Out, Nowhere, Stand-ins (all 1997), and Taking the Plunge (1999). In 1999, she landed her first high-profile role as a popular teenager who tortures an insecure copy editor in the teen comedy Never Been Kissed, alongside Drew Barrymore. The film was a commercial success, grossing US$84.5 million globally, and gave her an initial wide exposure with audiences. 2000s Ladd appeared in The Specials (2000), a comedy about a group of superheroes on their day off; in the film she played a neurotic named Nightbird. By 2000, she also had starred as an actress who vying for an Academy Award in E! first original film Best Actress, and appeared in the critically acclaimed anthology film Boys Life 3. Ladd starred as a college graduate and the victim to a flesh-eating virus in Eli Roth's directorial debut, the horror film Cabin Fever (2002). Ladd described as "insane" to work on the film, which began shooting just a month after 9/11. She remarked: "We shut down, we got up and running, and then we shut down again. We just hoped to finish the movie and hoped people would really understand and appreciate it. We had a blast doing it, even the tougher stuff. I'd rather work that way than on a big-budget fancy thing where you are completely separate from the process." It was with this film that her career would begin focusing on horror genre, as she had a "real education on that way of storytelling" with Roth and the film. Cabin Fever was largely praised by critics, and made US$30.5 million on a budget of US$1.5 million. She played a crying woman in David Lynch's Japanese-style horror short Darkened Room (also 2002). In 2004, Ladd took on the role of a suspect in a recent string of murders on a vacationing island in the horror comedy Club Dread, and starred as a mental health facility nurse in the horror Madhouse. Her topless scene in Club Dread ranked 14th in Complex magazine's "15 Best Topless Moments In Mainstream Horror Movies". In 2005, she appeared opposite Anna Faris, Ryan Reynolds and Justin Long in the independent romantic comedy Waiting..., and in 2006, she briefly appeared in David Lynch's film Inland Empire, which also starred her mother. Quentin Tarantino cast her as a wild, partying Texan and the victim of a killer stuntman in Death Proof, his high-speed segment of the double–feature exploitation horror