Setting a new standard for gore, the teen horror classic Carrie (1976) established Brian DePalma as a "money" director and employed a number of cinematic devices that would become DePalma signatures, including the false ending and split-screen narrative.

Born Sept. 11, 1940, in Newark, N.J., DePalma has attributed his obsession with blood to watching his surgeon father operate. DePalma made his first feature, The Wedding Party (with then-unknowns Jill Clayburgh and Robert De Niro), while still enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.

After directing a number of Alfred Hitchcock-inspired films during the 1970s and early '80s (including Obsession, Dressed to Kill and Body Double), DePalma embraced another kind of violence in gangster movies such as Scarface and Carlito's Way (both starring Al Pacino). In 1996, DePalma helmed the blockbuster Mission: Impossible.