If you want to count “Universal Monsters” as an ongoing cinematic franchise, then it’s about as long-running as they get. The first big movies classifiable as such pre-dated even the first King Kong, which came out in 1933. And Godzilla was still more than 20 years away around the time some of the Universal Monsters made their big-screen debuts, so even if Kong and Godzilla dominated pop culture eventually, at least as far as movie monsters go, you do have to give props to the genre’s originals. There were a few silent era movies that sometimes get called Universal Monster movies, but The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925) aren’t being included here. It’s not that they're bad, or ineffective as silent-era horror movies, but it feels a bit weird to call them monster movies, since the “monsters” are deformed people.
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