I am experiencing my own nightmare before Christmas right now because Jim Carrey has taken down his aggressively weird personal website. Now, instead of the hellish and surreal digital refraction of a famous man’s clearly deranged mind, the landing page simply says “Please come back later.”
This is what you used to see when you clicked around on JimCarrey.com:
It was incredible! It was spooky, and made me worry about Jim Carrey’s mental well-being, but it was interesting and clearly laboured over and anathema to the excessive blandness of celebrity PR.
One of the last news updates heralded the coming of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, so it wasn’t like Carrey updated the site a lot. But I liked knowing it was there. (You can still see the website by going to the Wayback Machine.)
I don’t remember how I found out about Carrey’s demonic gem of a website, but it’s been around since 2009, according to a (correctly) fawning Wall Street Journal article published about it that year. Why did the once-frenetic, Flash-laden site go dark? When it is relaunched, will it still be an unsettling knock-off Dali horrorscape?
I have asked Jim Carrey what happened to his website on Twitter. I haven’t heard back yet.