This Daniel Radcliffe Movie Adapted A Novel By Stephen King's Son (But Critics Hated It)

Alexandre Aja's 2013 film "Horns" stars Daniel Radcliffe as Ignatius "Ig" Parrish, a fellow who wakes up one morning to find that he is growing a pair of goat-like horns out of his head. They couldn't have come at a worse time, as Ig is still recovering from the recent sexual assault and murder of his girlfriend Merrin (Juno Temple). The police suspect Ig of being involved, and he's been spiraling into a deep depression. The horns look vaguely demonic and, as Ig soon discovers, they give him an unusual and unwelcome superpower: Whenever they have a conversation, people feel compelled to confess their darkest and most twisted secrets to him. 

Of course, when one wants to get to the bottom of a crime, magical confession-goading horns are incredibly handy. Thus, Ig begins tooling around town, grilling people as to what happened on the night of his girlfriend's murder. Naturally, he learns a lot more about his city's secrets than he bargained for. 

The film's supporting cast is a who's-who of recognizable actors. Indeed, Merrin's father is played by David Morse, whereas Ig's parents are played by Kathleen Quinlan and James Remar. Meanwhile, Max Minghella plays his friend, and Heather Graham has a small role as a waitress. Additionally (and this is fun trivia), pop sensation Sabrina Carpenter plays the young Merrin in flashbacks. The movie itself is based on a 2010 novel by Joe Hill, the author of the "Locke & Key" comic books, "The Black Phone," "NOS4A2," and many others. Hill is also the son of horror luminary Stephen King. 

Few liked "Horns," however. The film only has a 41% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes (based on 122 reviews). Tonally, the movie is all over the place, and its moral is unclear.

Chris Nashawaty, writing for Entertainment Weekly, felt "Horns" couldn't decide on a genre, flipping tonally between film noir and horror without much warning, while Christy Lemire, writing for RogerEbert.com, admired Radcliffe's devotion to oddball projects more than she enjoyed the film. The symbolism, she wrote, was heavy-handed, and the actual movie is overbearing and overlong. ("Horns" is a bloated 120 minutes.) In a review for Variety, Peter Debruge wrote that the film's humor is too silly to be truly effective. However, some critics noted that there was, at the very least, a lot of potential in "Horns." Ig has been cast as the Devil by the locals, all of whom have pre-judged him guilty of murder. When Ig accepts that he's essentially the Devil, he literally becomes one. 

Aja's career as a director is checkered. He exploded on the horror scene in 2003 with his stalk-and-kill thriller "High Tension," but that film has a problematic twist ending that might read to many (as it did to me) as homophobic. In 2006, he remade Wes Craven's "The Hill Have Eyes" to the delight of audiences and the disgust of critics everywhere. His films "Mirrors" and "The 9th Life of Louis Drax" have their defenders, but they're hardly notable in their genres. His best film may be the ultra-campy re-imagining "Piranha 3D," which embraced the zanier elements of Joe Dante's 1978 original (and added loads of nudity to boot). More recently, Aja helmed the textured and exciting Halle Berry vehicle "Never Let Go." That, too, is one of his better movies. 

Radcliffe, meanwhile, continues to make fun, weird career choices. Since "Horns," he's played Igor in "Victor Frankenstein," a corpse in "Swiss Army Man," and a man with guns literally bolted to his hands in "Guns Akimbo."