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!
Two things that have proven to be pretty dependable at the box office in recent years are horror movies and Christopher Nolan movies. With Nolan’s The Odyssey absolutely dominating the box office this past weekend, many fans of Nolan’s work have been left hungry for a Nolan-directed horror movie. After all, The Odyssey does whet the appetite for Nolan nightmare fuel.
Christopher Nolan has brushed up against the horror genre in the past with 2002 thriller Insomnia, but does he have any interest in someday making a full-on horror movie?
Nolan tells the Empire Podcast in a new chat, “I’ve always been interested in doing a horror film.”
“But horror is most successful when the conceptual framework of whatever the story is is just so undeniable. I think there are very few really great horror movies,” Nolan continues.
So why hasn’t Christopher Nolan directed a horror movie yet?
He explains to Empire, “I’ve never clicked with a particular idea or concept that worked for me. I love the genre. Of all genres, it’s the most visceral. Where the direct response to the audience is the most important. That is to say, you’re trying to make people literally feel something in their bones about what’s going on on-screen.”
Nolan calls horror “a genre in which experimentation is demanded.” He explains, “I go to see a lot of horror films with my kids these days, and you’ll see things in the first half an hour, 45 minutes of any horror film that you’d never see in another genre. Risks that are taken. Dangerous approaches to things. Admittedly, a lot of movies can’t sustain that to the end. But in the horror genre, that kind of innovation is not just respected – it’s really demanded.”
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is now playing in theaters.
Cillian Murphy as Scarecrow in Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight’ (2008)
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