LONGLEGS is a new horror movie from writer/director Osgood Perkins (THE BLACKCOAT’S DAUGHTER, I AM THE PRETTY THING THAT LIVES IN THE HOUSE, GRETEL & HANSEL, also played Young Norman Bates in PSYCHO II because he’s Anthony Perkins’ son). If you saw his other movies, or the bizarre, creepy-as-fuck trailers, you probly got the hint that it’s not a normal commercial horror movie, but more in the slow-horror/arthouse/early-Ti-West/stereotype-of-what-A24-releases tradition. Nevertheless it had the best opening weekend ever for distributor Neon, it’s Cage’s first live action film to open above $20 million since GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE twelve years ago, it’s already made a profit and become the highest grossing original horror movie this year.
Set sometime during the Clinton administration, it stars Maika Monroe (THE BLING RING, THE GUEST, IT FOLLOWS, INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE, WATCHER) as rookie FBI agent Lee Harker (hmm…) who has such uncanny intuition in the field that they test her for psychic powers and assign her to a decades old case. Families with no connection other than their daughters having the same birthday fall victim to murder-suicides, and on the scene are found coded letters signed “LONGLEGS.” Working closely with supportively pushy, hard drinking superior Agent Carter (Blair Underwood, POSSE, SET IT OFF), Harker quickly cracks the cypher, decodes some of the riddles, finds patterns in the dates of the crimes, and comes up with new insights into the case. But somehow Longlegs seems to already know who she is.
Monroe is great as always, here playing an odd and distant character – I saw someone say she was autistic, but I’m not sure that’s the intent. There’s obviously a parallel to SILENCE OF THE LAMBS in the way she’s trying to prove herself while clearly terrified (her chest heaves uncontrollably in any situation where she takes her gun out), though she doesn’t really display a traditionally tough side like Clarice. I assume this is intentional – other agents are always saying she’s not ready for things.
She lives in a cabin in the woods, and Perkins really captures the terror of isolated places at night as she sits in her lit up home with only darkness outside her windows. One of the most effective scenes is when there’s a loud pounding on her door and we only catch distant glimpses of Longlegs before he leaves one of his letters on her desk. (In my opinion she shouldn’t have kept this incident to herself, but I’m not in the FBI.)
As you’d expect, the great thing about the movie is Cage playing a total freak. Perkins gives him a real aura of mystery, using him sparingly, keeping his face partly obscured or cropped for a while. When we do get a clear look at him it’s not standard Cage face – he looks slightly deformed, but mostly like one of those Mickey Rourke types whose succession of cosmetic surgeries has left him looking tragically unnatural.
Seeing one of our great offbeat movie stars in a role like this I can’t help but be reminded of Ethan Hawke’s turn as The Grabber in THE BLACK PHONE, though I found that to be a much more satisfying period-piece-serial-killer-with-supernatural-elements movie. In both cases they put some of the qualities we love about their acting into a context where it’s very skeezy and off-putting. And there’s a certain similarity to the characters, like the way they talk to children, but obviously Cage goes considerably weirder, and it’s a rare instance of his mega-powers being harnessed to create fear. I also note that he has a bit of a Hitchhiker-from-TEXAS-CHAIN-SAW-MASSACRE giggle.
Weird coincidence(?): Longlegs has a thing that amuses him for some reason where he says “cuckoo!” and does a thing with his hands over his face. This was also true of Father Mort, the hero of THE POPE’S EXORCIST! We may very well have entered the “guys who say ‘cuckoo’” era of horror.
Alicia Witt (URBAN LEGEND) plays Harker’s mom, and actually the most unsettling thing in the movie was seeing an actress I know is the same age as me playing the frumpy weirdo mother of the adult protagonist. Life comes at you fast, as they say. A witness/survivor in a mental facility is played by Kiernan Shipka (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), but I mistook her for Elsie Fisher.
The movie looks great (cinematographer: Andres Arochi; production designer: Danny Vermette, SWEET VIRGINIA), maintains a powerfully foreboding mood, has a touch of odd humor, some really great scenes and moments. I was very involved for a while. Then it started to feel like maybe it wasn’t going anywhere. Then it turned out it was going somewhere, but not a place I found particularly satisfying.
