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

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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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  (#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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  (#3) Stephen King

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  King worked as a high school teacher and sometimes had short stories published in gentleman's magazines to help pay the bills. Although he already had three novels finished and sitting unpublished, King wrote Carrie to combat criticisms about his inability to write well-rounded female characters. After only writing three pages, King trashed the novel. Luckily Tabitha, his wife, fished the pages from the garbage and pushed King to finish.

  The rest is, of course, history, as King became a writer synonymous with the horror genre, publishing more than 60 novels and at least five non-fiction books. He's also directed a movie adaptation of his own short story, Maximum Overdrive, and seen multiple film, television, and mini-series adaptations of his works.
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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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  (#5) Sid Haig

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  Sid Haig had a long career in Hollywood prior to his passing in 2019, amassing over 70 film roles and over 300 roles on television. Haig began his acting at Pasadena Playhouse, the official state theater of California, where multiple stars of the 1940s and 1950s got their start. Also of note was Haig's performance as a drummer in The T-Birds in the late 1950s, releasing six singles that included the hit "Full House."

  Haig acted in multiple Blaxploitation films over his career, but his role as Captain Spaulding in director and writer Rob Zombie's House of 1,000 Corpses propelled him back into the collective consciousness of the horror world. The character made an impact and appeared in Zombie's movies The Devil's Rejects and 3 From Hell before Haig's passing. Even before that, Haig solidified his place in horror infamy with his role in 1968's Spider Baby as Ralph, an inbred child who wreaks havoc with his equally demented siblings.
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  (#6) Tim Burton

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  Before bringing his artistically macabre perspective to movies like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Batman, Burton worked at Disney in the animation department. Burton attended CalArts, the Disney-founded art school; after departing the program in the late 1970s, he worked on The Fox and the Hound but struggled with the restrictions of the Disney house style. After he made his short Frankenweenie in 1984, Disney let Burton go. Not long after, he was off to the races, directing 1985's classic Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

  Surprisingly, Burton went on to work with Disney and its different production arms over the bulk of his career, even remaking Frankenweenie with them in 2012. Although Burton's films lean more toward the visually strange than the type of horror that keeps you up at night, his contributions of family-friendly horror his and re-imagining of Alice in Wonderland are important entries in the genre and give hope to all of the strange kids whose ideas don't fit the traditional, sunshine-filled mold of mainstream entertainment. He also directed what might just be the scariest scene in any comedy.
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  (#7) Bruce Campbell

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  High school friends Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi lived in Michigan, bonding over their love of making short films in their childhood yards. After a youth spent making comedy shorts, horror shorts, and anything else they desired to film, the friends reunited as adults. In the interim, Campbell had worked a string of jobs, including driving a cab and working as a production assistant. In early 1979, Raimi wrote the short story that became the cult classic The Evil Dead, starring Campbell as hero Ashley Williams, a man trapped in a remote cabin with friends as an evil force takes over and dispatches them one by one.

  Campbell and Raimi went on to make more Evil Dead movies, with Campbell reprising his role in the series Ash vs Evil Dead from 2015 until 2018. Raimi directed all of the Campbell Evil Dead films before moving into mainstream cinema with 1998's A Simple Plan and the early 2000s Spider-Man trilogy. He returned briefly to his roots with 2009's Drag Me to Hell.
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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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  (#9) Linda Blair

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  Linda Blair was only 14 when her star-making turn as Regan MacNeil terrified audiences, leaving them nauseated and even causing some to exit the theater in terror. Prior to this role, a small 4-year-old Blair made her debut as a child model in print advertisements that eventually led to commercial work.

  More interested in horses than acting at the time, Blair auditioned for the role of Regan anyway, taking on what became her defining role and creating a character that serves as the benchmark for child actors in horror.
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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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  (#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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  (#12) Alfred Hitchcock

  • Dec. at 81 (1899-1980)

  Alfred Hitchcock's name is bound to come up any time horror films are a part of the discussion; he is the creator of macabre classics such as Psycho, The Birds, and the television anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Prior to that, he worked creating title cards presented during silent films and also made money a draftsman, advertising designer, and writer. 

  Hitchcock's filmography casts a long shadow on the work of filmmakers in all genres - not least of them horror.

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