A Beloved Jim Carrey Comedy Was Originally Meant To Be An Elm Street-Style Horror Flick

The year 1994 belonged to Jim Carrey, as he starred in three major comedy films: "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective," "Dumb and Dumber," and "The Mask." The latter, though, could have established him as a horror icon if one of the original outlines had been chosen.

The origins of "The Mask" trace back to the '80s, when Dark Horse Comics founder Mike Richardson worked with writer-artist Mark Badger to create a character known then as the Masque. "The idea I had was sort of a combination of a Steve Ditko character, the Creeper, with a Joker sense of humor to it," Richardson told Forbes. Through a shake-up of the creative team, Masque evolved into the horror comedy series known as "The Mask," that saw Stanley Ipkiss putting on a transformative face cover that imbued him with outrageous and mind-bending powers.

Eventually, the series was optioned for film, with Richardson working with others for over half a decade to bring it to life. However, one filmmaker saw the opportunity to create a movie franchise like "A Nightmare on Elm Street," suggesting a more sinister usage of masks. "There was one version where it was about a mask-maker on the edge of town, cutting faces off corpses and putting them on teenagers and turning them into zombies, which as you can imagine, there wasn't a lot of excitement on my part for that," Richardson said. "So, I nixed that."

When filmmaker Chuck Russell, best known for helming "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors" and "The Blob" remake, was brought on to direct "The Mask," he recognized the "Elm Street" parallels, especially in that "The Mask" comics were much more violent. In addition, the Mask's sense of humor mirrored the personality of Freddy Krueger. 

However, Russell pondered if placing a pure comedic talent like Jim Carrey into a gore-fest would've been the right choice. "So it was just like, 'Do we really need to do another grotesque film when there's this guy, Jim Carrey, out there? Here's an opportunity to light the world up with a new comedian,'" Russell told Forbes.

In a separate interview with "Talks from the Crypt" podcast, Russell explained that he didn't want to rip off "A Nightmare on Elm Street" with a new Freddy Krueger, since Robert Englund had become synonymous with the role. In addition, the director had a personal reason for not wanting to do another horror at the time. "I'd also had a death in my family," he said. "My father had died fairly recently, and I just was over horror for a minute."