Being a child star in a horror movie isn’t an easy task — but thousands of actors have taken it on. From Danny Lloyd, who portrayed the horrified child in The Shining, to Devon Sawa, who appeared in multiple Final Destination movies, always somehow escaping death, many stars got their start in horror films.
Of course, many of them had no idea what kind of impact the horror flicks would have on their careers.
“It was a little tiny pish of a horror movie shot in 20 days. I’m being honest. I mean, it’s nice that it has a fanbase,” Jamie Lee Curtis, who starred in the original 1978 Halloween, told NME about the now-famous movie. “I’m not trying to be facetious or cute or clever. Although I do try to do that often… It just bothers me because there’s some feeling that this was some preordained, planned mastermind and that’s just s–t.”
She explained that director John Carpenter would “be the first person to tell you” that they had no clue what type of massive success the movie — and its many sequels — would have.
“We were making an exploitation slasher movie about killing babysitters. And that’s what it was. Shot in 20 days, shot for nothing. Fast, furious, vicious and what it became really had nothing to do with the intent of the work,” she continued. “The intent of the work was to make a movie and then, as a young filmmaker, make another movie. It became then the thing you could get another job from, not that it was going to become something.”
Scroll through the gallery below to see where some of the biggest horror movie stars are today.