From bargain bin to A-list: 10 actors who got their start in awful horror movies
There’s always been a steady pipeline between horror and the summit of cinema, with a bountiful array of actors and filmmakers having gotten their start dealing with blood, guts, and buckets of entrails.
Not everyone gets to be a Sam Raimi, Kevin Bacon, or Johnny Depp by lending their name to a classic right out of the gate, though, with The Evil Dead, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street comfortably among the most recognisable – and profitable – titles of the modern age.
There’s no direct correlation between the quality of a horror flick a future star debuts in and the career they go on to enjoy, either, which is a fortunate development considering so many of them turn out to be abject dreck.
The trophy cabinets of the following ten performers are all stuffed to bursting point, but the common thread is that they all secured the first notable credits of their careers in schlockers so bad it would be an insult to B-level horror to place them among the second tier.
10 actors who debuted in bad horror:
10. Eva Mendes (Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror, Ethan Wiley, 1998)
She’s happily semi-retired these days after placing her focus on family while Ryan Gosling continues his current hot streak as one of the industry’s most popular leading men, but Eva Mendes first considered abandoning acting before she’d even landed her breakthrough.
It wasn’t until she was cast opposite Denzel Washington in Training Day that the actor was convinced her future lay on the silver screen after all, and debuting in the fifth entry in the interminable and never-ending Children of the Corn franchise hardly got her career off to the strongest start.
Indicative of her early struggles, another of Mendes’ earliest roles came in Urban Legends: Final Cut, so it’s easy to see why she was concerned about bargain basement slasher sequels being the only offers coming her way at the beginning.
9. Jason Alexander (The Burning, Tony Maylam, 1981)
The Emmy and Tony-winning veteran of stage and screen has proven his worth as both an actor and comedian, but the Seinfeld stalwart has never jumped out as somebody who’d be perfectly suited to the horror genre.
And yet, Alexander’s first-ever appearance in a feature film came in The Burning, which also marked the debuts of both Fisher Stevens and Holly Hunter. It’s since been reappraised as a cult favourite, but at the time, the critics had their knives out, and audiences couldn’t have been less interested in buying a ticket.
Alexander plays a camp counsellor caught in a killing spree when the caretaker gets set on fire and left for dead, only to return years later carrying a thirst for vengeance and his trusty – and rusty – shears to wreak a whole lot of havoc on the current crop of teenagers.
8. Jennifer Aniston (Leprechaun, Mark Jones, 1993)
Just a year after making her movie debut in Leprechaun, Jennifer Aniston was thrust into the limelight when Friends premiered to massive success, which is just as well because her maiden foray into cinema was entirely unremarkable.
Proving that no self-respecting horror franchise can stay down no matter how terrible it is, Leprechaun has given rise to five sequels, a reboot, and a legacy follow-up, and it goes without saying that none of them were any good.
It’s just as well that Aniston eventually found fame and fortune, because her first film appearance of any kind came via an uncredited blink-and-you’ll-miss-it spot in the egregious Mac and Me, so her movie career was hardly defined by a double-whammy of greatness before she pitched up at Central Perk.
7. Leonardo DiCaprio (Critters 3, Kristine Peterson, 1991)
Half a decade into his big screen tenure and Leonardo DiCaprio was already earmarked for greatness, not that anybody would have been able to guess what lay in his future if Critters 3 was the sole piece of evidence provided.
Fast forward five years, and he’d added This Boy’s Life, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Basketball Diaries, The Quick and the Dead, and Romeo + Juliet onto his filmography, leaving the straight-to-video creature feature sequel as nothing but a distant memory.
It wouldn’t be too harsh to suggest the only reason people even know Critters 3 even exists is because of DiCaprio’s debut, although the fourth instalment did feature an early role for Angela Bassett, so maybe it’s inadvertently become a proving ground of sorts.
6. Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Troll, John Carl Buechler, 1986)
The second Seinfeld veteran to arrive under inauspicious circumstances, Julia Louis-Dreyfus hardly gave off the aura of a performer who would go on to accrue 11 Primetime Emmys, a Golden Globe, and nine Screen Actors Guild Awards in the years to come.
