The United States of Horror: A Look At Each State’s Favorite Horror Movie Franchise!

In honor of Spooky Season, we took a look at your favorite horror movie franchises State by State! (Ranker.com)

America loves horror movies, and there’s no better time to enjoy them than the weeks before Halloween. While some great horror films like The Shining and The Blair Witch Project are standalone achievements, many of our favorite scary movies spawned sequels, trilogies, and even widely panned blockbuster crossovers with one another. These franchises feature some of the most discussed and debated movies in American pop culture.

Which of these franchises is your favorite? We might be able to take a guess based on the state you live in — we took a look at our Best Horror Franchises list (123.6k votes from 8.1k voters) and found out how people across the country voted on every franchise from Halloween to Hellraiser. Here’s what the voting data told us.

The most popular franchises are the Top 3 on the list: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street. But these slasher series account for only about half of all the states. The other half of the country favors a range of different classic horror movies, from classics like Texas Chainsaw Massacre to more recent favorites like the Saw films.

2001’s Jeepers Creepers picked up a total of five states: Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah. That’s a surprisingly strong finish for a franchise that started relatively recently (the original Jeepers Creepers came out in 2001) and that has far less name-recognition than its competitors — including Nightmare on Elm Street, which is the favorite of only four states. Meanwhile the widely beloved Alien was #1 in only two states, the same number of states that favor Gremlins and Tremors, respectively.

Other movies surprised us by even making it onto the map. Puppet Master is more of a cult favorite than a horror classic, so we didn’t expect to see it take the #1 spot in Louisiana. Nor did we think the goofy 80s Gremlins movies would be considered the best horror franchise of all time by voters in both Oregon and Rhode Island. But we weren’t shocked to see that the famously proud people of Texas were the only ones to vote up Texas Chainsaw Massacre as their #1.

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Watching horror movies isn’t just a Halloween tradition — it’s a great way to celebrate the holiday while continuing to practice social distancing. we can still have fun (and scare ourselves silly) while preventing the spread of COVID-19. However you’re choosing to spend your holiday, we at Ranker encourage you to celebrate safely!