Bringing together two very disparate takes on human violence—one filled to the brim with wackiness, whimsy, and other words that start with “w,” and one so drenched in blood it needs a rusty grate in the floor to let all the viscera drain out—Variety is reporting that Jim Carrey and Eli Roth are teaming up. The duo are working together on Aleister Arcane, a film adaptation of a 2004 comic from 30 Days Of Night writer Steve Niles.
Niles’ story centers on a Svengoolie-style horror host, who enacts a terrible curse on the parents of his small town as revenge for being banned from TV. That sort of hammy mayhem sounds like a plum Carrey role—with shades of his avian, over-the-top turn in Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events—but it’s not clear what Roth is getting out of the deal. Maybe the director—whose last two films were the surprisingly smart Knock Knock, and the luridly violent The Green Inferno—will have Carrey exact his revenge by luring his victims to foreign countries, and then goofily torturing them to death. Or maybe he’ll just shoot it like a regular young adult horror movie, except everything’s covered in a thick film of grime.
Carrey, meanwhile, hasn’t had a movie in theaters since 2014’s Dumb And Dumber To, as he’s been too busy telling parents not to vaccinate their kids, in a thought-free horror show that would probably make for a pretty good Eli Roth movie.