest series in terms of box office. It also wins outright in sheer number of movies in the series. I think it’s also one of the biggest movie series of all time outside of James Bond or, like Godzilla.
I’m with you on Nightmare on Elm Street belonging in the top spot. What puts it over the top for me vs the other top-tier possibilities is that even the bad sequels are still pretty fun.
Plenty of the Halloween and Friday the 13th sequels aren’t just bad, they’re boring. Which is the true kiss of death for a horror movie. It’s hard to keep wringing decent scares for five sequels out of “loitering in a menacing fashion”.
For me, the gold medal for “biggest missed opportunity” has got to go to Hellraiser. I really don’t get how they only got maybe two and a half watchable movies out of “sadomasochist fetish demons make Faustian bargains”.
I think Miramax just didn’t understand the series and flat out didn’t care as long as they could churn them out and be assured of a small but viable return on each one of them, and of course Barker himself had other irons in the fire.It’s certainly possible to tell interesting stories in that setting: for a while Vertigo had a licensed Hellraiser anthology comic that was often pretty good.
Agreed on FRIDAY THE 13TH. That series is pizza: Few mind-blowing installments, but every chapter is delightfully cheesy and meaty.
Agreed on all points. By all rights, Hello Mary Lou should be a beloved cult classic with a lavish Scream! Factor blu-ray on the shelves. It switches easily from campy to menacing, the violence is graphic but artful. It’s so 80s and so Canadian that a character gets electrocuted by his Amiga while drinking a Labatt’s. It has Michael Ironside. Hellraiser has the Cenobites and all, but there are maybe three enjoyable movies in the whole franchise. Friday the 13th is very dumb, but at least half of the movies are fun to watch because they take the core premise of “Jason killing teenagers” into an unexpected direction. Jason kills teenagers, but it’s actually suspenseful and he’s wearing a pillowcase (Part 2); Jason kills teenagers but they’re Corey Feldman and Crispin Glover and seriously what’s going on (Part 4); Jason kills teenagers, but it’s outer space and wait is that David Cronenberg (Jason X).
Mary Lou: Prom Night II: Hormonal Boogaloo
Hello Mary Lou is an excellent horror flick, but it is a Prom Night sequel in name only. It otherwise has nothing to do with the preceding film, they just stuck the Prom Night name on it for marketing purposes.
Oh, of course, but it absolutely rules and I’d rather watch it than any of the Gory Horny BDSM movies.
I mean, doesn’t Child’s Play do the same thing if we’re talking consistency? At least Chucky has personality and energy that even Freddy Krueger couldn’t keep pace beyond Elm Street 4.
My memory of Child’s Play is a good first movie, two trash sequels, then it gets bonkers, then it gets Fiona Dourif (so it gets awesome). I should do a franchise rewatch with consistency in mind.
I’ve been going back and watching a few of them myself and going in with not a horror mindset so much as just watching Brad Dourif having fun hamming it up as the voice of Chucky is a treat.I actually kind of enjoyed the recent reboot that took a someone different take on the character. Mark Hamill did a respectable job and got genuinely creepy at time but he won’t replace Dourif by any means.
The Child’s Play reboot was really far better than I was expecting. It was smart to just take it in an entirely different direction than the originals.
Also: Hellraiser isn’t a slasher film. There are none of the slasher hallmarks in Hellraiser. Hellraiser takes the themes and tropes of gothic fiction and sets them in 20th Century suburbia.
NEAT.Interesting picks and a couple of surprises.It’ll shock me if the final four aren’t going to be Freddy, Jason, Michael and Leatherface.
Leaving a Michael Myers / Freddy Krueger / serious / silly debate for last.
Wolf Creek v Wrong Turn is a tough one for me. I feel like [the first] Wolf Creek was a better movie, but Wrong Turn is a better slasher series. I can be talked out of that
I went with the Wrong Turn franchise just because I fucking hate Wolf Creek. It’s the only movie I’ve ever walked out of.
