Scary starts: Big stars who launched their careers in bad horror films

A year before she launched a million haircuts as Rachel on TV’s Friends, Jennifer Aniston made her big-screen debut in 1993’s . As Freddy Krueger seemed to be winding down his theatrical run, Hollywood must have thought a wise-cracking leprechaun would fill the void left by A Nightmare On Elm Street’s razor-fingered boogeyman. Aniston plays Tory, a gun-toting teen (Aniston was nearly 24 at the time of the movie’s release) who battles a demonic leprechaun at the farmhouse her father has rented for the summer. Although the campy Leprechaun has a cult following and spawned numerous sequels and a reboot, it should come as little surprise that Aniston stayed far away from all of them.

A year before earning her first Oscar nomination for playing Tina Turner in What’s Love Got To Do With It, Angela Bassett played Fran the spaceship pilot in 1992’s . Yes, at this point in the aging Critters franchise—the original movie was a cheap Gremlins rip-off—the filmmakers thought outer space circa 2045 would be a fresh setting for the crazy critters. Critics crucified the movie for its lame special effects and juvenile ideas, but hopefully Bassett was at least paid enough to buy a new car or something before she moved on to roles more worthy of a queen’s talent.

Actor-comedian-musician Jack Black is best known for his roles in High Fidelity, King Kong, School Of Rock, and for voicing Po in the Kung Fu Panda franchise. But the Golden Globe nominee’s most-maligned part is the uncredited role of Titus Telesco in , the sequel to I Know What You Did Last Summer, which means the sequel probably should have been called I Know What You Did Two Summers Ago, but let’s stay focused. The character works at a resort in the Bahamas where a majority of this soggy sequel about a murderous fisherman takes place. Titus has dreadlocks (today’s woke audiences would cancel him faster than you can say “cultural appropriation”) and is aggressively preoccupied with getting guests a boatload of weed. We’re not sure what Titus (or the filmmakers) were actually smoking, but this obnoxious, offensive, supporting character should have been left on the cutting-room floor.

is a prequel to 2003’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was a remake of the 1974 grind house classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. In the 2006 prequel, Matt Bomer plays a young man traveling across the country with his brother and their girlfriends before enlisting to serve in the Vietnam War. They of course encounter Leatherface and his messed-up family of hillbilly cannibals, and things go south fast. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning came out during the peak of the torture-porn era, when movies such as Saw and Hostel were carving up the box office. Because of this, The Beginning seems to have no other purpose than to graphically torture beautiful people (including Bomer) on-screen in sickening detail. We love that Bomer is game for genre roles, but we’d rather watch him on American Horror Story than in an exploitation film like this dubious prequel.

Hot off turning heads with a glorious mullet on The Facts Of Life, future Oscar winner George Clooney appeared in one of his first big-screen roles in 1987’s . This comedy-horror film is about members of a film crew who begin to disappear on location at a high school where a bunch of mysterious murders took place. It was probably too soon to spoof slasher films in 1987 (we had to wait for Scream to do it brilliantly in 1996), so very few horror fans return to Return To Horror High today. The flick, like Clooney’s mullet, has been lost in time.

Best Actor Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio made his film debut in the direct-to-video sequel . It’s hard to believe that anyone who starred in this lame Gremlins rip-off would go on to greatness, but within 10 years of this sequel DiCaprio became a teen heartthrob and appeared in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Basketball Diaries, Romeo + Juliet, and a little movie called Titanic. We’ll chalk Critters 3 up to industry growing pains. Coincidentally, around the same time of Critters 3’s release, DiCaprio appeared as Luke Brower on TV’s Growing Pains.

In the aughts, many classic ’80s horror movies were remade, often in watered-down PG-13 versions, in an attempt to get younger people to buy tickets. This is the case for 2008’s , a PG-13 remake of the 1980 cult classic starring Jamie Lee Curtis. In this mostly bloodless remake, someone talked Idris Elba into playing Detective Winn, a man tasked with protecting a teenage girl from an escaped convict who murdered her family years earlier. By the time Prom Night came out in 2008, Elba had already found success on TV’s The Wire, so we’re not sure what inspired him to sign up for this gutless and unnecessary remake. His performance here is the definition of “phoning it in,” so maybe he should have been asked to join the remake of When A Stranger Calls instead.

is about spiders that are exposed to toxic waste, grow to a colossal size, and terrorize the residents of a small mining time. This 2002 homage to ’50s B-movies features David Arquette and a young Scarlett Johansson, the latter having just had her breakout role in Ghost World. After kicking arachnid butt (they have butts, right?) in Eight Legged Freaks, Johansson would later go on to star in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as, ironically, Black Widow. But in Eight Legged Freaks she gets caught in a web of schlocky special effects.

