Horns hits home video January 6th from Anchor Bay and RADiUS
Horns is as enjoyable and confounding on repeat viewings as it was on first blush. There’s a whole lot of crazy crammed into this one’s two hour runtime and, almost by default, there’s going to be a whole lot of misses along with the hits. It’s going to be up to each individual viewer on whether the hits outweigh the misses, and nothing I say is going to swing you from loathing to loving. I’m not Santa Claus. Or the Devil. Or, you know, some other kind of magical being that does magical things. Anyway-
I reviewed Horns when it hit VOD and I was quite kind to it. As much as I enjoyed director Alexandre Aja’s visuals and the various performances, led by a startlingly committed Daniel Radcliffe, there was also no escaping how clunky and leaden the film’s plotting ultimately was. The film has a ton of great energy without a fully developed center.
It has a simple enough hook: Ig Perrish (Harry Potter) is living a happy small town existence, content with spending the rest of his days focused entirely on loving his childhood sweetheart Merrin (a luminous Juno Temple). That existence is shattered when Merrin is discovered raped and murdered, and Ig is the only suspect.
Just when it seems like his life can’t go any more to hell, Ig wakes up from a blackout drunk to discover two horns curling out from his forehead. And as if the horns aren’t enough, Horns’ horns also give Ig special powers, enabling him to learn people’s darkest secrets and compel them to act out their most wicked desires.
If that sounds awfully thin to hang an entire film on, well, it is. Horns author Joe Hill knew this, and he used his premise as a launching pad to move through time and experiment with metaphysical moral concepts. Horns the novel was much less concerned with the murder mystery mechanics (to the point that the killer is unmasked shockingly early) than it is with investigating the notions of guilt and grief that ripple through past and present in response to trauma.
For reasons that probably made sense at the time, Aja and screenwriter Keith Brunin decided to expand the mystery aspect so it runs throughout the bulk of the runtime, with extensive flashbacks to Ig and Merrin’s childhood and eventual relationship constantly tweaking our understanding of Merrin’s eventual death.
This structure just doesn’t work, as it leaves the present day story feeling as though it is running in place for the first hour of the film. By the time Aja has finished setting up the story, it’s time for the story to end. Worse, this structure results in a script that gives the very game cast very little to play, as they’re stuck playing plot placeholders instead of people.
With such a clunky story, most of what makes Horns such a fun sit is the texture within the text. For starters, there’s that imagery. HOLY SHIT what a pretty movie this is, something which the Blu-ray only exacerbates. The colors are practically bleeding off the screen, with luscious shades of green and gold casting an otherworldly glow across the forest locale where much of the film takes place. The red, when it strikes, is just-exaggerated enough to be delightful instead of stomach-churning.
(Between this, Jennifer Kent’s glorious work with The Babadook, and some of James Wan’s recent stuff, I’m excited to see that horror appears to be finally shaking off the post-Saw/Paranormal Activity look of ultra-desaturated images, where every frame looks like it was filmed through a filter comprised of materials procured from a bathroom floor. The everything-looks-smeared-in-shit lens was originally a nice way for indie directors to make their digital photography a little more interesting, but it rapidly became boring. ‘Scary’ doesn’t mean ‘boring’, and it’s nice to see that actual cinematic horror is still a going concern.)
That’s become something of an Aja specialty between this film and his Hills Have Eyes remake. He’ll push the brutality far beyond what you would expect for an English-speaking film, but Aja remains a showman at heart. He’s more interested in sending you on an exhaustively entertaining roller coaster ride than he is on punishing you for having strapped in. So even as Hills was rolling in a blood orgy of mutant muck, it was still a rollicking good time.
The same goes for Horns, which nicely balances right on the line between black comedy, dark fantasy, and out-and-out horror. It’s often cheerfully nasty and cynical, taking visible pleasure in turning humanity’s capacity for awfulness into cheeky bloodsport.
And maybe that’s why I continue to find Horns so compelling, even as its flaws are unavoidable. It’s messy and goofy and human, a film about the supernatural that is grounded entirely in the petty problems of mundane folks. Horns is about the ultimate battle between cosmic good and evil, and its climax revolves around a small group of men arguing in a forest. With this movie, Aja attempts to wrestle with the divine, and if he doesn’t hit the target straight-on, he’s at least still on the board.
So I would still recommend Horns to anyone reading this. And, you know what, probably you will like it more after reading this. Because maybe I am Santa Claus. Or the Devil. Or another kind of magical being that can do magical things.
(I still say they should’ve put Radcliffe in the blue dress from the book, though. That shit is WEAK.)
THE PACKAGE
As I said, the film looks beautiful on Blu-ray. Even the film’s harshest detractors will have to tip their hats to the way Aja composes his imagery, blending digital and on-set work seamlessly.
It’s a pretty sparse disc, though, with the lone special feature being a puff piece Making Of. The most interesting bit is the explanation for how they pulled off the horns, a neat little trick that is forehead-slappingly obvious once you see it (don’t actually slap your horn-heavy forehead. You will impale your hand and, you know, die, probably).
It was also nice to see Aja talk about his sincere passion for the book and the movie. What’s odd is that Aja actually underlines elements from the book that the movie ends up ignoring as being what drew him to the material. When I first watched the movie, I assumed that Aja had chucked the more complex thematic material to focus on making a monster mashing good time, but the Making Of suggests that it was these exact concerns which made him so eager to direct the film.
One of these days, Aja’s going to put it all together and make something truly undeniable. The world may not survive afterwards, but boy will it be worth it.