I will pick Halloween over everything else in the end.Now for the brackets I picked Black Christmas even if both remakes are shit (like seriously the Woke one and I’m as far left as most was somehow worse thant he 2006 piece of shit) but the original was great. Also I liked Jeeper Creepers 2 so I voted for that even if the director of 1 and 3 made me feel dirty for voting for it. I also couldn’t vote for the Hills have Eyes as those scenes you were talking about bother me too much, I’ve been watching horror movies since 1978 when I was 4 and shit like I can’t deal with.Shocked you didn’t have My Bloody Valentine as one of the choices.
Yeah, “My Bloody Valentine” is a legit slasher, and it definitely deserves a place in the starting lineup over any of the Charles Band franchises.
Wholeheartedly agree!
Last holiday season I watched Black Christmas and Bob Clark’s other notable Christmas movie, A Christmas Story, in the same day.
They go hand and hand don’t they! 😉
I would put Christmas Evil up against Black Christmas. I would still vote for Black Christmas, because it is awesome and in many ways the first true North American slasher (sorry Psycho, but you’re not a true slasher), but Christmas Evil is a lot more interesting than Silent Night.
Him never heard of that one, will check it out. So wait, is your name after 21 and 24???? If so awesome!
But it’s a French song! Street cred with the indie crowd. The Damned even did a cover of it!
See I didn’t know that because I have no culture and I’m only a comic book and cartoon geek! And Horror geek! I knew I left something out.
I’ll spare his life! But only for you, sugar pants.
Getting the easy ones out of the way quickly, eh? If the competition is greatest slasher franchise, seems fairly obvious that Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street will inevitably come out on top, no? The rest is just window dressing.
No! Black Christmas is amazing, the original film does so much with so little that it negates the other versions! So creepy. Please rethink this!
Plus Olivia Hussey’s hair looks amazing.
The phone calls still make my skin crawl
No! Black Christmas is amazing, the original film so so much with so little! So creepy. Please rethink this!
I am a fan of the Stepfather series, but it’s a stretch to call any of them slashers.
I haven’t watched past Sleepaway Camp II, but even Stepfather 3 has a funnier gag in it than anything from that one. (“I’m, uh, gonna go chop some wood, roast some marshmallows!”)
My only real quibbles are is that Hellraiser isn’t really a slasher franchise, per se. A demonic take on BDSM, possibly? Clive Barker’s works are hard to define. Also, Black Christmas isn’t a franchise, just one awesome original and two wildly different remakes with the last one being one in name only.
Yeah those have never been slashers. First they started out as body horror, then they went psychological torture, then they went to just normal torture. Victims in Hellraiser aren’t being hunted down and killed off, they’re either getting what they deserve for messing with something they shouldn’t have, or they were dead the whole movie and the big reveal is that they’re being tortured in hell.
Preach. I tried to watch any of the installments past Bloodline, and my mind just rebooted into Safe Mode until I hit the Stop button. Torture, indeed.
Good morning, readers! Vote in the reader bracket embedded at the bottom of the piece or at this URL: https://www.polltab.com/bracket-poll/j15R5Jpe3b
A lot of blowouts in the first round (i.e. the four 8-seeds have 20 votes combined), but looks like there will a couple close ones…The Hills Have Eyes vs. Slumber Party MassacreWrong Turn vs. Wolf Creek
The Scream films are the hands-down winners by the metric of “horror franchise you would have to make the fewest embarrassed excuses for when showing them to your non-horror-fan friends or relatives” although I understand why a series that at its core is a parody of the genre probably won’t win.
I was going to say that as enjoyable as Scream and its sequels are, they wouldn’t exist without those original slashers so it’s hard to vote for them since all their scares and jokes are literally taken from other films. Imho, I think Halloween is the best movie even if I would say NOES was the best overall franchise. So I’d be happy with either of those winning.