Troll 2 is undoubtedly more famous than its predecessor thanks entirely to the way it entered the hall of cinematic infamy through the sheer shithousery involved in every fibre of its construction and execution, but the tongue-in-cheek adulation that greeted the sequel was of an entirely ironic nature.
The opener, meanwhile, is just a shitty film. There are wizards, witches, beasts, and things going bump in the night, all executed without an ounce of style or panache, but at least allowing Louis-Dreyfus to get the ball rolling on what would soon become a stellar career.
5. Brad Pitt (Cutting Class, Rospo Pallenberg, 1989)
Being ridiculously handsome can only get an actor so far, as Brad Pitt discovered when his first three feature-length outings failed to even result in his name being part of the credits.
When he landed the first lead role of his career in Montenegro-shot thriller The Dark Side of the Sun in 1988, nobody got to see it for a decade after the regional conflicts saw the almost-completed movie tucked away inside a Belgrade warehouse until producer Andjelo Arandjelovic got it finished and released.
In the meantime, Pitt kept himself busy playing Dwight Ingalls in blackly comic slasher Cutting Class, where he becomes the target of a troubled student who returns to resume their education following a spell being institutionalised, right before a swathe of teens begin vanishing under suspicious circumstances.
4. Hilary Swank (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Fran Rubel Kuzui, 1992)
The TV series bearing its name may have become a pop culture touchstone several years further down the line, but Buffy the Vampire Slayer was dead on arrival as a tonally misjudged and altogether uninteresting horror comedy.
It did at least give Hilary Swank her very first outing on the big screen, which she followed up by following in Ralph Macchio’s footsteps in The Next Karate Kid. It was a bizarre start to her professional life, but it didn’t take long for acclaim and accolades to begin coming her way.
A measly seven films and seven years into her career, Swank took home the Academy Award for ‘Best Actress’ thanks to her star-making performance in Boys Don’t Cry, making it very easy to ignore her presence in the movie where Ben Affleck was overdubbed, as well as her tutelage under Mr. Miyagi.
3. Tom Hanks (He Knows You’re Alone, Armand Mastroianni, 1980)
Tom Hanks shot to stardom as an affable romantic lead before evolving into a dramatic powerhouse, but like so many before him, his foot entered the door through the means of the tedious shoestring slasher flick.
As the ninth-billed name in He Knows You’re Alone, the pressure wasn’t exactly heaped upon his shoulders to deliver right out of the gate, but the overly-familiar serial killer thriller did gain a lasting legacy of sorts when its opening scene was repurposed by Wes Craven in the beginning of Scream 2.
It would be another four years before Hanks appeared in another movie, and when he did, Ron Howard’s Splash instantly strapped the proverbial rocket to his back and set him on course to become one of the industry’s biggest stars.
2. Charlize Theron (Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest, James D.R. Hickox, 1995)
Following the Swank route of ‘debuting in a dire horror before winning an Oscar less than a decade later’, Charlize Theron even managed to get in on the Children of the Corn act before Mendes did, because crap franchises seem to have a weird habit of unearthing stars.
Between Urban Harvest and her ‘Best Actress’-winning turn in Monster, Theron rapidly rose up the ranks after being directed by Tom Hanks in That Thing You Do!, combating Al Pacino’s scenery-chewing in The Devil’s Advocate, collaborating with John Frankenheimer on Reindeer Games, and lending support in The Cider House Rules.
That’s nothing short of meteoric, considering there were only eight years between Patty Jenkins’ ferocious biographical crime drama and her pivotal contributions to the third Children of the Corn film ‘Eli’s Follower’.
1. George Clooney (Grizzly II: Revenge, André Szöts, 1983)
As far as Z-list horrors go that mark ignominious debuts for future A-listers, George Clooney‘s Grizzly II may well have the most supremely stacked ensemble the bargain bin has ever cobbled together.
In his first feature film credit, the future two-time Oscar winner is joined in the cast by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Oscar winner Louise Fletcher, second-generation talents Laura Dern and Charlie Sheen, as well as Indiana Jones favourite John Rhys-Davies, and Timothy Spall.
Quite frankly, that’s a ludicrous array of names to be brought together for a sequel where a bloodthirsty bear goes on a rampage ahead of a concert at Yellowstone, but everybody has to start somewhere. For Clooney, sadly, it was here.
