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!
