10 Actors Who Got Their Start in Horror Movies (Besides Jamie Lee Curtis)
Paul Rudd
Jamie Lee Curtis wasn’t the only young star who got an early start in a scary movie. Here are 10 other actors who appeared in horror flicks early in their careers.
Actors Who Got Their Start in Horror Movies
New Line Cinema/Everett Collection
Johnny Depp
Long before he played pirate Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp (then 21) was ill-fated teenager Glen Lantz in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), lured into a literal hellhole by Freddy Krueger.
Courtesy IMDB
George Clooney
Who’s that handsome young actor playing a handsome young cop in Return to Horror High (1987)? Why, it’s George Clooney, then 26.
Related: 20 Extremely Scary Horror Movies You Can Watch on Netflix Right Now
20th Century Fox
Ben Affleck
If a basketball player in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), a precursor to the later TV series, looks familiar, it’s because he’s a 20-year-old Ben Affleck in an uncredited role. The following year, he’d have a bigger part in director Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused.
Courtesy IMDB
Charlize Theron
She’d receive an Oscar for playing a serial killer in Monster, but a decade before that, Charlize Theron, then 20, was an unnamed young woman who meets the wrong end of a mutant corn stalk in Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (1995).
Dimension Films/Everett Collection
Paul Rudd
Tommy Doyle, the little boy babysat by Jamie Lee Curtis’ character in the original Halloween, was all grown up in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)—and played by Paul Rudd, then 26.
Related: 20 Extremely Scary Horror Movies You Can Watch on Amazon Prime Video Right Now
United Archives/IFTN/Newscom
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
It’s Halloween again in Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998), and neighborhood boy Jimmy Howell (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, then 17) doesn’t know he’ll soon have an unfortunate encounter with a piece of ice-hockey equipment.
Rogue Pictures/Everett Collection
Renée Zellweger
On prom night—almost always a bad evening in horror films—Jenny (Renée Zellweger, then 25) has a terrifying encounter in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994) with the members of the aptly named Slaughter family.
TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy Stock Photo
Keira Knightley
British actress Keira Knightley was only 16 when she played Frankie, a rebellious schoolgirl trapped and terrified with her classmates in an old, abandoned war bunker in The Hole (2001).
Related: The Best (and Scariest) Horror Movies You Can Watch Right Now on Hulu
Courtesy IMDB
Jennifer Lawrence
She’d go on to star in the Hunger Games series and receive an Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook, but at 20, Jennifer Lawrence was a young woman moving into a small town reeling from a gruesome double murder that happened in House at the End of the Street (2012).
IFA Film/United Archives/Newscom
Naomi Watts
All the kids in a town turn feverish, then evil, killing every adult in sight. Newcomer Grace Rhodes (Naomi Watts, then 28) tries to figure it all out, and survive, in Children of the Corn: The Gathering (1996), the fourth in the “Corn” franchise.
