10 Actors Who Saved Their Careers By Starring In Horror Movies

Years and years before he voiced killer doll Chucky in the Child's Play franchise, Brad Dourif won Hollywood's respect with his Oscar-nominated performance as Billy Bibbit in 1975's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Despite this early success, the next decade-plus of Dourif's career was relatively modest - appearing in the likes of Eyes of Laura Mars, Wise Blood, Ragtime, and David Lynch's Dune and Blue Velvet - as he decided to return to New York and act on stage, while also teaching acting and directing classes.

However, Dourif decided to return to Hollywood in 1988 and was almost immediately cast as serial killer Charles Lee Ray and the voice of Chucky in Child's Play.

Though the part is largely a vocal one for Dourif, his distinctive vocal tenor became the series' constant for almost three decades, cementing him as an icon of the genre.

The mainstream attention also helped Dourif win a meaty role in the criminally underrated The Exorcist III, and ever since he's enjoyed a fruitful, busy career playing psychopaths and supporting weirdos in genre films, perhaps most memorably as Gríma Wormtongue in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Yet without Child's Play, it's tough to say where Dourif's career would've gone, and though it didn't net him an Oscar nomination, it sure did win him a cult of enthusiastic fans.