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."