12 Oscar Winning Actors Who Starred In Awful Horror Movies

Everybody has to start somewhere.

Leonardo DiCaprio Critters 3
New Line Cinema

They say that everybody has to start somewhere and for a lot of jobbing actors just getting their feet in the door that often means appearing in films of a more questionable quality than the ones they probably dreamed of starring in as star-struck whippersnappers.

As horror is often considered one of the most lowbrow of all cinematic genres and something that serious, established actors should avoid at all cost it’s not surprising that a lot of horror movies feature vaguely familiar fresh-faces that eventually go on to become household names, or in the case of the actors here, acclaimed Oscar winning talents.

That’s not to say all the Academy Award-winning actors featured here were at the start of their careers when they took roles in suspiciously terrible horror films. Some nabbed their Oscars and then lowered their standards as a result of either dwindling popularity, bad judgement or perhaps just as a means of paying the bills.

Whether they were naïve ingénues or established talents that really should’ve known better, there’s one thing that unites all these Oscar winning actors – these bad horrors are probably something they’d like to forget.

12. Charlize Theron - Children Of The Corn III: Urban Harvest

Leonardo DiCaprio Critters 3
Miramax

Anyone who has a few film adaptations of horror writer Stephen King’s books under their belt can tell you one thing for sure: they either tend to be very good like The Shining or The Shawshank Redemption or absolutely awful like The Mangler, Cell and other such films best left to drift into DVD bargain bin obscurity.

Children of the Corn – which, believe it or not focuses on a corn-based demon that brainwashes hick kids into murdering adults and dressing like Mennonites – and the eight other films it’s spawned so far unfortunately fall into the latter category.

The third instalment, Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest, moved the action from Nowheresville, USA to Chicago and saw a young Charlize Theron make her film debut in an uncredited role as a brainwashed corn cult member who meets a sticky end impaled by a mutant corn stalk. As you do.

Despite that rather dubious start in the film industry, less than a decade later she’d be accepting the Oscar for Best Actress for her role as real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Patty Jenkins’ Monster.

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