While we have yet to see an actual trailer for the feature adaptation of Joe HIll's Horns, a clip from the film has made its way online, and gives us a look at Daniel Radcliffe in the lead role of Ig Perrish, a man who finds himself sprouting a mysterious set of horns, which give him the ability to draw people's darkest desires and confessions from them. The above clip, which comes to us via Collider shows a horned Radcliffe desperate enough for help that he's willing to stare down the barrel of a gun to get it.
I don't know why, but I love hearing Daniel Radcliffe speak with an American accent. Putting that aside, let's talk about what's going on in this very brief video. The plot of the film has Radcliffe's Ig waking up a year after his girlfriend's brutal murder to discover he's sprouted a set of horns. As mentioned, he soon figures out that the horns are causing people to confess their deepest secrets and admissions to him, and the horns also make people act on their desires, which would explain why he tells David Morse that if he was going to kill him, he would have already, and that he brings out the worst in people. He isn't kidding.
The clip offers very little introduction or explanation as to what's going on in this scene. One might assume that Ig's desperation for help in the video has to do with finding a cure for his horned affliction, but judging by the length of his horns, especially by comparison to how short they were in the photo that shows him getting checked out by a doctor, they appear to have grown in quite a bit, so I'm going to assume we're looking at a scene that's a bit further into the story, by which point Ig has presumably moved past trying to understand why he has the horns and onto using their powers to help him figure out who killed Merrin. Which brings us to my next theory about the clip, and that's that Morse is playing Merrin's father or someone close to Merrin. Morse isn't listed on the film's IMDB page, so it's unclear who he's playing, but Merrin's father might be a good guess.
In the book, most people believe Ig was involved in Merrin's death, though it was never proven. So not only has he lost his girlfriend, but his reputation is wrecked. Assuming Morse is someone who cared about Merrin and believes Ig killed her, that would explain why Morse has a gun on him. And perhaps Ig has come to him to get some answers about something related to Merrin's death. I'd speculate more on that in detail, but that would require getting into bigger book-spoiler territory. So we'll leave my theories at that. Either way, it's exciting to get to see a little bit from the movie while we wait for a full trailer.
Horns doesn't have a release date yet, but the film is expected to arrive in theaters in 2014.
