As we look forward to the Oscars, let’s celebrate these Oscar winners who started in horror movies.

Humble origins can lead to tremendous success.

Tom Hanks

In 1980 — the same year he starred in the sitcom Bosom Buddies — Tom Hanks appeared in the creepy horror film He Knows You’re Alone, in which he played Elliott, a young man skeptical of a woman named Amy (Caitlin O’Heaney) who says a mysterious man is following her.

The movie has a bachelor party scene, perhaps a foreshadowing of one of Hanks’ breakout roles. Tom Hanks, a two-time Best Actor Oscar winner for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, doesn’t do a lot of horror movies now, sadly.

Hillary Swank

Hillary Swank made her film debut in 1992’s deliberately goofy horror comedy Buffy the Vampire Slayer — the Kristy Swanson film that inspired the Sarah Michelle Gellar TV show — playing the supporting part of Kimberly Hannah.

She would soon go on to star in 1994’s The Next Karate Kid, but proved herself as one of the best actors of her generation with Oscar-winning lead roles in 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry and 2004’s Million Dollar Baby.

George Clooney

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George Clooney made his feature debut in 1983’s Grizzly 2: The Revenge, but the film didn’t get a proper release until 2020.

Did he wait around for silly old Grizzly 2 to provide his big break? He did not. He scored his breakthrough role on ER, proved his movie stardom in Out of Sight, went on to anchor the Ocean’s movies, and earned his first Oscar — for Best Supporting Actor — in 2005’s Syriana.

He kept turning in excellent performances in films like Michael Clayton while directing films like the excellent Good Night and Good Luck (his 2005 directorial debut.) And he picked up another Oscar as one of the producer of Ben Affleck’s Argo.

Brad Pitt

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Clooney’s Ocean’s 11 co-star, Brad Pitt, scored his first lead in the goofy high-school horror movie 1989 Cutting Class after playing small, often uncredited roles in films including Less Than Zero and No Way Out.

The Fight Club and Moneyball star quickly proved he could do much better than Cutting Class, becoming one of the biggest stars and producers of his generation. He won his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but his first Oscar was for producing the Best Picture winner 12 Years a Slave.

He’s back this year in Wolfs, starring alongside George Clooney, which is, sorry horror movie fans, not about werewolves. It’s a story of two professionals who clean up after things go wrong. They work alone… until one night changes everything.

Charlize Theron

Charlize Theron’s first role didn’t suggest the massive success coming her way: She had a nonspeaking part as a follower of the deadly Eli in 1995’s Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest. You know it was gonna be silly from the title alone.

She broke out two years later in another horror film, Devil’s Advocate, alongside Keanu Reeves, who played her lawyer husband, and Al Pacino, who plays his new boss, who happens to be the devil.

Things moved fast for Theron from there, and she won the Oscar for Best Actress for playing a serial killer in 2003’s Monster, which is not, despite the title, a horror movie.

Patricia Arquette

New Line Cinema

Patricia Arquette is excellent as troubled teen Kristen Parker in 1987’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, in which she’s almost eaten by a snakelife Freddie Krueger but gets a nice assist from original Nightmare on Elm Street final girl Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp, seen with Arquette above).

In the film, Nancy is working as a psychiatric intern in the facility where Kristen and other young dreamers seek refuge from their very bad dreams. Like all the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, it’s a little funny, and a lot scary. The movie ends with some terrific heroism from Nancy that feels like a passing of the torch, but sadly Arquette didn’t hold it for long: Another actor, Tuesday Knight, played Kristen in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master.

Arquette has gone on to incredible success, including winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for 2014’s Boyhood.

Jamie Lee Curtis

Of course there’s nothing goofy about Halloween. Jamie Lee Curtis is basically the gold standard of stars who turned horror careers into just plain thriving movie careers.

She starred as Laurie Strode in the original 1978 Halloween and then reprised the role in many sequels, including the recent reboot trilogy. (She even made two small cameos in Halloween 3: The Season of the Witch, which departed dramatically from the Michael Myers storyline.)

Curtis also appeared in many other hits, including Trading Places, A Fish Called Wanda and True Lies, before winning an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once.

But she hasn’t turned her back on horror movies: In 2022 she appeared in Halloween Ends.

Peter Jackson

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The New Zealand-born filmmaker won three Oscars for directing, co-writing and producing the Best Picture winner The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

But nearly two decades before that 2004 hit, he broke out with Bad Taste, a horror film so filled with upsetting images that the one above is one of the few we can show you.

Jennifer Connelly

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The winner of Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her outstanding turn as Alicia Nash in 2001’s A Beautiful Mind, Jennifer Connelly got her start in a smaller role in 1984’s Once Upon a Time in America before taking the lead the next year in Dario Argento’s Phenomena (above).

The film, a typically creepy Argento affair, is an Italian-American production — also sometimes known as Creepers — about a young girl who has the unusual ability to communicate with insects. Her remarkable powers may help solve a string of murders at her Swiss boarding school.

Jennifer Connelly would of course go on to star in films from Labyrinth to The Rocketeer to Requiem for a Dream to 2022’s year’s mega-hit Top Gun: Maverick. She’s currently starring in Apple TV+’s Dark Matter, about a a man who discovers alternate universes that contain varied versions of himself.

Leonardo DiCaprio

Leonardo DiCaprio started out appearing in commercials and TV. But he made his film debut in 1991’s goofy Critters 3, playing a character he described to the New York Times two years later as “your average, no-depth, standard kid with blond hair.”

He of course would go on to much bigger roles, including in Titanic — one of the the most successful film of all time — and his Oscar-winning lead role in 2015’s The Revenant.

He also recently starred in last year’s Killers of the Flower Moon, nominated for 10 Oscars. While not a horror movie, it contained plenty of horrifying elements.

Guillermo del Toro

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Guillermo has three Oscars: for directing and producing Best Picture winner The Shape of Water, and, more recently, for Best Animated Feature for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.

He started in horror movies with the mesmerizing 1992 Mexican production Cronos (starring Federico Luppi, above) and has gone back to his horror influences in every project since, always taking the genre in new and experimental directions.

He returns to horror with an upcoming adaption of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, coming soon to Netflix and starring Jacob Elordi. Oscar Isaac, Christopher Waltz and Felix Kammerer will also appear in the film.

Liked This List of Oscar Winners Who Started Out in Horror Movies?

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You might also like our list the Scariest 1970s Horror Movies or this list of Gen X Film Stars Gone Too Soon.

Main image: Jennifer Connelly in Phenomena.