Top Ten: Horny For Horned Creatures
Tuesday, March 3, 2015 at 11:30AM 
This top ten list is devoted to Madonna & her minotaurs since "Rebel Heart," the Queen of Pop's 13th studio album arrives in full this Friday.
The minotaurs in particular serve as horny inspiration for this week's top ten. What are the best horned villains, horned beauties or horny creatures from the movies? I was surprised to realize that we don't get that many. It was hard to find enough good characters. The movies haven't been big on the succubus, for example, as mythological fetishes go. TV has far more horned characters but that's thanks in most part to the demon happy and expansive Buffyverse. But we're talking movies. Sorry Hellmouth!
We'll make do with what we have. But please do shout out a favorite if you don't see it here.
TOP TEN HORNED MOVIE CHARACTERS
after the jump...
Honorable Mention: goes out to Uma Thurman's much maligned but so bad it's great Poison Ivy, Tom Hiddleston's wildly overrated but totally compelling Loki, and various Vikings with their helmets who all pretend to have horns but actually serve normal skull realness.
10 Mr Tummus in Chronicles of Narnia (2005)
This was just an excuse to feature a young James McAvoy because Mr Tumnus' horns are so teeny that you can barely make them out in his curls and his ears are pulling focus anyway. Remember the Aughts when McAvoy was a much bigger deal? The X-Men swallowed him whole. Return to prominence, please! Pine for Keira again or something. That worked splendidly.
09 Satan in South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (1999)
Parker & Tone's gleefully offensive depiction of Satan as a show-tune singing, super-gay, Saddam-Hussein loving conflicted romantic justifies his own ranking best when he warbles his Disney spoofing "Up There"
What is evil anyway?
Is there reason to the rhyme?
Without evil there can be no good so it must be good to be evil some times.
08 Beast in Beauty & The Beast (1991)
The movies are really fond of 'don't judge a book by its cover' secret gentleness/beauty, aren't they? In a way all Beauty & The Beast stories are redundant because every male hero is a Frog Prince who has to transform (the women start beautiful and stay that way). Mixing fairy tales, sorry, but it amounts to the same thing. That gaspy enthusiastic applause when this got a Best Picture nod on Oscar nomination morning = One of the single greatest Oscar-watching moments of my lifetime.
07 Faun in Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
06 Hellboy in Hellboy (2004)
A Guillermo del Toro double feature. And possibly his peak twosome? What visual splendors these two characters are truly and triumphs for the make-up effects team. And their horns are so central to their looks whether ram like, or sanded off. Weirdly, Hellboy wasn't nominated for the Makeup Oscar though Pan's Labyrinth won it. Looking forward to Crimson Peak even though del Toro has the same problem a lot of visually inspired uneven directors have, in that he often errs on the side of TOO MUCH and forgets that you have to be able to understand what you're looking at. Though that's not a problem in his best film (Pan's obviously).
05 Ferdinand the Bull (1938)
This early Oscar winner for Animated Short is absolutely worth 8 minutes of your time. Not least for its hilarious voice work / writing. (Another gentle giant despite the fierce look - sensing a theme, are you?)
04 Darth Maul in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999)
This villain's big moment is the lonely moment of inspiration - nay, genius -- in this otherwise atrocious blight on cinema. Supposition: If the five or so minutes of "Duel of Fates" hadn't been in this movie, no one on Earth would have tricked themselves into thinking they liked it at all.
03 Chernabog in Fantasia (1941)
The single most frightening character in the Disney canon. The simple visual presentation all long black strokes with points (wings, eyes, horns) is seismic in impact. Well, Modest Mussorgsky helps a little.
02 Darkness in Legend (1985)
Horrifyingly red, violent, naked, and proportionally disturbing ('my what big cheeks/chin/ears you have') the shiny hard black horns are what really makes a case for his iconic stature, protuding from his slimy red skin like they've torn through it and just keep growing, or, more disturbingly, like uncircumcised permanently aroused violence. Darkness is too gruesome to be comfortably camp but he is, memorably that, too. Tim Curry owns this troubled 80s attempt at dark fantasy as the unicorn-killing devil but you could imagine the Rocky Horror superstar singing South Park's "Up There" as he too longs to escape the shadows.
01 Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty (1959)
The original. Accept no substitutes. Her win is predictable, surely, but "oh dear... what an awkward situation" had she lost at TFE. She's a marvel of visual craft. Consider that her magnificent curl point black horns, spooky eyes, and spiky cloak even maintain their shapes and color so she's still immediately recognizable in dragon form without being silly (Madame Mim in Sword in the Stone) or tacky (the witch dragon in Seventh Son). Even better, she's frightening and witty and blessed with a sublime vocal performance from Eleanor Audley. Best, the way she moves through the fairy tale world like an entitled queen, rarely physically engaging with it but laughing at its weakness in the face of her "powers of the hell."
Reader Comments (17)
Mr. Tumnus is my favorite James McAvoy performance.
Wasn't there a movie called The Last Unicorn?
I presume there a couple ties there, so I'll break the news that you didn't get how ties work. When two or more things tie, the next item goes down the total number of items tied. So if there's two things tied for 5, the next item or tie goes to 7.
Madame Mim in Sword in the Stone - not Mumsy. Love that one.
Glad you included Faun. Just thinking about Pan's Labyrinth the other day while reading book 1 of the Strain trilogy by Del Toro and Hogan. Should definitely watch that film again soon. I wonder if I'll love it as much as I did on first viewing?
What about Sully from Monsters Inc.?
What you said about Chernabog is DEAD ON. The entire "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence in Fantasia is absolutely terrifying for children. I refuse to believe that anyone who saw it as a child wasn't scared shitless by it.
Even more interesting about Hellboy is that the sequel WAS nominated for the Makeup Oscar.
Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna
Oh and YAY HORNS.
Hellboy II: The Golden Army earned that makeup Oscar nomination. It's one of the most beautiful fantasy fims - and what unique characters.
I love 1, 2, & 3 in this post. All 3 are wonderful.
Great list, but I would switch Chernabog to #1 and Faun to #2.
Excellent list- Darkness entrance is "Legend" is awesome.
How about Daniel Radcliffe in Horns?
PJ -- i keep hearing that's terrible but i have not seen it..
Darkness is my favorite one. He scared the shit out of me as a kid, along with every villain and creature and Tom Cruise in that movie.
There is a small chance that we havent seen the last of Darth Maul on the Big Screen.
Spoiler:
He is rescued in Clone Wars (official canon) and didnt die in the series.
"his best film (Pan's obviously)"
Del Toro's best film is obviously The Devil's Backbone (for Peggy Sue: El Espinazo Del Diablo). Well, okay, maybe not, but at least it's a worthy companion piece to Pan's Labyrinth (El Laberinto Del Fauno), as the titles already imply.
willy - i dont much like devil's backbone but i understand that most del toro fans l-o-v-e it. but i wouldn't call myself a del toro fan really. he's hit and miss
I probably wouldn't say that I l-o-v-e The Devil's Backbone, but I would say that Santi is my favorite ghost in motion picture history, especially since he barely has any screen time at all. In this case, del Toro didn't err on the side of TOO MUCH either.
Goodness, FERDINAND THE BULL is gaaaaay. It's about a prancing, sissy bull who doesn't like sports, but who eventually grows up to be a muscle queen, yet no less proudly flamboyant whose eye bulge at the sight of a half-naked man who he then proceeds to lick. Umm...