James Gunn was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri in a large Irish Catholic family. At the age of twelve he began his filmmaking career with an eight-millimeter camera. His first film featured his brother Sean, an actor on the WB's The Gilmore Girls, being disemboweled by zombies.

In 1988 Gunn took over lead-vocals for local rock band, Gravity's Rainbow, which later became The Icons. The Icons released an album for Ancient Lizard in 1994 called, Mom, We Like It Here on Earth. The Icons enjoyed some national attention when their music appeared on the soundtracks of movies like The Lowlife and Troma's Tromeo & Juliet (which Gunn would later write the screenplay for). During this time, Gunn also played in a band called The Pods, who never recorded an album but enjoyed more touring and success than The Icons.

While attending Columbia University in New York, Gunn applied for a part-time job filing papers at famed B-movie studios Troma Entertainment, and ended up writing the screenplay for the aforementioned movie Tromeo & Juliet instead. He was paid $150 to do so. In 1997, Tromeo became a cult hit, playing in theaters around the world, including over a year of midnight screenings in Los Angeles. Gunn has also acted in the Troma films Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger 4 and the appropriately titled Tales from the Crapper.

Gunn left Troma to write and star (along with Rob Lowe, Thomas Haden-Church, Jamie Kennedy and his own brother, Sean) in the feature film, The Specials, about a group of superheroes on their day off. In the year 2000, literally dozens of people flocked to the theater while it played in LA and New York. However, the film went on to minor-cult status on DVD, and Gunn has twice been accosted by someone dressed as himself in the movie.

Gunn wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Toy Collector, released by Bloomsbury Press in 2000. It's the story of a hospital orderly who sells drugs to finance his escalating toy collecting addiction. He also wrote, with Lloyd Kaufman, the non-fiction book All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger, which is currently in its fifth printing.

In 2002 the live action Scooby-Doo movie was released into theaters. Gunn wrote the screenplay for the film, the first movie he was involved with that he allowed his mother to see. The film has grossed almost $300 million worldwide.

In March of 2004 Gunn became the first screenwriter in cinema history to write back-to-back #1-for-the-weekend box office hits, with the critically-acclaimed, "re-imagined" Dawn of the Dead on March 19, 2004 and Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed on March 26, 2004.

Currently, Gunn's love for the comedy and horror genres has coalesced in the humorous horror film SLiTHER, released by Universal on March 31, 2006. Gunn wrote the film, his feature-film directorial debut, which was produced by Gold Circle and Strike Entertainment, and stars Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, and Michael Rooker.

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Filmography