Daniel Radcliffe has been working off his Harry Potter weight with great success over the past few years. The 24-year-old Fulham-born actor’s next non-Potter outing is as Ignatius Perrish, a man who awakes one morning after a heavy night on the tiles to find he has a pair of horns protruding from his temples.

Daniel Radcliffe and Juno TempleDaniel Radcliffe and Juno Temple attend a screening of 'Horns' at the Toronto Film Festival in 2013 - Getty/Aaron Harris

But his newfound, devilish horns aren’t his only problem. Far from it: Perrish has been accused of raping and murdering his girlfriend, and must discover the true perpetrator of the crime while in hiding from the victims' friends and family. Because of those damned horns.

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Radcliffe has described the movie as like nothing he’s ever done before, adding to Total Film that it defied genre classification. “The first third starts off like some bizarre absurdist comedy, and then it becomes this epic tragic love story and revenge saga with elements of horror, fantasy, religion and everything else you can imagine along the way,” he explained.

“And rock’n’roll, that’s another important influence in the movie. I saw it the other day and I do think that Alexandre has done an amazing job,” he added, suggesting “horror elements in it but it’s not really a horror film. There’s one sequence where – in Alex’s words – we go into full slasher movie mode. Generally speaking, it’s never just one thing, which is why it will be a challenging film to market."

However, with Radcliffe’s face all over the campaign, and with the recent Harry Potter short story hitting Pottermore fuelling rumours that the boy wonder might return to the role of a lifetime, it’s difficult to imagine Horn flopping, even if the critics don’t get on board – not to mention the Halloween release date.

Horn poster