I will take the Ginger Snaps movies, though possibly feminist werewolf movies are distinct from slasher movies. So dark and thematically rich & also I love how the sequels reinvent themselves & don’t just repeat the original
I was thinking that Ginger Snaps is seriously missing from contention. If we count Hellraiser as a slasher, than why not Ginger Snaps too?
Werewolves slash people with their claws!
It really comes down to which you find more satisfying: ‘78 Halloween, or original Chainsaw. Nothing else comes close to these two as individual film achievements.But a whole franchise? None of these are 100%. The law of diminishing returns rules horror cinema.
Prom Night deserved a better first round matchup, even if it had no chance of making the finals. Honestly, if you average the many, many Hellraiser movies, you could argue that the franchise may be the worst ever, even considering how good some of them are.
Also, surely you could have found a more deserving franchise than Camp Blood? Like literally anything? Maybe Laid to Rest or something (not that it’s good, but it’s not Camp Blood bad)?
As much as I’m not a huge fan of this franchise, if this is about consistency, it’s Friday the 13th all the way. I love Halloween, but as a “franchise” it’s trash. Halloween 1 is great, Halloween 2 is ok, Halloween 3 is fun but weird, and the rest are pretty awful. I also love Nightmare, but outside of 1 and 3 it’s also some pretty rough sledding (campiness of 2 notwithstanding).The main problem is tone. Friday the 13th is not a “good” franchise by any stretch, but man does each movie nail that tone pretty much every time.
Agreed. If the metric here isn’t “horror franchise with the best movies” but rather “best horror franchise,” it’s Friday the 13th. None of those movies stand on their own, but they build meaning through repetition.
How did you leave out the Alien or Predator franchises?
Sure, if Hellraiser is a slasher, than why not Alien?
Calling Hellraiser a slasher franchise is a stretch. Calling Black Christmas a franchise is ludicrous.
My final four would be Halloween, Scream, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Hellraiser. Finals of Scream and Nightmare on Elm Street. Bit of a toss up, but I’ll give it to Scream.
There should be some re-seeding with the bracket based on reader voting. I don’t like that Halloween and Friday the 13th are on same side of the bracket. Definitely don’t like that Scream has to share a quadrant with Friday the 13th. Would be interested to have seen how Texas Chainsaw or Nightmare on Elm Street would fair if they replaced Friday the 13th in that quadrant. Also Puppet Master franchise is way better then Saw. Bite Me 🙂
Also, since they did the seeding and they’re doing the voting, what does it matter? I mean, if you seed one higher than the other that’s the judgment that it’s better, isn’t it?
I have never seen a single one of these movies. I attribute this to watching Poltergeist on video cassette at age of maybe 8 or 9 — it freaked me the hell out, and I did not want it again. These days I’ve seen and enjoyed more modern horrors (Babadook, The Witch) but I still have a visceral antipathy towards the 80s-90s stuff.Probably I would be amused with it all now, but it’s an awful lot of material to catch up with.
So many Full Moon jabronies on this bracket. With the exception of Puppet Master (which should have beaten Saw easily), all these Full Moon flicks are just set up to allow the heavy-hitters to progress to the next round. In what universe could Evil Bong stand up against Texas Chainsaw? C’mon!
Longshot prediction: We’re going to see Candyman make it to the semis.
People voting for The Hills Have Eyes are showing their asses big time. Slumber Party Massacre II is an all-timer slasher, and the first film ain’t half-bad neither.
Happy Death Day 2 is just barely a thriller. It’s more of a riff on time travel comedies.
A suitable “get that crap out of here” first round.
Black Christmas isn’t a franchise so it should lose by default. The Silent Night Deadly Night movies are not good, but they are a franchise.
Always feel the MPAA just wrecked Friday the 13th… ever see some of those test shots Savini put together – holy hell if the movies had actually been that astonishingly gory!
