Ever since Alfred Hitchcock popularized the director cameo, audiences expect to see certain filmmakers pop up in small roles within their own films; from Quentin Tarantino to Spike Lee to M. Night Shyamalan, the faces of the directors are as expected as their distinct visual styles.
But what about those directors who enjoy film so much that they want to appear in OTHER people’s movies as well? Here are ten well-known horror filmmakers who have popped up frequently in a variety of films they didn’t make themselves.
JOE DANTE
Aside from making brilliant films himself, Joe Dante is also a curator of film history (having created Trailers from Hell) and has many friends in the film world who like to put him in front of the camera. Friend and frequent collaborator John Landis put him in front of the camera for Beverly Hills Cop III alongside Eddie Murphy.
Dante and Landis both had cameos in the recent horror anthology Tales of Halloween, and they also both appeared in Sleepwalkers, directed by friend and Masters of Horror creator Mick Garris.
Director Jack Perez, who previously directed the John Landis-produced Some Guy Who Kills People, cast Dante and Landis in cameo roles in Blast Vegas, and Landis even had an in-joke in the credits for his gangster comedy Oscar, in which Joe Dante is billed as Face on the Cutting Room Floor. There have been other small roles, a bodyguard in 1982’s A Time to Die and the cab driver in The Butterfly Room; however, one of his more memorable cameos is in the opening moments of the horror parody The Silence of the Hams, performing alongside some other famous faces as seen here: