25 definitive iterations of classic horror franchises

There have been many fine incarnations of the Transylvanian bloodsucker over the years. Actors like Gary Oldman, Frank Langella and Christopher Lee have sunk their teeth into the role. But Bela Lugosi was the first Dracula of the sound era, and his creepy “I bid you welcome” to John Harker (David Manners) set the tone that performers have been chasing for over 80 years.

This could easily go to Christopher Lee, who played the reincarnated monster to Peter Cushing’s Baron Victor Frankenstein in several Hammer horror classics, but Boris Karloff’s mixture of brutality and tenderness has never been equaled (not even by Robert De Niro in “Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein”). Karloff’s most triumphant turn is in the series’ second film, “Bride of Frankenstein,” where the attempt to find the big fella a wife literally blows up in Henry Frankenstein’s face.

Jacques Tourneur’s voodoo-inflected “I Walked with a Zombie” is an early masterpiece in the genre of the undead, but Pittsburgh-native George A. Romero turned them into a flesh-eating sensation with 1968’s “Night of the Living Dead.” Romero has returned to the series five times, arguably surpassing the original with the mall-set “Dawn of the Dead” and the grim nuke-anxiety of “Day of the Dead.” His zombies may lumber, but they outnumber the living and they make a messy meal of anyone caught in their clutches.

The “Friday the 13th” franchise is most impressive for its longevity. Officially, the original incarnation ran for 23 years, concluding with the jokey “Freddy vs. Jason.” Michael Bay produced a successful reboot in 2009, but the studios have been unable to capitalize on the hockey-masked slasher’s enduring popularity. He was at his best in the mid-1980s and never better than in 1984’s “Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter,” where uncredited stuntman Ted White hacked up teens with ruthless intent. Special makeup FX maestro Tom Savini outdid himself with the grisly kills in this one.

Not much of a competition here. Michael Bay produced a 2010 remake starring Jackie Earle Haley as the blade-fingered madman, but there’s only one man capable of haunting our dreams: Robert Englund. He held the role from 1984 until 2003’s “Freddy vs. Jason,” gradually introducing a quippy sense of humor to the character that, after a while, undercut Krueger's creepiness. The original is still the best, but 1987’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” is terrific in its own right.

For years, when people thought of "The Mummy," they conjured up an image of Boris Karloff lumbering around in bandages. While this was effective, the tale of the resurrected Imhotep got a shot of adrenaline in 1999 when filmmaker Stephen Sommers re-imagined the tale as a rollicking, Indiana Jones-style adventure starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. The sequels may be terrible, but the first film is a dazzling mix of horror, action and comedy.

Lon Cheney Jr. was superb as Larry Talbot, the Welsh lord who gets bitten by a werewolf, which dooms him to transform into one of the hairy critters every time there’s a full moon. He was so great, Warren Zevon name-dropped him in his song “Werewolves of London." But nothing will ever top John Landis’ “An American Werewolf in London,” where Rick Baker’s special effects wizardry painfully transformed poor David Naughton into a creature of the night. It’s still the gold standard for practical effects work.

Peter Benchley’s classic beach read “Jaws” became a worldwide phenomenon when a 25-year-old Steven Spielberg delivered his classic adaptation of the novel in 1976. This set off a killer-shark frenzy, including direct sequels to Spielberg’s film that rapidly declined in quality. The knockoffs weren’t limited to sharks; underwater creatures like piranha, octopi and barracudas were exploited for their (sometimes dubious) man-eating prowess. Movies like “Open Water,” “The Shallows” and “Deep Blue Sea” have their charms, but there’s only one “Jaws.”

It’s hard to single out one great portrayal of the tortured doctor who turns himself into a psychotic monster. John Barrymore, Spencer Tracy and John Malkovich have all taken a crack at the role. But the finest screen version — outside of Bugs Bunny’s encounter with the mad doctor in “Hyde and Hare” — has to be Frederic March’s Oscar-winning portrayal in the 1931 classic.

Hollywood has taken several trips to H.G. Wells’ "House of Pain," most infamously with Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer in the bizarre 1996 flop “The Island of Dr. Moreau.” But the best iteration of the tale, in which the not-so-good doctor melds men with beasts, is still the 1933 version starring Charles Laughton. It’s a fantastic blend of adventure and horror, and it’s brilliantly capped off by Bela Lugosi’s anguished performance as “The Sayer of the Law.”

Everyone from Claude Rains to Robert Englund have played the lovelorn, horribly deformed creature (Gerard Butler starred in the big-screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hugely popular musical), but Lon Chaney Sr.’s indelible silent-film performance is the one we all remember. “Feast your eyes, glut your soul on my accursed ugliness.” Of course, there is the late, great William Finley in Brian De Palma’s cheeky variation, “The Phantom of the Paradise.” The Paul Williams score is fantastic, and you get to see Gerrit Graham assaulted in the shower, “Psycho”-style, with a toilet plunger.

For some reason, Africanized Killer Bees were perceived as a major threat in the 1970s, which prompted the master of the disaster film, Irwin Allen, to produce 1978’s gloriously ludicrous “The Swarm.” He was actually late to the craze, but the competition wasn’t exactly formidable. To be honest, “The Swarm” is in no way a “good” movie, but it does feature a strangely cruel, hilariously out-of-place love triangle between Fred MacMurray, Ben Johnson and Olivia de Havilland. It’s not every day you get to see Hollywood greats getting stung to death by bees!