I do not see how Halloween cannot win this, though Nightmare on Elm Street should be a close 2nd, it is Michael Myers that rings the most to the table. Though the thorn anthology is stupid it is better than the son of a thousand maniacs, a kid who was drowned and randomly comes back as a freak giant, or a guy who possess a doll through magic. Ghostface or Jason would be my 3r and 4th probably with Ghostface being 3rd. They all kind of repeat themselves every movie though Michael seems the least regurgitated without being too stupid. Where as the more the Nightmare movies were made the stupider the story became and Jason is like the same thing every time just sometimes it will be in a new location. You also won’t see Jason play with his prey nearly to the extent you will see Michael, Freddy, or Ghostface play with their prey. With Jason it’s like ohh there he is, now you are dead on repeat the whole movie. Hell sometimes Michael will let you get away just so he can kill you later. Jason might have as people like to say “more creative kills” though that doesn’t he is more interesting or a better serial killer. The better serial killer and/or movie series should take into consideration. Storylines, other character development besides the killer (Dr. Loomis and Lori Strode in Halloweens, Nancy from Nightmares, or Cid, Gale, and Dewi from Screams. Then also who and when they kill should also come into consideration. This is what makes Freddy so scary, he gets your sleep and everybody has to sleep and on top of that he goes after kids/teens (normally) which makes it all the worse because it’s youth. Jason is just Michael and Leatherface combined, with less backstory development and victim character development. So even though for some reason Jason is probably more popular it doesn’t make Friday the 13th the best slasher series. It takes more than “more creative kills” to earn that recognition.
In the late 90s, I frequented an AOL chat room called Guess Movie By Plot, a simple place with simple rules where one person would by typing a movie plot in caps, sometimes in unique and creative ways, almost always starting with, “THERE’S THIS GUY.” I enjoyed the company of the other movie lovers more than I did the game.Eventually, one of the regulars, screen name PapaSeth, created an e-mail newsletter about movies. I don’t remember much about the newsletter other than the guy often getting on his soapbox about how much he hates the Scream films, but more their popularity than their quality.I love the first two Scream films (4 was alright, too). They were a humorous, self-aware examination of slasher tropes without abandoning suspense, mystery, or likable characters for a soulless spoof. Maybe it’s not for everyone, few things are, but don’t be like PapaSeth. Don’t be a contrarian hipster, like and dislike things based on merit and your personal taste, not because you want to be allergic to the passion of others.
Oh boy, the late 90’s usenet Fulci-or-bust horror guys did *not* like Scream.That said, I’m surprised that the series as a whole has held onto the fondness it seems to have managed, though I suppose five movies over twenty-five years is a pace that’ll keep it from burning out.
Like Halloween, it would have been better if it ended with the second film. Craven’s direction is excellent, but the third film was rushed, with Kevin Williamson unavailable to write the script, and Neve Campbell, the main character, barely appearing from only being available to shoot for a few days, the end result being a straight forward slasher film with none of the subversive awareness that made the original two films so good. The 4th film was just part of the nostalgia reboot wave, and while it was pretty good, it pushed away from a plausible series of revenge killings to diluted perennial franchise. The 5th film isn’t written by Williamson, and Craven unfortunately died a few years ago, so I doubt it’s going to be what anyone wants, despite the three surviving original characters returning.There’s no denying what Craven brought to the films. He cannot be replaced.
I’ll allow Europeans to use the term “cinema”. But when a pretentious American does I want to ask, “So are slasher movies your favorite genre of cinema?”It’s been proven to all but dolts that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare. But the man who usually misspelled his name, once as William Shaksper, did write something of note. An Elizabethan tragedy titled “The Bride of Chucky”.
Of all the bracket style challenges I’ve ever seen, this one seems like the one most predetermined to come down to an obvious outcome. On every metric – quality of original, impact, legacy, longevity, influence – how can it not be Halloween? The original is the single best pure scare film out of any on the list, and really, only Psycho and (maybe) Texas Chainsaw are in the same rarified air of critical acclaim. Scream is the most consistent franchise here from movie to movie – there isn’t really a “bad” one. But the meta nature of the series probably excludes it from top spot.
