MovieChat Forums > Horns (2014) Discussion > Liked it but it made no sense

Liked it but it made no sense

posted 8 years ago by patrick-413
4 replies | jump to latest

I enjoyed this movie, I'll start there. The characters were interesting, the mystery unfolded well, and the acting was good (despite a few rough American accents - actually Radcliffe's was excellent, I thought). I even liked the "uneven" tone a number of people are complaining about. The humor stopped as soon as the really serious ramifications were spelled out (about half-way through) and I thought it actually served to heighten the suspense. That was something Hitchcock did a lot, and it seems to work here.

OK, SO -- what I didn't get was - why the horns? Why the devil transformation? It didn't make sense and it was never explained or even hinted at. Does the devil hate murderers and help god punish them? That would be an interesting take if slightly touched on, but it wasn't. Iggy wasn't guilty at all so it wasn't his guilt manifesting physically, which is a tried and true literary device. It was random.

And why would the victim's cross protect her murderer? That makes no sense from a storytelling standpoint. Magical/fantasy plots like this only really resonate if there's some sense of balance, symbolism, or poetic justice.

The sort of genre that DOES invite random punishment for both the evil and the good is Horror. You can get away with this sort of thing there, but I'll propose that this was NOT a horror movie in any way, despite a few trappings. It was a mystery/romance with a touch of the crime thriller, that threw in some slightly disturbing Fantasy elements. But Horror, it was not.

[–] wednesdaylorraine 8 years ago

Here's my take, I see it as a blessing and a curse. A curse because f his drunken blasphemy when he smashed the Virgin Mary's statue and urinated on it. A blessing because he learns to use his curse to solve the mystery of who killed Merrin. Blasphemy is deeply frowned upon by the Lord. They also hint at the story of Satan and how he fell from grace. Satans horns are actually from early Christianity hoping to wipe out the pagan gods. The God Pan had horns.

I believe the cross worked because Merrin was pure. Sure she made mistakes but she was deep down a pure soul. Plus it's the opposite of the horns, the good to the bad. Plus there's a psychological element. Merrin and Lee believed it would protect them and so it did.

That's my theory.

[–] patrick-413 8 years ago

That's a good theory, and maybe it fits if the cross being "good" is only "good" in the sense of Christian dogma, and not objective morality. That is, the cross "worked" - that is, made the bearer immune to the Satanic influence of the horns, but it worked to protect someone who was evil, and almost worked to pervert justice in getting a killer off.

In that sense, it would be reminiscent of Kevin Smith's "Dogma" movie (speaking of dogma), where the rules of the game, so to speak, trump morality.

[–] wednesdaylorraine 7 years ago

I think that, that is exactly where they were going with the cross. I could also say that when Daniel Radcliffe's character started to figure it out, the scales, so to speak, began to balence.

In this, and Dogma, I guess you can say that the scales are always tipping one way or the other and things might not work out how you think or whom you may expect.

[–] kannef87 8 years ago

He gets horns because he turned his back on god the night at the treehouse when he pees on all of the candles and breaks the Mary statues. The priest goes over iit a little and a lot more in the book when Ig asks him for help.

The cross is a barrier for the horns because it's Merrins. Merrin was all love and good and Christianity.