Random True Stories Of How Famous Horror Icons Got Their Start (13 items)

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  (#8) John Carpenter

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  Prior to giving the world Halloween and Michael Myers, John Carpenter attended University of Southern California, where he made short films. His first, 1970's The Resurrection of Billy Bronco, earned him an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Subject Film. His move into full-length films started with 1974's cult classic Dark Star, then Assault on Precinct 13 in 1976, and then Halloween in 1978.

  Carpenter's contributions to sci-fi and horror continued with The Thing, The Fog, and most recently, The Ward in 2011. Carpenter's Halloween, however, shaped the formula for slasher flicks that featured mask-wearing creeps stalking teenagers.
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  (#1) Rob Zombie

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  Many famous actors got their start either in front of or behind the camera of Pee-Wee's Playhouse, a children's show that aired from 1986 until 1990. Rock star and horror film director Rob Zombie is included on this list, working as a production assistant on the series. Zombie was around 19 at the time, telling outlet Westword that he really enjoyed the people working on the show and did "crap work" for the show.

  After moving on from his stint behind the scenes, Zombie took his love for old horror movies and integrated it into the videos for his music before making his first film, House of 1,000 Corpses, in 2003. It became a cult favorite, leading to sequels featuring the Firefly clan, remakes of John Carpenter's beloved Halloween franchise, and multiple low-budget horror movies with a rabid following.
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  (#10) Jordan Peele

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  Jordan Peele's background is improv and comedy work, illustrated by the successful Key & Peele series on Comedy Central from 2012 through 2015 and his stint prior to that on MadTV. Even before that, Peele took part in TADA! Youth Theater and performed improv in Chicago with Second City. Surprising fans, Peele moved into horror with his Oscar-winning 2017 film Get Out, following it up with another horror hit, Us, in 2019. 

  Peele headed a reboot of the classic series The Twilight Zone at CBS in 2019 as well. In 2020, he produced a remake of 1992 horror film Candyman, continuing to make his mark in horror.
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  (#4) Wes Craven

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  Wes Craven brought horror into viewers' dreams with his classic series A Nightmare on Elm Street and its distinctive stripey-sweater-wearing villain Freddy Krueger; but before that, he directed adult films. Although Craven earned degrees from Wheaton College and Johns Hopkins University, in his thirties, he decided to branch out into film. Using pseudonyms, he dipped his toes into the business via adult films, including an undisclosed role in the making of Deep Throat.

  Luckily for horror aficionados, Craven pivoted with his gory debut The Last House on the Left in 1972, followed by The Hills Have Eyes in 1977 and A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984. Craven went on to redefine the horror genre with 1996's Scream, making the characters aware of all the rules to surviving a horror movie while fighting their own masked slayer.
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  (#2) Eli Roth

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  Roth's Cabin Fever hit in 2003, bringing the writer and director to the forefront of a new movement in horror that emphasized gore and body trauma. Famed director Quentin Tarantino produced Roth's followup, Hostel, a dark fable about rich, powerful people paying to torment vacationers staying in group hostels. Even today, Roth continues to push the limits of human squeamishness with movies like The Green Inferno.

  Before his directorial debut, Roth had an unusual job working as a cybersex operator on the internet for Penthouse magazine in the early 1990s. Pretending to be a woman, Roth fulfilled fantasies for people.
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  (#11) Dario Argento

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  Dario Argento's made his mark in horror with dream-like, gory fantasias like Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980). A master weaver of gleefully trippy stories about witches, insect communication, and kidnappers, Argento made money prior to his film career in a much more mundane way: as a columnist for an Italian newspaper. 

  In a 2009 article for The Guardian, Argento shared that he wrote movie reviews for Paesa Sera in the late 1960s. It was during this time that Sergio Leone asked Argento to write a screenplay for his movie Once Upon a Time in the West, which he did with Bernardo Bertolucci. It was the first of many films Argento wrote, leading to directing one of his own screenplays, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, in 1970.

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