LONGLEGS is a Diabolical Detective Story

Oz Perkins crafts an unsettling, infernal spell on unsuspecting viewers in a satanic crime thriller

Evil hangs softly in the air of every Oz Perkins film.

From The Blackcoat’s Daughter to Gretel and Hansel, a silent malevolence infects every interaction, every flicker of daylight, hinting at elemental evils far beyond our comprehension. No kindness can be trusted, and moments of peace are a foreboding precursor to inevitable violence and terror. While plenty of modern horror has mined quiet moments of dread for all they’re worth, none quite match Perkins’ singular approach of cinematically binding natural and unnatural worlds. It’s an approach that’s developed a similarly gradual groundswell of pop culture resonance over the last few years, in the form of a Netflix original, an A24 VOD release, and finally a theatrical release in the remaining few weeks before the COVID pandemic. 

In that context, it’s no wonder that Longlegs, Perkins’ first (hopefully) unencumbered wide theatrical release, feels like the tipping point of a major horror breakout. Thanks to NEON’s tantalizing slow-burn of a marketing campaign (beginning in January!), Longlegs’ malicious atmosphere has had a fair amount of time to percolate in the zeitgeist–conceivably acclimating mainstream audiences to the equal patience occasionally required for Perkins’ frights to take proper effect. Thankfully, it’s a patience that more than pays off: Longlegs sees Perkins operating at a creative fever pitch with a visually dazzling, uniquely frightening detective story that seizes control of our deepest fears. 

Set during the Clinton administration, Maika Monroe’s Lee Harker is an FBI agent whose nascent psychic abilities land her a key placement in the Bureau’s hunt for a decades-spanning serial killer–if he can be called that. He shows no signs of directly interfering with his victims, who instead kill each other in ritualistic murder-suicides adorned with cryptic, Zodiac-like letters bearing his call name: Longlegs. As Harker grows closer to deciphering Longlegs’ enigmatic goals, Longlegs himself (Nicolas Cage) meticulously prepares to take his next victims in satisfaction of his ultimately Satanic pursuits.

What makes Perkins’ approach to horror so effective is how he initially grounds audiences in the traditional and familiar. It can be on a totemic level, through intricately detailed and lived-in production design, effortlessly evoking the tired, twilight grime of the mid-90s (major praise to production designer Danny Vermette). Here, the 90s are represented as a boxy, beige era caught between a worn-out reminiscence for 70’s kitsch and a premature nostalgia for Reagan-era exceptionalism. It can also be through familiar tropes, here rooted in a shared love for detective procedurals and psychological horror films. While Longlegs may immediately remind audiences of classics like Seven or Silence of the Lambs, there are also echoes of the burning madness of Cure, the dream logic of Phantasm, and–at least, to this viewer–the crackling tension between cruel reality and the terrifying mysteries of the beyond in The Exorcist III. This love for horror has a literary bent as well, with characters’ names nodding to everyone from Bram Stoker to H.P. Lovecraft. This isn’t to say that Longlegs earns most of its mileage through a clever, stylized pastiche of horror greats; rather, Oz Perkins uses these myriad cultural touchstones as a Rosetta Stone to tap into anxieties on a deeper, primal level. 

Much like Longlegs’ letters cryptically pointing to the motivations behind his grisly crimes, Perkins’ usage of the familiar soon gives way to a nightmare logic that permeates every atmospheric frame. So much tension is divined from a flashlight beam dissolving into darkness, a split-second invasion of demonic imagery, or a twisted mouth whose face malevolently rests just outside the confines of the screen. Oftentimes, you aren’t quite sure just what you’re supposed to be afraid of. Is something going to appear in a distant doorjamb? Is there another voice lurking in the shadows? Is this shot something omniscient, or have we temporarily inhabited another sinister point of view? Eventually, the specifics don’t matter–in favor of surrendering to a permanent sense of surreal unease. Perkins and cinematographer Andres Arochi imbue this sense of uncanny dread in each of Longlegs’ gorgeously terrifying sequences, which on their own retain a painterly chiaroscuro quality before preying on our fears of the dark. 

One key decision, crucially upheld until well toward Longlegs’ final act, is Perkins and Arochi’s choice to obscure our view of their titular killer. While Longlegs is one of Nicolas Cage’s most imposing and sinister personas yet, he’s deliberately kept out of frame or at a distance–aside from teasing glimpses either in an ominous game of peekaboo or in tentative dips into our range of vision. This not only tempers the expected heights of another Cageian performance–but fosters the idea of Longlegs as an invasive presence in both the world of Longlegs as well as the film itself. He’s a sublimely unheimlich demon even for a procedural thriller like this, infusing the ominous omnipresence of a killer like the Zodiac with the supernatural vibes of the Cursed Video from The Ring or the Girl in the Radiator from Lynch’s Eraserhead. 

In surprising opposition to this, Maika Monroe’s Harker is played extremely close to the chest, with a marked reserve that makes her initially difficult to read as a protagonist. While commanding when pursuing the FBI’s latest target, Harker remains steely in private moments with co-workers or her cloyingly religious mother, the latter deviously played by Alicia Witt. It makes for a mature evolution of Monroe’s presence as a modern scream queen, especially in inevitable comparison to Jodie Foster’s turn as Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs. While Foster’s Starling must adopt a performative bravado to be seen as an equal in the eyes of her FBI cohorts, Harker’s deliberate emotional detachment becomes an asset in unearthing clues that go unseen by others working on the case. Monroe’s execution is remarkably skilled here, working with Perkins’ oppressive silence to let audiences in on non-verbal emotional cues to Harker’s inner machinations, a far cry from the more theatrical terrors of It Follows and Watcher. 

As one might gleam from repeated notions of patience and cold distance, Longlegs most definitely retains the crawling pace of Oz Perkins’ past work despite being his most accessible film yet. The film’s marketing nails Longlegs’ terrifying ambiguity–and while this may prove enticing for crowds eagerly awaiting this picture, it may ultimately prove divisive among wider audiences conditioned to or expecting multiple frights per minute. However, viewers willing to surrender to Perkins’ subversive spell will be rewarded in the nightmares that will linger long after they leave the theater. Major kudos can be given here to editors Greg Ng and Graham Fortin, who traffic in split-second imagery and unpredictable, aspect-ratio-shifting time warps between the 1990s and 1970s, with all of the latent Satanic Panic visuals and audio cues one might gather from these respective eras. 

While there are some concrete answers divulged for Longlegs’ many mysteries, what’s most exciting about Perkins’ film is its dedication to retaining the enigmatic nature of several key elements. Whether it’s an FBI-run program meant to weed out the psychics among them, the origins of some of Longlegs’ particular tools, or the many moments where our eyes may be deceiving us, Perkins has a wonderfully auteurist flair for keeping some crucial clues deep within the shadows. It allows the careful, diabolical magic tricks of Longlegs to retain their unearthly power across future viewings–entertaining but never permitting audiences to wake up from this nightmare.

Longlegs opens in theaters on July 12th, 2024 courtesy of NEON.