In 2012—the same year Jennifer Lawrence appeared for the first time as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games and earned an Oscar for starring in Silver Linings Playbook—the lame psychological thriller finally got released after having been filmed in 2010. The makers of House At The End Of The Street probably hoped to cash in on the American sweetheart’s success by brushing the dust off an unreleased movie about a notorious house where a double homicide took place. The strategy kind of worked because the low-budget PG-13 flick made over $44 million (about $43.9 million more than it deserved to), but don’t expect Lawrence to sign on for a sequel anytime soon.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has so many sequels, prequels, reboots, and requels that you would need a flow chart to keep track of all the timelines. For those interested, 1995’s is the fourth movie in the franchise and follows the timeline established in the original 1974 movie. TCM: The Next Generation got a limited released in theaters two years after Matthew McConaughey had his breakout role in Dazed And Confused and a year before Renée Zellweger became a huge star thanks to Jerry Maguire. TCM: The Next Generation featured cameos by actors from the original film and was written and directed by Kim Henkle, the cowriter of the 1974 classic, but the cheap production served little purpose other than to point a camera at McConaughey and let him and his wild eyes act crazy. of the experience, “It was very low budget, so we all shared a tiny Winnebago that the producer of the film—it belonged to him, it was his personal camper. It was ridiculous. How we pulled that off, I have no idea. I’m sure none of it was legal. Anything we did was a little bit dangerous. But what an experience. It was kamikaze filmmaking.”

Actress and Ryan Gosling baby mama Eva Mendes made her feature film debut in the 1998 straight-to-video sequel no one asked for: . Mendes plays an outsider named Kir in this shoddy sequel about a cult of rural kids who serve an entity known as “He Who Walks Behind the Rows.” Mendes’ only function here is to join the cult and sacrifice herself by jumping off a silo to a fiery death. The end. Fortunately, better parts followed in movies such as Training Day, 2 Fast 2 Furious, Hitch, and The Place Beyond The Pines, the latter of which she starred alongside Gosling.

Oscar nominee Viggo Mortensen is best known for playing Aragorn in The Lord Of The Rings movies and for becoming David Cronenberg’s go-to leading man, but every great actor has to start somewhere. One of Mortensen’s earliest roles was as Edward “Tex” Sawyer in 1990’s , in which he plays a member of the Sawyer family of cannibals that includes the titular chainsaw-wielding maniac. Mortensen is a committed actor who has never phoned it in—even in this mediocre horror sequel—but his admirable sense of duty can’t elevate Leatherface from being anything more substantial than a gory cash-in.

Continuing the 2000s trend of remaking horror films of the ’70s and ’80s is 2005’s , a remake of the 1979 film of the same name that is based on a supposedly true story of a haunting at a Long Island home where several murders took place. Ryan Reynolds plays George Lutz, the family patriarch who got a great deal on the home due to its notorious past, but who slowly loses his mind due to the sinister supernatural forces within. The filmmakers use any excuse to film a ripped Reynolds without his shirt on (time to flex and chop some wood!), which only pulls you out of the moment because no average dad had a bod like that in the 1970s. Beyond that jarring distraction, the hokey remake did little to improve upon the original story, which many skeptics dismiss as a hoax. Reynolds’ build and comic delivery were much better utilized in movies such as Blade: Trinity, Deadpool, and The Hitman’s Bodyguard.

Paul Rudd made his feature-film debut in 1995’s , the sixth film in the Halloween series. Rudd plays a grown-up version of Tommy Doyle, the little boy who Laurie Strode babysat in the 1978 original. This notoriously troubled sequel was saddled with the obtuse Thorn-cult plot that had been established in the two previous movies, so you can’t help but feel embarrassed for the future Ant-Man as his character tries to explain the convoluted mythology surrounding the cult’s power over Michael Myers. Years later a Producer’s Cut of the movie surfaced that was a slight improvement for hard-core fans, but the Halloween series got a reboot in 1998 when Jamie Lee Curtis returned for Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, which pretends as if Halloween: The Curse Of Michael Myers never happened. We bet Rudd does the exact same thing!

—the fourth movie in the Hellraiser series and the final one to get a theatrical release—is credited as directed by Alan Smithee, an alias used by directors who want their name taken off a film. This is already a bad omen before Parks And Recreation star Adam Scott appears as Jacques, a man who summons a demon named Angelique with the help of box that is a portal to Hell. Angelique grants every wish to Jacques under the one condition: that he never “stands in Hell’s way.” He, of course, does, and it doesn’t end well for Jacques or this time-jumping movie that serves as both prequel and sequel to 1987’s Hellraiser directed by Clive Barker. As problematic as Hellraiser: Bloodline is, it’s still superior to many of the cheap straight-to-video sequels that followed. At least Scott returned to familiar comic territory with Party Down and the horror-comedy Krampus. When you think of Scott, the first role that comes to mind for the funnyman probably isn’t “a man who summons a demon and uses her as a sex slave.”

In Rob Zombie’s 2009 sequel , Oscar nominee Octavia Spencer plays the thankless role of Nurse Daniels, a character who serves little purpose other than to be meat for the grinder that is Michael Myers. Two years after being violently dispatched on-screen in this ugly Zombie flick, Spencer got her breakout role in The Help and her career took off. If she got a call today to be the umpteenth victim of a cinema boogeyman in a sequel, we’re pretty sure she would turn it down faster than you can say “chocolate pie.”

Future Best Actress Oscar winner Charlize Theron made her acting debut in the straight-to-video sequel . Theron’s role is uncredited and described only as “Eli’s follower.” She went on to win an Oscar for her performance as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster and starred in high-profile genre pictures such as Prometheus, Mad Max: Fury Road, Snow White And The Huntsman, Atomic Blonde, and The Fate Of The Furious. We suspect she’s relieved, or even grateful, that her name doesn’t appear in the credits for the third Children Of The Corn movie.