10 Movies That Smashed The Box Office With A Totally Unknown Cast
8. Halloween
If youre looking for an example of a film that comes totally out of the blue, with a tiny budget and a cast of unknowns, to succeed on a massive scale at the box office, look no further than Halloween. Donald Pleasance was the only recognisable face involved in the project, and even he was third choice after Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee both declined the role of Dr Loomis. Jamie Lee Curtis had never appeared in film up to this point, limited instead to television parts. At the same time Nick Castle, playing the masked Michael Myers, is still unrecognisable to this day, except to the most die-hard horror fans. The film followed in the footsteps of Psycho, not just in terms of tone and subject matter, but in how an obscure cast was assembled for a greater sense of threat and realism. It is a peculiar fact of the horror genre that it seems to be most successful when suspension of disbelief is at its greatest, and this can only occur when the actors on screen are not associated with other films or projects. Whereas once a horror flick would involve a cast of high profile actors to ensure greater box office returns, the low budget feel seems to reap the greatest rewards in modern cinema. Halloween itself made an incredible $70m from a shoestring budget.
