10 Horror Franchises Where The First Movie Is NOT The Best

Few, if any, genres spawn as many lucrative, long-running franchises as horror does, and this isn't necessarily a good thing. After all, such franchises always peak with their first movie... right? 

Actually, not at all. 

Sure, plenty of horror franchises have never topped their first instalment - Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Psycho, Candyman, Insidious, Saw, the list goes on. Having said this, a horror franchise that peaks later on really isn't as rare as it sounds. These following ten franchises are all great examples of this. 

Some of them actually started out with a weak movie that was lucky to get a sequel to begin with, so there was ample room for improvement, while in other cases the filmmakers behind the series hit their stride later on, delivering more compelling material once they'd had some practice and really established the characters. 

Regardless, it is so, so satisfying when a horror franchise peaks after its first movie, especially given how awful so many horror sequels are. Kicking off with one of the most financially successful horror franchises of all time...

The best instalment: Paranormal Activity 3

Paranormal Activity is one of horror's very-worst franchises. The original film is pretty terrible when you take away its found-footage gimmick and even if it deserves praise for being the most profitable movie ever made (it made $194.2 million worldwide on a $15,000 production budget), this is harder to celebrate as its success led to a series of lazy, creatively hollow sequels being sent out year after year. They were quick and cheap to produce, yet little to no effort was made in writing a good script or coming up with genuine scares. 

So then, are any of the Paranormal Activity films good? Actually, yes. One of them. That is Paranormal Activity 3, which is (mostly) a prequel to the first two films, showing the childhood hauntings that afflicted Katie and Kirsti, the protagonists of the first and second PA films respectively. 

While it's still formulaic and could've made more effort to get viewers invested in its characters, Paranormal Activity 3 is a surprisingly solid horror threequel that does actually deliver the scares for once, and also uses its found-footage format in some inventive ways. For example, a camera being mounted on a revolving fan arm leads to some neat shocks. 

While not a great movie by any stretch, this is still an absolutely solid entry into the usually underwhelming found-footage subgenre, and the fact that it's a Paranormal Activity movie that's actually good makes it an immensely satisfying, pleasantly surprising watch.