Oz Perkins artfully weaves terrifying, occult horror into a creepy procedural crime-drama.
Nearly every online film community have been swept up in the wait for Longlegs over the past few weeks. The promotion for Ozgood Perkins’ latest film, organised by Neon production company, has been one of the horror film industry’s most viral marketing campaigns in recent years.
There were teaser trailers with snatches of dank, blood-soaked crime scenes. If you called a phone number on the film boards, you could hear the serial killer Longlegs whispering cryptic threats. In later trailers, a horrid, flapping Nicolas Cage as Longlegs appears at the edges of sight for fleeting seconds. Neon’s drawn-out campaign has sealed Longlegs’ status as the most hotly anticipated horror of 2024 and left audiences eagerly awaiting its release.
However, did all the hype and hashtags tip off audiences about what kind of film Longlegs is? As one of the lucky fans to snatch tickets to a preview screening hosted by GrimmFest in Manchester, I’m still trying to figure out how to describe Longlegs. There couldn’t have been a more fitting place to watch Oz Perkins’ new chiller. GrimmFest, Manchester’s annual horror film festival in its 15th year, has carved out a reputation as an authentic source of new horror for UK and European horror film fans. The specialist horror magazine Fangoria last year promoted Grimmfest as ‘one of the UK and Europe’s most beloved genre film festivals’.
The packed preview screening for Longlegs showed a demand for new horror outside of this main GrimmFest festival in October. There’s a and a thirst for regional screenings of new horror films outside of London. Northern audiences deserve an early peak at films that will keep them awake at night just as much as London audiences, especially when films have been as eagerly expected and enigmatic as Longlegs. This enigma is part of the queasy appeal of Perkins’ new horror. The basic plot is easy to summarise. Longlegs follows rookie FBI agent Lee Harker (played by an excellent Maika Monroe, a decade after her breakout role in It Follows). Lee is part of the team hunting down a serial killer whose bloody crimes span decades and whose cryptic messages at the crime scenes reveal occult influences.
Longlegs has shades of procedural drama in David Fincher’s Seven (1995) and Zodiac (2007). It also has echoes of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), focusing on a female FBI agent bearing the hard thumps from life in a man’s world. However, it is not a conventional serial killer film. Longlegs‘ heroine has psychic abilities that assist her with the case. This gives the film a decisively supernatural edge that places it in the territory of Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2016) and Hereditary (2018). Its exploration of how horror arises from grief and guilt creates a memorable blend of horror and psychological thriller.
As the Longlegs progresses, it becomes clear that the occult influences do not solely exist in the twisted mind of its villain. I cannot say more without spoilers. However, I can say that Longlegs’ strongest scenes are not moments of extreme violence but long, meandering scenes that extract suspense from moments of shabby ordinariness. Innocuous shots – an ordinary suburban house, a car on the road, a window lit by daylight – come strangely to life with malevolent menace. Banal phrases or songs take on a terrifying tone. Some of these ordinary moments radiate squalid terror in a way that will etch them onto your memory.
Longlegs sometimes feels like more of a moodscape than a film. In certain places, it looks like a film by the Coen Brothers, composed of a lightly-tinted, unhurried arthouse-realist style that captures a scene’s texture, feel and mood. This arthouse style enhances the squalid texture of some of the more extreme and unnerving scenes. Drifting, eerie scenes of ordinariness are disturbing, both while they are unfolding onscreen and in retrospect.
Every scene is also tainted by the unsettling presence of Nicolas Cage’s Longlegs, even though he only glanced fleetingly in the opening half, and he spends most of his time off-screen. If you were writing a movie with Nicolas Cage at the centre, you couldn’t envisage a role that would better illuminate the unexpected potential for darkness in his acting repertoire. Cage’s performance as Longlegs is wonderfully, subtly, textured, with a weird lip-smacking tic and a hunched gait that gives him a clownish vibe. He’s also darkly funny—a humour that has more to do with the delivery of his dialogue with a soft, whispering voice that still sounds like nails scratching on a board. Cage is more than the usual villainous catchphrases. He is a brutal character with a clownish vibe that echoes throughout the film.
The threat of violence is always growing beneath the film’s surface, despite the events never seeming anything out of the ordinary, until the closing scenes. The plot may become too unwieldy and unpredictable for some audiences towards the end. However, Longlegs manages to evoke genuine fear, making it a thrilling experience. Not many other recent horrors have managed to hit the mark so many times in such a short screening time. Some moments will etch on your memory, radiating misery and menace. Blood and gore aren’t the only things that can scare you, not when we have filmmakers that can evoke a type of stark irrational terror that chimes with the depths of our subconscious.
