Movies
‘The Mask’ Was Originally Going to Be a Horror Movie?!
Chuck Russell has made some pretty cool movies throughout his career. He’s of course known in the horror world for directing A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and The Blob (1988), one of the best horror sequels of all time and one of the best horror remakes of all time. He subsequently directed Jim Carrey-starring comedy The Mask, centered on a man who turns into a crazy green freak after putting on a mysterious mask.
Hey wait. That sounds like a horror movie, doesn’t it?
Well, it was originally supposed to be!
Speaking with Xfinity in advance of this past weekend’s Bloody Disgusting co-presented Horror Fest at Wizard World Philly, Russell revealed that the 1994 family film was originally conceived as a very Elm Street-esque slasher flick. Stanley Ipkiss, well, he was going to become New Line’s new Freddy Krueger!
“It’s a great example of really fighting for your vision in a film. We changed it from a horror film into a comedy,” Russell revealed. “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. He would put on the mask and kill people. And have one-liners. It was a really cool, splatterpunk, black and white comic. They’ve redone the comics to be more like my movie, but the original comics were really cool, dark and scary.”
He added, “But I knew, as a film, it would be very reminiscent of Freddy Krueger.”
What would The Mask look like as a horror movie? Find out below!
Before updating the video nasty Faces of Death, director Daniel Goldhaber and writer Isa Mazzei explored the dangers of online life in tech-thriller Cam, their feature debut that was acquired by Netflix in 2018 after making waves on the festival circuit.
At the end of last year, the Netflix exclusive quietly departed from the streaming platform, left without another streaming home.
It’s not an isolated story; Mike Flanagan’s Hush also left streaming entirely for a period until it was finally picked up on both physical media and other streaming services.
While the tech-thriller currently isn’t available to watch on Netflix, Tubi, Hulu, or any other platforms, that’s not a problem for Cam thanks to a very cool move by Goldhaber: the director has made his breakout film accessible to watch online for free via his website.
As his site notes: “CAM is unfortunately not currently available to view on any platforms, so you can watch it here if you like :).“
No subscriptions or fees necessary, just hit play.
Cam follows Alice (Madeline Brewer), who works as an online cam girl obsessed with her ranking on the cam site. The higher her ranking goes, the more it draws unwanted attention, and Alice soon finds herself replaced on her own show with a doppelganger.
Written by Mazzei, a former camgirl, it uses the horror thriller premise to examine the life of a sex worker; Alice’s career ambition is directly at odds with the shame it brings to her family, and how she tries to spare them from it by keeping them in the dark. It only compounds her danger when the doppelganger enters the equation in Goldhaber’s engaging thriller.
For a deep dive into the treacherous world of Cam, listen to Horror Queers’ episode on it now.
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