Greetings Meatlings, and welcome to another installment of the Andrei Trostel/Gavin Pitt Halloween Tag Team, an Autumnal article that is rapidly becoming a beloved Halloween tradition, on par with “fun-sized” candy bars (note to Willy Wonka: Bonsai-ed chocolate is never “fun”), costumes for women being marketed as “sexy” (I look forward to many “Sexy Trumps” this year), and frantically checking all the doors and windows for your brother coming at you again with a William Shatner mask and a butcher knife (Jamie Lee Curtis tradition only).
So fuel up your chainsaws, polish your silver spheres, and crack the knuckles of your knife-fingered gloves as we dissect the Top 5 Sexiest Male Monster Hunters!
1. Jensen Ackles and Jared Padelecki as Dean and Sam Winchester, Supernatural
The twelfth season – “Big Bad, The Trump Presidency” – proved to be too much.
This series about two brothers who hunt demons, vampires, witches, Trump voters and other evil creatures has been airing now for 12 seasons, and it shows. Boy, does it show. It couldn’t show more if the two lead actors lopped off one of their fingers, painted themselves bright yellow, and changed their catchphrase from “Hunting is the family business” to “D’Oh!”.
That being said, Jensen and Jared themselves are still way hot (as is Mischa Collins, who plays Archangel Castiel, Dean’s “Guardian Angel” – read “Guardian Angel” the same way as entertainment media uses the word “companion,” “male friend” or “flamboyant”), and are frequently shirtless. Granted the people they get shirtless with tend to have the life expectancy of your average Game of Thrones actor, but hey, baby steps.
Sam and Dean themselves die every other episode, but they’ve done it so many times now it’s more of a nuisance than a devastation, like the Grim Reaper just gave them an embarrassing hickey. Actually, I think he may have done than it one episode.
But really, despite the leads being hot, this show is well and truly past its use-by date and is begging to be taken out into the woods and put out of its misery, like a hellhound that is faithful, but has eaten a few too many Girl Scouts lately and is attracting undue attention. Anything that goes on that long is bound to decay – except for mine and Andrei's Halloween articles of course…
2. Brendan Fehr and Kerr Smith as Nick and Sean, Forsaken
“What do you mean, ‘that wasn't ketchup'?”
This criminally under-seen 2001 vampire film features nine medieval knights who were turned into vampires during a botched attempt at immortality (ALWAYS read the fine print when dealing with Genies, Lovecraftian entities, or lawyers) and who spread across the Earth. Three of them ended up in North America, and set about doing what vampires do: taking their shirts off and moping over grumpy lesbian… er, visiting small, out of the way towns and turning them into “dry communities” in a very literal sense.
Into this world stumbles Sean (Kerr Smith, Dawson's Creek) after he picks up (kind of in more ways than one, it seems) enigmatic hitchkiker Nick (Brendan Fehr, Roswell), who has been fanged by one of the Nine Forsaken (Jonathan Shaeck) and has a set number of months to find and kill him before he irreversibly turns into one of them. Which doesn’t seem to worry either of them all that much, as they spend just as much time in the movie getting into increasingly homoerotic shenanigans with each other as tracking down and eliminated Shaeck's minions.
Indeed, Sean later accidentally gets bitten by Nick in extremely suspect circumstances: both are in their underwear, Sean goes to check on a nightmare-having Nick because “he heard noises and was worrie-” *bam, insta-hickey* This is a really good film with some neat gore, some great acting (Simon Rex all but steals the film as The Forsaken’s Day Protector) and the camera clearly loves its two leads, especially Kerr Smith, who is frequently in nothing but boxers and a wife-beater in various anatomically interesting positions. And far from me to fault the camera’s taste. Or the Forsaken’s, for that matter.
3. David Boreanaz as Angel, Angel the Series
“It's beginning to look a lot like… wait, what?!”
In Joss Whedon’s now 20+ years old series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (people who grew up on it are now fast approaching the age where they wish they themselves were vampires), David Boreanaz’ vampire Angel was basically required to stand around being A) pretty and B) enigmatic while Allyson Hannigan and Anthony Stewart Head did the heavy lifting, acting wise, and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy was the demon/vampire/monster of the week hunter.