Well, if we were talking individual movies, I’d agree that the original Halloween is the slasher movie of all slasher movies (basically inventing the genre certainly helps). But as a franchise it falls short. The problem is that Michael Meyers is a boring villain. That’s not a problem in the first couple of installments. In fact, it’s kind of the point, he’s just this elemental, inexplicable killing machine. But there’s really nowhere new to go with that. Michael escapes, kills people, is defeated, presumed dead, or maybe in a coma. Rinse, repeat. It’s the definition of diminishing returns. You can’t really develop Michael Meyers or add additional mythology because then he stops being Michael Meyers, which is why there have been two separate soft reboots and one “fuck it, starting over” reboot. This means that craftsmanship and style needs to do most of the heavy lifting. You can’t throw a journeyman director into a Halloween movie and expect it to be anything other than a pale John Carpenter imitation.
For a franchise, I’d go with Nightmare on Elm Street. Freddy is a far more entertaining villain, to me, and even when those movies are bad, (and there are definitely some stinkers, chief among them the craptastic reboot) they’re always fun, with at least a couple of really inventive and unsettling kills per movie (mixed in with Breckin Meyer’s ‘hey, video games’ death scene . . which. . . yeah). Plus, and maybe it’s just my gut reaction, but the gooeyness of Freddy’s nightmare world always got to me.
I think because of Victor Salva Jeepers Creepers should have been disqualified from contention.Apart from that I mostly agree, except that Hill Have Eyes is too influential to be beaten by the slumber party movies (though you make a strong case), and, Black Christmas, while hardly a franchise, is too also too influential…it would have been better to leave it off the list as just not really a franchise significantly: The Stepfather is a masterpiece, and the first sequel is pretty damn good (despite being mostly a retread), but it is NOT a slasher. “We’re gonna need a little order around here!”
This is for the 12 brave commenters who voted Gingerdead Man over Elm Street. Are you ok? Can I call someone for you?
My own personal preferences lead to a Candyman/Halloween final face-off and if the studios are looking for the next Freddy vs Jason…..
Halloween never should’ve gotten a sequel, let alone 8 and a reboot.The Friday the 13th sequels were also bad but that franchise was never particularly scary or seemed to take itself seriously and thus they don’t diminish the first. The first one had its moments but lacked the cinematography and mood that Halloween masterfully handled as the F13 franchise always exhibited a sense of cheapness that never elevated it beyond cheesy camp.That said, I’m gonna go out on left field here and say Child’s Play is going to pull an upset and emerge from the piles of slasher franchise corpses.
Probably too late to influence the fan voting, at least, but are we counting Leprechaun in the Hood as part of the Leprechaun series, or is it its own thing as kind of a spinoff?
Fun! And I love enough of these movies that I don’t have a favorite, so I’m keeping this wide open- Especially since my votes are based purely on Best Kills (a sequel may suck, but if it’s got a death I’ll never forget, that will count for alot). However, I think if you’re gonna put Saw, you gotta add Hostel. They were the two big ones of the mid-00s. On to the bracket itself: I’m with most of these picks, although I favor Black Christmas. And if that can count as a “franchise” just because it got a remake, what about The House on Sorority Row? I’d rather pit that against Prom Night, and move Hellraiser elsewhere. I don’t know what an Evil Bong is, but where’s The Hitcher? Sleepaway Camp is atrocious. It has exactly one thing going for it- a blatantly transphobic ending. I’m voting The Stepfather, and AV Club should have too.
If Puppet Master and Leprechaun qualify for this, why not Critters??
A lot of no-brainer matchups in this round, I’m more curious how the next one will go. I gotta say though, Halloween is of course a classic and hugely influential, but Urban Legend is underrated. It’s a fun B-movie slasher with a good mix of creative kills, hammy moments, mystery about who the killer is, and a grab bag of recognizable late 90s/early aughts actors.
I’m sad the Phantasm series wasn’t considered, but if the final four isn’t Halloween vs. Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street vs The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, something is wrong.