Longlegs

The new horror movie Longlegs just opened and there has been a fair amount of buzz about it. I was kind of on the fence, because I’m kind of sick of Nicolas Cage being epic and craaaazy; and I am kind of sick of A24-esque arty-horror films. But I saw that the director was someone named Osgood Perkins, and looked him up, and found that his dad was Anthony Perkins, the actor who played Norman Bates in Psycho (1960). Something about that just seemed so cool, like being the son of a horror icon just made him inevitably make a horror movie. It’s also cool that he wrote and directed it; movies by writer-directors have a singular vision that is increasingly rare.

This movie definitely has that—the look, feel, and voice of the film are very singular. Every frame looks like it came from one guy’s head; the writing is funny in an absurd macabre way that can’t be stitched together from multiple voices. The story is subtle but also kind of simple—which is a great combination—and it’s the kind of thing that can only come from a unity of vision.

The movie is set some time in the 1990s, and it has the aesthetic of an X-Files episode mixed with the psychological thrillers of the 90s (like Se7en, The Silence of the Lambs, etc). Something about this genre of psychological horror crime detective story just feels more at home in the 90s, I can’t say why exactly, but it feels right. All the little touches that bring the 90s feel home—like a big obnoxious picture of Bill Clinton in the FBI agent’s office—are really well done and pretty funny, always putting you squarely in the 90s. The 90s has a sort of familiarity to it—it wasn’t that long ago!—but it’s also distant enough from us, before the Internet and smartphones and all the bullshit that has defined and emptied out life over the last two decades, that it has a sort of strangeness to it, where more supernatural things seem somehow plausible.

I also think a movie like this, where there is a supernatural element at the center of how the plot works, is somehow more readily accepted now than it was in the 2010s. I’m thinking of the movie Prometheus (2012), which I really liked, but which was widely despised and mocked by fans because there was some unexplained black goo as sort of the engine of the plot. Longlegs is equally reliant on some unexplained metaphysical substance to put the whole story in motion, and it feels like people now are more willing to just go with that. In 2012, everything was very reddit—people were so apt to be like “oh erm actually that’s an epic logic fail plot hole my dude” and just dismiss the whole thing, like assholes. So in a way, people are more able to receive cinematic art now, perhaps?

The sound design of the film is also really good—I’m not sure, but it sounds like they used old school foley work, using real artists with objects to produce sound effects, so that you feel like you’re in the world of the movie. Lots of little old school touches that go a long way toward creating the full effect.

(Spoilers from here).

I won’t go into too much detail about the plot, but the basic gist is that there’s this ghoulish Satanist named Gil Ferdinand Cobble (Nicolas Cage), who goes by the name Longlegs; he builds these weird dolls that contain some kind of demonic energy that channels the Devil himself. He has an accomplice bring the dolls into the homes of families, and once the doll is inside, the demonic energy in the doll compels the father to murder his entire family, and himself. This process has repeated over ten times.

We find out late in the movie that the heroine of the film, young FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), was a potential victim of Longlegs when she was younger; but her Mom Ruth (Alicia Witt) made a deal to become his accomplice, and dress up as a nun and bring the dolls into the victim’s houses for Longlegs.

Early in the movie, looking at how the crime scenes show no sign of Longlegs himself actually being in the houses (other than his Satanic letters left at the scene), Lee’s superior at the FBI, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) likens the Longlegs phenomenon to the Manson family; Manson himself never entered the homes where the Manson murders occurred; the people (mostly women) under his control did it. That’s one way to read the film—an updated, even creepier version of the Manson murders; and a chronicle of how women become Manson killers; as Manson himself said once: “I’m the Devil and all my women are witches.” The same is true for Longlegs.

The movie is about the weakness of evil; how the Devil needs to be given an artificial physical form—the dolls that Longlegs makes—and then brought into a physical location, inside the houses, where it can exert its will. Only these conditions give it any real power in the world. There are a lot of steps that need to be taken before the Devil can have any direct power in the world—it needs dedicated servants to help its evil have real impact in the world. So evil and demonism are real forces in the world, but unless there is a concerted effort to assist them, they can’t do much.

The movie is also about the growing and fermenting of evil within institutions—Lee Harker eventually becomes the new Longlegs at the end of the movie; and she was allowed to sort of incubate within the FBI, the supposed paragon of public safety and morality. But of course, the FBI has largely been a force for assisting Satanic elites in getting away with their crimes; helping to cover up the real story of what goes on, and feeding the public the mythology of “lone wolf serial killers” so that the truth of Satanic sacrifices being carried out by the elites stays hidden. The idea that our most trusted institutions actually shield and develop the people they pretend to oppose is interesting and accurate; we trust the FBI to hunt down monsters, but they just as easily can harbor and create them.

Another theme in the movie is how Satanism focuses on children; and how things in our society are geared towards this. Longlegs visits his victims’ houses on their children’s birthdays, and he often sings creepy versions of Happy Birthday. And Longlegs himself looks like a psychotic, grotesque version of Bugs Bunny. The idea is how the elites use children’s media to sneak their demonism into the world, into the most vulnerable people.

The last frame of the movie goes full Satanic Bugs Bunny, with Longlegs saying “Hail Satan!” in a cartoonish way with a big wink and blowing a kiss; the movie then ends. Kind of like how old Looney Tunes cartoons would end with Bugs saying “That’s all folks!”