One of Jim Carrey’s best-known early starring vehicles, 1994’s “The Mask” is a superhero comedy about the mild-mannered Stanley Ipkiss (Carrey) who discovers the ancient Mask of Loki and becomes a green-faced, cartoon-powered entity known as The Mask. It’s a fun, goofy, and surprisingly good movie that’s constructed to showcase Carrey’s specific brand of physical comedy. However, if you happened to be in Japan when it premiered and saw one of the movie’s marketing posters, you might have thought that it’s a pretty terrifying horror film. 

Japanese Poster for The Mask (1994) pic.twitter.com/9BYo3blVOx

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Imagine going to the theater to see “The Mask” based on that poster alone. It seems to be specifically designed to display the creepiest moments in the film, making it seem like a fairly inventive scary movie. While there are a few small images of Carrey making faces thrown in, the eye is immediately drawn to Dorian Tyrell’s (Peter Greene) horrific, red-eyed version of the titular character, as well as a graphic image of Stanley gruesomely trying to tear the mask away from his face. Both are seen in the movie, granted — but making these individual images such a huge part of a promotional poster doesn’t exactly scream “fun comedy film.” 

What’s more, even the more normal images in the poster are weirdly horror-coded. Peter Riegert’s Lieutenant Kellaway stares in shock, Cameron Diaz’s Tina Carlyle has a distinct Final Girl vibe, and even Milo the dog looks distinctly concerned. It’s a wild poster for a wild movie — it’s just that the specific flavor of wildness is completely different. 

In a way, the Japanese poster for the movie is a more accurate advertisement for the Mask franchise than the movie itself. While its main character might forever be associated with Jim Carrey’s rip-roaring antics, the untold truth of “The Mask” hides some pretty dark source material. John Arcudi and Doug Mahnke’s “The Mask” comics feature a much more dangerous version of the titular character — or rather, a series of characters, since the mask changes hands on a regular basis. Rather than the Mask, the characters wearing the mask are generally known as Big Head. They tend to use their powers in various inventive and often deadly ways, and the mask effectively possesses them to use its power in a violent fashion. 

Because of this, the overall atmosphere of the “Mask” comics tends to be far closer to the movie’s Japanese poster than anything else. In fact, the movie’s director, Chuck Russell, originally tinkered with the idea of adapting the source material into a horror movie series  until he was so impressed by Carrey’s comedy that he decided to switch gears. This gave fans one of the best Jim Carrey movies ever, but who knows how binge-watchable a scary movie franchise based on “The Mask” could have been?