But I can’t talk about a female hunter being hot or I’d be jumping on Andrei… er, I mean jumping on Andrei’s coat-tails.
Fortunately, Buffy was successful enough, and Angel popular enough, that they spawned the spin-off series Angel, in which Boreanaz’ souled vampire graduated from shirtless glorified scenery to… well, shirtless main character – but he got to hunt supernatural creatures whilst he did it. As the heart (unbeating, but still the heart) of Angel Investigations, he fought various monsters of the week that were intent on making “City of Angels” way ironic. He had some great chemistry with half-demon seer Doyle (the late Glen Quinn) in Season 1, and then even more onscreen chemistry with Christian Kane’s sort-of-evil-only-not lawyer Lindsey McDonald Season 2 – to the point where Angel’s sire, centuries-old vampire Darla, is annoyed during foreplay with Lindsey that “it’s not me you want to screw, it’s him.”
Darla: The guy is tormented and romantic and spends so much time screen shirtless you’d mistake him from a werewolf from Twilight. Can you really blame Lindsey that much?!
4. JR Bourne as Chris Argent, Teen Wolf
“Wait, I'm naked on this show and I'm NOT in the shower? Do the writers know?”
There seem to be three primary prerequisites for lycanthropy on MTV’s continuing series Teen Wolf:
- You turn into an animal-human hybrid with the moon
- If male, you are shirtless at all times
- 90% of your daily routine involves showering
And heck, lately the prerequisites haven’t even been confined to the werewolves, but to the people hunting them as well! Case in point, JR Bourne as Chris Argent, the patriarch of the Argents, a family of lycanthrope hunters that can trace their lineage all the way back to Medieval France (“Argent” being French for “Silver”, which is of course, werewolf Kryptonite. This is why the writers probably stick to penning shower scenes).
Though he’s not really a bad guy any more, even when he was, back in the first two or three seasons, he STILL got just as many exploitative, completely gratuitous shirtless shots as (insert every male actor under 30 here). Actor JR Bourne first came to prominence as a sleazy lawyer in the 2001 remake of Thirteen Ghosts, in which his character becomes bisectual – no, that wasn’t a typo), and here he doesn’t show quite as much skin (or blood, bone or guts) but he does get to have some nicely homoerotic moments with (insert every male actor under 30 here).
5. Patrick Wilson as Ed Warren in The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2
“Why am I suddenly having a vision about Odor-Eaters?”
Ahh, The Conjuring movies. A series that takes some extremely dubious claims about real life hauntings/possessions, and portrays them as gospel (literally and figuratively) truth.
The films take great pains to assure audiences that they are both “based on true events” – meanwhile the first film has a demonically-possessed doll running around murdering people faster than they can say “Chucky” and the second one features a little girl levitating and turning into an undead old man on live British television. If half the supernatural shenanigans that happen in the movies happened in real life, people would be calling exorcists more often than plumbers and openly praying in the streets to Bruce Campbell’s Evil Dead character as their chainsaw-handed savior.
But despite the Warren’s rather liberal use of poetic license, the two Conjuring films feature Patrick Wilson (Nite Owl in Watchmen, the ghost-possessed father in the Insidious – yes, ghosts want his sexy butt too) as Ed Warren, the male half of the married paranormal investigators featured in the film. Wilson is infamous for getting naked in most of the films he’s in, but he keeps his clothes on in both Conjuring movies – unfortunately, as they’re set in the '70s, so we have to watch Wilson busting demonic dolls and nasty nuns, whilst the real supernatural horror going on in what he’s doing to polyester and wool – and yet HE remains unpunished by the Vatican. Faced with either a naked Patrick Wilson or a Patrick Wilson in '70s garb, I think even the most homophobic of people would prefer a face-full of Wilson wang to bell-bottomed, olive corduroy trousers.
Next up is Andrei's “Top 5 Sexiest Female Slayers and Hunters”!
View all of Andrei and Gavin's “Sexy Halloween Series”!