“Are you feeling horny?”
Horns opens with this wocka wocka line and doesn’t quite recover from it even after the stirring ominous score sets in and a shaggy and very hungover Daniel Radcliffe hauls himself up off the kitchen floor. Horror and comedy are a difficult mix and to its credit this adaptation of Joe Hill’s great horror novel often strikes the right tone between gothic horror and tragedy — so pervasive you can’t help but crack a joke or two.
Things aren’t going so well for Ig Perrish (Radcliffe). He’s been accused of the brutal rape and murder of his childhood sweetheart Merrin (Juno Temple) and though he knows he’s innocent everyone in his small town (British Columbia masquerading as Washington — I caught a glimpse of a CIBC) has decided he’s guilty. Admittedly he’s the obvious suspect — on the night of her murder the couple were seen fighting at a local diner and he’s a dirty alcoholic loner. Guilty as charged.
What’s needed is some divine retribution and after an angry bender one night Ig receives some aid via a pointy pair of horns that have sprouted painfully from his head. Suddenly everyone in town wants to tell Ig their deepest darkest secrets all of which fall somewhere between the two Freudian poles of sex and violence. And Ig can prove very persuasive with the would-be confessors driven to commit lusty drug-fuelled copulation and fighting with a mere wink and a nod. The curse might be a blessing in disguise: if Ig can find the killer he can get him to confess.
Horns looks like a Linkin Park video shot outside Burnaby — baroque turgid and bursting with adolescent angst. (Or more accurately it often resembles the video for “Sour Girl” by Stone Temple Pilots.) You can believe serial killers hide in the Pacific Northwest. Satan not so much though the alternately dank and majestic setting often works for the narrative’s push-pull between seedy murder mystery and biblical revenge tale. It proves to be all the more effective as half the film is told in flashbacks tracing Ig and Merrin’s fairytale romance from churchgoing preteens to teenage sweethearts rutting in the woods. The film occasionally abandons this misty romance and gets unnecessarily overblown and goofy stretching the horror-comedy limits too far. While a lot of the campy elements give the film some welcome levity a tragic tale like this doesn’t need for example a sequence of hair metal-inspired cheese featuring Ig strutting out of a burning bar in slow mo set to the dulcet sounds of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus.”
Those missteps can be forgiven if only because it’s great to see Hill’s novel done this faithfully onscreen Hollywood meddling aside. Director Alexandre Aja is far more subdued here than in his other films (Piranha 3D High Tension) which revelled much more in the old ultraviolence. (We’ll pretend his godawful Mirrors doesn’t exist.) He’s right for the material — clearly it doesn’t call for the French filmmaker’s emphasis on extreme bodily horror but enough of it creeps in at the margins and the film has the uncompromising fatalistic tone of his The Hills Have Eyes remake.
The film boasts a uniformly strong cast including David Morse James Remar Max Minghella and Kathleen Quinlan. Even Heather Graham shows up as a vain celebrity-seeking waitress. Juno Temple is still a collection of weepy eyes and chubby cheeks but she’s like 16 so we’ll give her a break. She doesn’t amount to much more than an object to be fawned over by the men in the movie though it’s one of the better threads lifted from Hill’s book interrogating male privilege and self-righteousness.
It’s Radcliffe’s show and he does an admirable job as the quintessential reluctant hero mad as hell and completely woefully unprepared. It’s the latest in a string of great roles that has him working further away from his Harry Potter fame and fandom. If you’ve got the clout may as well use it on films like Horns. It’s not as good as the book (never is) but it comes close enough.
HORNS directed by Alexandre Aja starring Daniel Radcliffe Juno Temple and Heather Graham screens on Monday October 27 as a Cineplex Front Row Event.
