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Best Maze Series/Franchise?

What is the best maze series of HHNH?

  • NOES (Freddy's Nightmare, Home Sweet Hell, Never Sleep Again, FvJ, ToT)

  • F13 (Camp Blood, Kill Jason Kill, FvJ, ToT)

  • TCM (Back in Business, Saw is the Law, Blood Brothers, ToT)

  • Halloween (Life and Crimes, MM Comes Home, Hell Comes to Haddonfield, H4)

  • Saw (Game Over/Game On, Games of Jigsaw)

  • Alice Cooper (Welcome to My Nightmare, Goes to Hell)

  • TWD (Dead Inside, No Safe Haven, End of the Line, Wolves Not Far, TWDA)

  • Insidious (Into/Return/Beyond: the Further)

  • AHS (Year 1, Roanoke)

  • HOB (Chapter 1, Chapter 2)


Results are only viewable after voting.

DTH

Nov 7, 2016
1,573
1,722
HHNH has now had it's fair share of IPs returning for sequel mazes. Which franchise has had the best series of mazes?

To qualify as a series, it had to be at least 2 distinctive mazes. Something like La Llorona, which had a tweaking or even 50% new scenes, doesn't make the cut. Has to be a wholly new maze and layout.

Evil Dead and AvED is also missing... honestly I just forgot to put it in the poll and I couldn't put more choices anyway, but if this is anyone's pick, go ahead and just put it in the comments!
 
Well, like anything else, to figure this out, I gotta rank 'em. So here we go:

11) Evil Dead. I didn't even remember to include it. I also find it hard to even connect the two since they're so vastly different in terms of tone. Regardless, neither maze was particularly scary or got it's due justice. Maybe it still will one day...

10) HOB. I only liked Chapter 2 and Chapter 1 is way... way down there, for me.

9) Alice Cooper. WTMN was good, but GTH was fairly mediocre.

8) AHS. First Year was good and I actually loved Roanoke, but there's only been two years, so I can't make the case to take it much higher.

7) Saw. Very strong first two years, but Games of Jigsaw was just a sorry return to close out that trilogy.

6) TCM. BIB is my all time favorite maze anywhere, SITL was good, but I wasn't a fan of Blood Brothers. The TOT portion was alright also.

5) F13. Camp Blood was a lot of fun, but wasn't particularly scary. KJK made up for that though. FVJ was a cherry on top and the portion of TOT was pretty good! CB is the only thing holding it lower.

4) Insidious. All three of these have been top notch, but the third one's continuity just didn't make any sense. Pound for pound, this has been the most reliable series when it comes to scares though.

3) NOES. First two years, they were pretty cool, but not my favorite. NSA though, was the very definition of turning a crappy movie into an A+ maze that was very scary. Again, FvJ was amazing and I found Freddy's portion in ToT to be the best part.

2) Halloween. Talk about very consistent. Life and Crimes is easily in my top 5 mazes of all time. The second time they tried to pull off the first movie... meh. Not that it was a bad maze, it just paled in comparison. Hell Come to Haddonfield was great though, especially with that knockout ending. And part 4 gave us a relentless Michael that just doesn't give up and is constantly attacking you at every corner. These have been the scariest and best of the slasher mazes, for sure.

1) TWD. Now I know these haven't always been everyone's cup of tea, but these mazes never let me down. First year, grade A maze. Year two, just as good. Year three, I'll admit could've been a lot better, but I still got my scares. Year four, somehow didn't suffer any fatigue and was probably the best TWD they did by being long, relentless, mixed in strobe scares, puppet scares, and roaming scareactors KSF/any-regular-haunt-in-the-world style. The TWDA is good in it's own right, especially in terms of scenic, but even if I weren't counting it apart of the HHN series, this wins for me. Always delivered action packed mazes that had me bouncing from one end of the hallway to the next while zombies tried to eat my face and it was always a delight.
 
I'd say Texas Chainsaw Massacre - gets under your skin, and every installment feels like it has its own identity. Blood Brothers was a great incorporation of the sequel's characters/mythology without becoming a straight recreation.

Halloween is definitely the closest runner-up, with every maze in its lineage being rock solid or better.

Insidious would be my top if Beyond the Further hadn't face planted so hard. The cast was great and the characters fun, but the maze design was so poor (especially relative to its exceptional predecessors) that it can't even be in the conversation.

EDITED TO ADD:
American Horror Story also would've been in the conversation had it lasted more than two installments. I loved what they did with the first maze (though I do have considerable bias there), and I thought Roanoke was a solid follow-up (complete with the same introductory framing device). However, I was frustrated that Roanoke diverged so significantly from the actual season's tone and content, at times feeling too many degrees removed of what was experienced; the AHS theme itself wasn't even used. This was likely an outlier problem (Roanoke was an outlier season to begin with), but it did bother me.
 
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