10 Surprising Horror Movie Cameos
Wes Craven has a Scream with that cameo...
Director Alfred Hitchcock became so well-known for his joking onscreen cameos - perhaps the first filmmaker to be easily recognized by his portly frame - that he put began placing them earlier and earlier in his films. Too many audience members spent the film waiting for him to grace the screen that he feared they stopped paying attention to the plot. But he never stopped, even in films like Rope and Lifeboat, which feature a minimal cast and setting, managed to find room for the director's silhouette on a billboard and in a newspaper ad, respectively.
Like most directors of horror and thriller films, Hitchcock aimed to surprise and shock audiences. When it turned into more of a gag than a pleasant surprise, his cameos were minimalized.
But there are other filmmakers who have followed in the master of suspense's favourite bit of trivia, inserting themselves in their work, or at least knowingly having small turns from horror legends put in out of respect for the genre. Here are some you may have missed.
10. George A. Romero Appears In The Silence Of The Lambs
Jonathan Demme, like many directors who grew out of the 1970s cinema brat boom, got start under the tutelage of exploitation producer/director Roger Corman.
As a producer, Corman cared little about plot as long as the films he dumped money into showed good returns - giving the likes of Martin Scorsese and Demme free rein so long as they met a certain quota of sex and violence.
Demme certainly paid his former mentor back in his Best Picture-winner The Silence of the Lambs, giving Corman a dialogue-heavy role, but he also made room for another fellow director.
In a blink-and-you'll miss it moment, George A. Romero appears as one of the guards who forcibly removes Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) from her last in-person conversation with Hannibal Lecter (Sir Anthony Hopkins. Incidentally, since the film's release, six directors appear including Corman and Romero.