Scary Starts

Here are nine other stars who—like Jamie Lee Curtis—appeared in horror flicks early in their careers. Long before he played pirate Jack Sparrow,

Johnny Depp (then 21) was ill-fated teenager Glen Lantz in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Who’s that handsome young actor playing a young cop in Return to Horror High (1987)? It’s George Clooney, then 26. If a basketball player in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) looks familiar, it’s because he’s a 20-yearold Ben Affleck. She’d receive an Oscar for playing a serial killer in Monster, but a decade before that, Charlize Theron, then 20, was an unnamed young woman in Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (1995). At 26, Paul Rudd played a grown-up Tommy Doyle, the little boy Jamie Lee Curtis’ character babysat in the original

Halloween , in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995). Young Jimmy Howell (Joseph GordonLevitt, 17) has an unfortunate brush with a piece of ice-hockey equipment in Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998). On prom night—almost always a bad evening in horror films—Jenny

(Renée Zellweger, 25) has a terrifying encounter in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994). Keira Knightley was only 16 when she played Frankie, a schoolgirl trapped in an old, abandoned war bunker in The Hole (2001). At 20, future Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence was a young woman in a small town reeling from a gruesome double murder in House at the End of the Street (2012). —Neil Pond