The 1994 Jim Carrey comedy classic that was almost a horror movie: “That was a real battle”
Some actors aren’t cut out for certain genres, and based on the minimal evidence provided over the last four decades, you can make a strong case for Jim Carrey and horror being mismatched bedfellows.
The closest he ever got was Joel Schumacher’s abysmal 2007 psychological thriller The Number 23, which he was deeply invested in because of his own lifelong obsession with the titular number, but not every passion project is going to pan out, with Carrey’s getting him a Razzie nomination for ‘Worst Actor’.
Dark Crimes was a bit of a serial killer thriller, and that was crap, too, with the forgotten procedural faring even worse among critics than his last attempt at ticking even some of the boxes associated with the horror genre. Needless to say, blood, guts, and Carrey don’t mix, and that’ll always be the case.
He can do his usual comedic schtick in his sleep, and he’s also an excellent dramatic actor, even if there’s a chance we’ll never see the two-time Golden Globe winner play it straight ever again, since his primary focus these days seems to be semi-retirement and absolutely nothing but Sonic the Hedgehog sequels.
His first major leading role did have vampires in it, right enough, but 1985’s Once Bitten leaned ten times harder into comedy than it did chills. A decade later, Carrey enjoyed one of the biggest breakout years in modern Hollywood history, which might not have happened had the studio persevered with its original idea of making The Mask a horror flick.
New Line Cinema was responsible for the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, so it stood to reason that another character with a gnarly face could have filled the void left by Freddy Krueger. To that end, the studio hired Chuck Russell to direct, who’d never made a comedy in his life.
In fact, his second and third features were both horror films, and one of them was even a Nightmare on Elm Street sequel, so after helming Dream Warriors and The Blob remake back-to-back, you can understand why New Line were so keen to have him stick to what he knew for the adaptation of the Dark Horse comic book, which was itself much darker than The Mask ended up being.
“It’s a great example of really fighting for your vision in a film,” the filmmaker explained. “We changed it from a horror film into a comedy. It was originally conceived as being a horror film. That was a real battle. New Line wanted a new kind of Freddy movie. By coincidence, I had seen the same original Mask comic they ended up buying, and I thought, ‘That’s really cool, but it’s too derivative of Freddy Krueger.’ It really was.”
Instead of basically ripping himself off, Russell turned the concept on its head, and the pieces really fell into place when Carrey walked into the audition room. “He’s really a comic genius,” he noted. “I said, ‘We’ve gotta use this guy, Jim Carrey’. It was really developed for Jim.” Just like that, The Mask was no longer a horror movie, and you can’t say it wasn’t the right call, looking at how it turned out.
