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Why do horror actors rarely go mainstream?


Recently watched fairly a few horror movies for Halloween, and most of the actors are unheard of. While fairly famous within the horror genre, these actors never make it past the horror genre and I wonder why that is? I have a theory that especially in the past, a horror movie actor, if she was a woman, had to be fine with doing nudity and perhaps due to puritan ethics, this limited their chances of ever playing anything but a promiscuous girl in future roles. But why do you think this is the case?

There are notable exceptions of course, like Johnny Depp and Kevin Bacon, but for the most part I am right.

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Typecast?

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Just a few that come off the top of my head who or had successful careers outside of horror movies
Tom Atkins
Robert Davi
Del Close
Jamie Lee Curtis
Carrie Fisher
Ben Johnson
Amanda Righetti
William Smith
Amy Steele
Kevin Dillon
Matthew Barton
Jared Padelcki
Amanda Righetti
Betsy Palmer
Chad Michael Murray
Elisha Cuthbert
Danielle Panabaker
Simon Baker
John Leguizamo
Dennis Hopper

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The majority get stuck in the genre and can't break out.

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It's a genre. Horror/scifi typically lumps together. It's a lucrative field to be in. You can have a long career doing it. Trying to get real work, ya might have a nice stint doing the rounds through all the tv procedurals but that's about it. It's super rare to have an actual break out star. You get doing the horror conventions and the cons and what not, which is a small pool, but you get to know all those directors and producers real well. It's kind of a community. Probably very comfortable and hard to break out of. Hard to rub elbows with the big dogs like Abrams or Bruckenheimer who will open real doors for you. And the more work you get doing that genre work, the less sellable you are. You're now a posterface for schlock.

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