The great ape has been revived numerous times throughout film history, most recently in Jordan Vogt-Roberts’s “Kong: Skull Island.” The effects are always impressive (even in the 1976 redo), but the filmmakers are always chasing the handmade genius of Willis O’Brien’s work in the 1933 original. If pressed, Peter Jackson would probably admit that his performance-capture iteration from 2005 doesn’t top O’Brien’s groundbreaking work. One other element in the 1933 movie’s favor: It’s only 100 minutes long.

“Halloween” has been serialized and rebooted (and is about to be rebooted again by the unlikely duo of David Gordon Green and Danny McBride), but no iteration can match John Carpenter’s 1978 original for sheer, jump-out-of-your-skin terror. Michael Myers (as played by Nick Castle, who would later co-write "Escape from New York" with Carpenter) is the prototype for the modern slasher: a being of pure evil who cannot be stopped by conventional means. Add in Carpenter’s eerie synthesizer score, and you’ve got a 91-minutelong nightmare.

The nuclear age brought all manner of mutants and monsters, but it’s only right that Japan would provide the most nuanced and heartbreaking take on the tragic new genre. Ishiro Honda’s “Godzilla” is far removed from the campy, comedic vibe of the myriad sequels; it’s a somber horror film about the dangers of nuclear weapons at a time when the United States and the Soviet Union were just ramping up their arms race. Despite the death Godzilla leaves in his wake, it’s hard not to feel sympathy for this beast brought into existence by man’s inhumanity toward their fellow man.

Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” is one of the most terrifying films ever made, and one of the primary reasons for this is Gunnar Hansen’s unhinged performance as the insane Leatherface (who wears the human flesh of his victims). Unlike other slasher icons, Leatherface runs at top speed and, given his weapon of choice, doesn’t go about his bloody business quietly. Michael Bay produced a solid remake in 2003, but it couldn’t touch the unbridled savagery of Hooper’s original.

Here’s a rare case where the remake actually tops the original. Hideo Nakata’s “Ringu” has an ingenious premise (everyone who watches a cursed videotape will die in seven days), but it lacks the visual panache of Verbinski’s 2002 redo. The U.S. version, starring Naomi Watts, ramps up the sense of dread and delivers a creepier iteration of the cursed girl who climbs out of the well (named Samara here). Execution counts for so much, as was evident in the terrible 2005 sequel directed by none other than Hideo Nakata.

Wes Craven’s 1972 remake of Ingmar Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring” is about as unsettling an experience as anyone is likely to endure at a movie theater. Rogue Pictures tried to update the revenge film in 2009, and while that film is effective, it can’t compare to Craven’s original. There’s something about the borderline amateurish filmmaking of the '72 version that makes it all the more disturbing.

Sanctuary! Lon Chaney Sr. gave a remarkably athletic performance as the poor, deformed Quasimodo, but William Dieterle’s 1939 version features an all-time great performance from the incomparable Charles Laughton. Audiences will always be fighting back tears at the film’s final scene, where the heartbroken Quasimodo turns to a sculpture of a gargoyle and asks, “Why was I not made of stone like thee?” Cue the waterworks.

These movies all stink, but Stuart Rosenberg’s 1979 feature provides a few cheap scares thanks in large part to Lalo Schifrin’s haunting score. The notion that this is all based on a real-life haunted house in Long Island gives the first film a creepy charge at times, but it’s hamstrung by a lumpy screenplay and lousy lead performances from James Brolin and Margot Kidder. The 1982 prequel, “Amityville II: The Possession,” is also awful, but it adds in some kinky elements (and an abusive Burt Young) that makes it an unintentional howl.

Though Richard Franklin’s “Psycho II” is a far better sequel than most people realize (Tom Holland’s screenplay is tight as a drum), there’s still nothing like Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic. The modern horror film is deeply indebted to Hitchcock’s masterfully staged shower murder, Anthony Perkins' ultra-creepy portrayal of Norman Bates and, of course, Bernard Herrmann’s string-slashing score. Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake is worth watching as a cinematic exercise.

Alexandre Aja delivered a high-style remake of Wes Craven’s relentlessly terrifying horror flick in 2006, but he sacrificed dread for a surfeit of gore. Craven’s original is a lo-fi account of a family accosted by mutants in the desert; it cuts away any semblance of a safety net early on, signaling to viewers that everyone is expendable. It’s a rough, exhausting tale of survival in the face of unimaginable savagery.

The 1981 slasher flick was a passable entry in the then-nascent sub-genre, but what it really needed was the charge of a pickax being swung at the audience in 3D. This Patrick Lussier-directed remake is a load of fun. It’s a wild ride of inventive kills, wildly gratuitous nudity and a great throwback performance from 1980s horror-film favorite, Tom Atkins. Everyone seems to be having the time of their life in this movie.

The Chucky saga has yet to be properly rebooted, but it did make a pretty wild tonal swing with the Ronny Yu-directed “Bride of Chucky” in 1998. The series had always had a bit of a comedic kick (it is, after all, about a serial killer inhabiting a toy’s body), but the primary emphasis of the first few films was on scares. The films are all generally enjoyable, but the Tom Holland-directed original is still the best.

"Scream," the film that — for better or worse — revived the slasher film, went through several sequels itself before getting a television reboot. Wes Craven directed all four features, but the novelty of the first movie, with its horror-film-savvy kids trying to outsmart the killer (not realizing that their classmates Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard are the killer), could never be duplicated. Craven had been gradually improving as a director throughout his career, and he finally put all of the pieces together in the first movie. It’s a modern horror classic that’s aged beautifully.