10 Horror Movie Actors Who HATED Their Own Performances
"I did not talk, I just cried."
Everyone's a critic, right?
The horror genre is a corner of cinema that often opens itself up to criticism more than any other. Given the sheer scope of what horror and its ever-expanding subgenres encompass, coupled with the relatively low cost of making a horror movie (hey, found-footage!), and the fact that so many budding actors and green rookies get their first breaks in horror, it means that the end result is not always necessarily the highest of quality.
It's one thing to see a paid-up film critic lambast a movie or a performance, and likewise for a paying audience member or home viewer to air their own personal gripes, but it's somewhat rare for an actor themselves to go public with their disdain for their own performance or for a project they've been involved in.
While it is rare, it's not unheard of, though.
With that in mind, then, here are ten such examples of times where a horror movie role caused an actor embarrassment, trauma or, in some cases, the need to publicly apologise for a performance and a picture.
10. Jamie Lee Curtis - Virus
Few actors are as synonymous with the horror genre as Jamie Lee Curtis.
Sure, Curtis has gone on to have major success outside of horror, but it's hard not to be forever tied to this creepy corner of cinema when you have five Halloween movies (soon to be six, then likely to be seven), The Fog, Prom Night, Terror Train and Roadgames under your belt.
While those films clearly vary in quality, one picture that Jamie Lee has particular disdain for is her appearance in 1999's Virus.
Based on Chuck Pfarrer's comic book of the same name, Virus is a sci-fi horror offering based around an alien entity on a mission to turn mankind into a race of cyborg slaves. Despite having an impressive headline cast of Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Sutherland and Billy Baldwin, John Bruno's movie was so horrendous that it didn't even make back half of its $75 million budget.
As for Curtis' thoughts on Virus, back in 2010 she told WENN (via the Express):
"That's a piece of sh*t movie. It's an unbelievably bad movie. Just bad from the bottom."
Continuing on, the famed Scream Queen would add:
"It was maybe the only time I've known something was just bad and there was nothing I could do about it."