Yesterday Lainey wrote about Daniel Radcliffe and how he’s pretty much doing whatever he wants, post-Harry Potter. At 24 and he’s already made his money and earned the kind of fame that never really goes away (see also: Orlando Bloom, Mark Hamill), so there’s no pressure to earn or increase his profile or anything like that. DanRad has achieved something very few actors, even ones twice his age, ever do—he can work to please himself. Lainey’s already mentioned the movie he’s promoting now, a rom-com titled What If and/or The F Word, depending on where you live, but his next movie is very, very different.
The first trailer for the long-awaited Horns was released last night and it looks GREAT. Directed by French horror master Alexandre Aja, Horns is about a man whose girlfriend is brutally murdered and he is accused of the crime. At the same time, he grows a pair of horns, and people start confessing their various and sundry crimes and misdeeds to him. It played the festival circuit last year and divided critics—as Aja’s movies usually do—but with a horror-friendly Halloween release date and a well-known star, it’s poised to be a cross-over success along the lines of Radcliffe’s previous foray into horror, The Woman in Black.
I wish the trailer got more into the actual horns part of the story, but it does a good job of establishing the look and feel of the movie, which is where Aja’s strengths really lie, in atmospherics. And Radcliffe looks so creepy and intense in the final shot with his washed-out face and the horns. Even though critics disagreed on the film overall, they all praised his performance. With nothing holding him back and a record of interesting, diverse choices, Daniel Radcliffe is becoming the kind of actor you simply have to watch.
(Lainey: I saw Horns last year at TIFF. It worked for me as a dark fairy tale. And he was great in it.)
