I only recently saw the full trailer for Horns, Daniel Radcliffe’s newest movie, and it looks like a fun Halloween flick, to say the least.
Vague plot spoilers and trigger warning for discussion of rape after the jump.
Generally when I review a book-to-movie adaptation’s trailer, I’m familiar with the source material. In this case, I haven’t ever read a single thing by Joe Hill. (Well, I’ve read, like, the first chapter of Locke and Key, but I’m still working on it.) So while I will say this trailer looks interesting, I can’t say much about how true-to-source it looks. I’ve basically only got what the trailer has: troubled boy loves floaty-perfect girl, floaty-perfect girl is murdered, troubled boy grows horns and his whole town goes to shit. It also seems like, post-horns, people seem willing to share dark secrets with him, so I’m guessing he’ll use that power to try and track down his girlfriend’s killer.
Without knowing anything else about the story, I do really like the tone of the trailer. It comes off as something that will be genuinely thrilling and scary in a psychological way without depending on jump scares or body horror imagery. I’m not a big horror fan as a rule, but when I do watch something scary, that’s the sort of spooky I prefer.
Hill and Daniel Radcliffe are both artists with an interest in divorcing themselves from expectations—Hill from those who would compare him to his father, Stephen King, and Dan from the shadow of Harry Potter. At the risk of offering a totally uneducated opinion since, as I said, I’m unfamiliar with the bulk of Hill’s work, I think Dan’s doing a better job in the divorce effort. Of course, I don’t necessarily consider that a failing on Hill’s part – my tastes in scary stories run to the Stephen King-esque, and I see a lot of the same things I like in this trailer. Dan, on the other hand, seems to have been pretty successful in casting off his Harry image. While it was arguably a risk to take a lead role in another speculative fiction book-to-movie adaptation, and while I’ll admit I’ve seen some joking “if Harry’d been sorted into Slytherin” jokes, his character in this film doesn’t seem to have any resemblance to his most famous role.
The one thing that does concern me is that, yep, the whole plot appears to turn on a lady’s death. Whatever the circumstances of her death might be, without it there would be no story at all. Furthermore, a brief dive into Wikipedia mentions that, in the book, she wasn’t just murdered: she was raped and murdered, and given that the film’s R rating was partially given for a depiction of sexual assault, I’m guessing they didn’t cut that out for the movie. Given how interesting the rest of the story looks, I’m bummed that such a tired and sexist plot device is the impetus for the action.
I’m tentatively excited for this movie, though, and at absolute worst it looks like a fun popcorn flick for Halloween (which is, incidentally, when it premieres). What do you think, readers?
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