Jim Carrey Wanted To Make 'Dumb and Dumber To' A Found-Footage Horror Film

Add this to the list of amazing sequel ideas that Jim Carrey couldn’t quite convince studios to greenlight – an excerpt from the Hollywood Reporter’s “Writers Roundtable” revealed that the filmmaking duo of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, commonly known as “The Daniels,” were once approached by Carrey with a bizarre proposition. 

Almost a decade ago, the Canadian comedian who was recently banned from Russia asked the pair of moviemakers behind Everything Everywhere All at Once to join him on the set of Dumb and Dumber To and simultaneously film a second project that would take the Dumb and Dumber series in a drastically darker direction.

Carrey, intrigued by the success of films like Paranormal Activity and inspired by an interesting filming location from the first movie – Dumb and Dumber was shot in the hotel that inspired The Shining – asked The Daniels to create a found-footage horror film using behind-the-scenes footage from the set of Dumb and Dumber To.

Kwan’s answer to the question of “What’s the weirdest writing job you’ve been approached about?” was appropriately strange for one half of the creative team behind Swiss Army Man. Kwan recalled the story of how he and his partner first encountered Lloyd Christmas, saying, “Very early in our careers, Jim Carrey reached out. He had just seen Paranormal Activity and was like, ‘Guys, it’s found footage and it’s horror — have you seen it?’ And we were like, ‘Uh-huh, we’ve heard of it. Where is this going?’”

Carrey told Kwan about the story of how the filming of scenes from Dumb and Dumber in The Stanley Hotel, the lodge which inspired Stephen King to write The Shining, was marred by issues and injuries which seemed suspiciously supernatural to Carrey. Kwan says that Carrey told him, “The whole time we were shooting, things were breaking, people were getting hurt, doors were swinging, and it felt haunted.”

The idea was to use these behind-the-scenes mishaps to build a suspenseful story about a haunted comedy movie set that would juxtapose the shrieks of laughter with the shrieks of the damned. Carrey explained the premise to Kwan, saying, “We’re going to shoot Dumb and Dumber To, and I want you guys to do a found-footage horror comedy on the set. While we’re filming, you guys are going to make a feature-length, behind-the-scenes video that slowly becomes a horror film.”

The Daniels were sold – they set to work on building an outline and planned a pitch. The studio, however, was not quite as convinced. Said Kwan, “We sat down with the producer, we pitched the idea, and they’re like, ‘We’re not actually going to make this. I’m sorry, Jim got really excited, but there’s no way the studio is going to let us do a movie while they’re shooting Dumb and Dumber To.’”

The Blair Witch-style partner project would have been a groundbreaking achievement for horror and comedy, similar to what Werner Herzog attempted by simultaneously filming the epic adventure film Fitzcarraldo and the making-of documentary, Burden of Dreams. The process was parodied in the recent season of Documentary Now!, but the ultimate comedic exploration of this idea was sadly robbed from us when The Daniels were denied funding for Carrey’s found-footage vision.

Apparently, you can’t pay for a movie with an I.O.U.