A lifelong movie buff who turned his love into his career, Dante first displayed his encyclopedic knowledge of movies (especially horror/fantasy/sci-fi movies) in the 1960s publication "Castle of Frankenstein." When his boyhood friend Jon Davison got a job with producer Roger Corman in the 1970s, he sent for Dante and had him hired as New World Pictures' principal editor of preview trailers. (Along with the typical New World exploitation fodder, Dante also cut trailers for the likes of Fellini's Amarcord He also got to edit an occasional feature, including 1977's Grand Theft Auto which marked Ron Howard's directing debut.) When Davison bet Corman that he could produce a New World film in one week for $50,000, it was up to Dante and Allan Arkush to direct it. The result was Hollywood Boulevard (1976), which gave Dante his baptism of fire behind the camera.

In 1978 he directed his first feature, Piranha an effective, tongue-in-cheek, lowbudget thriller about killer fish written by John Sayles. He followed it with the more ambitious The Howling (1981), a vivid werewolf tale cowritten by Sayles. This brought him to the attention of Steven Spielberg, who hired both Dante and Jon Davison to work on one segment of Twilight Zone-The Movie (1983). Theirs was a bizarre story about a boy who holds his family prisoner in a cartoonlike house.

Dante's career then took a giant leap as Spielberg hired him to direct his bigbudget scare movie Gremlins (1984). His career has moved in fits and starts since then, with hits and misses along the way, including Explorers (1985), Amazon Women on the Moon (1987, some sequences only), Innerspace (1987), The 'burbs (1989), Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), and Matinee (1993).

At his best, Dante manages to capture in his work the wonder-and humor-of 1950s and 1960s movies that first turned him on; his films are overflowing with injokes for like-minded movie buffs. He remains loyal to many actors of that period (and the sci-fi/fantasy genre) and uses them in his films as often as possible. He also indulges his love for cartoons, having given famed animation director Chuck Jones a cameo in Gremlins and hired him to create animated gags for the closing credits of Gremlins 2.