I had a somewhat similar experience with the only other Perkins joint I’ve seen, THE BLACKCOAT’S DAUGHTER. It’s certainly an unusual movie and I was intrigued for a while. A couple different storylines turn out to be connected in unexpected ways, and it started to feel like it was all coming together, but then I realized I couldn’t really follow how it was coming together, and it lost me. But I know many fans of that one so hopefully they’ll appreciate LONGLEGS more than I did.
There’s meaning here to Perkins – in reading interviews afterwards, I saw how the idea of a mother lying to her daughter relates to his own family history. And you don’t have to pick up on that specifically for it to be meaningful for you. But to me it starts to feel like those Longlegs ciphers – a bunch of symbols that I gotta take the movie’s word for it are saying something. When it lost me it started to seem like just a list of things that are supposed to be creepy: Zodiac ciphers, old home movies, old Polaroids, slide projectors, microfiche of degraded newspaper articles, crime scene photos, ‘70s style credits and typefaces, cryptic Satanic gibberish, singing “Happy Birthday” off key, an adult talking kind of childlike, hoarding, upbeat music played in a scary situation (in this case the theme from The Price Is Right), flashes of psychic visions of wriggling snakes. Most of these remind us of when we were kids and saw scary things about serial killers on the news. When you picture a serial killer, his clothes and hair are from decades ago, right?
It’s a good trick, but it stopped working for me when I started to feel there was nothing behind them. A switch flipped and they transformed from atmospheric details to empty signifiers. The name “Longlegs,” for example, might have significance (see spoiler post-script for theory), but it doesn’t seem like it does. It seems like just a “that sounds like a creepy thing to say” surrounded by a bunch of other ones. When the movie gets around to “oh yeah, but he’s not only the Zodiac, he also leaves spooky dolls” I really switched to arms-folded-skepticism mode.
The reason my brain had time to pick at these things is that LONGLEGS lacks the momentum of a true mystery. It’s just going in a straight line the whole time – he leaves behind his Riddler bullshit, she finds it, circles some things and draws a triangle or some shit, continues in the same direction. She doesn’t go down the wrong path and redirect due to new information, she doesn’t surprise and outsmart him. When she has a hunch it’s correct, when the hunch brings up a question (he must have an accomplice – who is the accomplice?) it will answer it pretty quick.
Eventually it definitively switches from (non-specific spoilers) grim crime investigation procedural to some kind of fairy tale type deal. On paper that sounds like a big swing I might like, but I couldn’t really flow with it. She’s a psychic and there ultimately turns out to be supernatural crap going on here, but for most of the movie they’re trying to ground the weirdness in some amount of verisimilitude. It always feels a little out of its league in that department, because it doesn’t have anything near the scale of a SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, but it’s going for a representation of the real world that will slowly get more and more off the beaten kilter until it ends up in Hell. I like that concept, but to me it makes too much of a leap, too late in the game, to feel natural. And the solution to the mystery is a little too, uh… Goosebumps for my tastes. Oh, that’s what was going on? Huh.
I want to give a specific example of a small thing that piles onto enough other small things to become an issue, but it’s from the end, so this and the next paragraph are the SUPER ENDING SPOILER ZONE. Harker find out that the way Longlegs gets the families to kill themselves involves an accomplice dressed as a nun knocking on their doors and saying, “Congratulations, you won a prize from the church!,” then giving them a huge box that contains a creepy life sized doll. I understand that once they open the box the doll hypnotizes them to do evil devil business or whatever the fuck, but shouldn’t the encounter before that have some vague resemblance to normal human interactions? The movie acts like “you won a prize from the church” is a sensible, everyday thing that makes sense, but I simply do not believe a series of ordinary families would smile and say “Yes, strange lady, enter my home!” without at least a few minutes of confusion and questions.
The thing is, I find Longlegs to be really scary when he’s inexplicable. Then not only do you lose the mystery but the answer to the mystery is he’s a fucking doll maker who leaves magic Satan dolls to hypnotize people. Imagine if at the end of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE we found out that Leatherface is a dollmaker who leaves magic Satan dolls to hypnotize people. Not as good in my opinion, and not just because it takes away the fear of the unknown. Let’s try SE7EN. At the end we find out who John Doe is, what he’s up to, but what he’s up to is he’s a doll maker who leaves magic Satan dolls to hypnotize people to suffer from the seven deadly sins or whatever. To me, it’s simply not a cool idea. And if I ever watch LONGLEGS again I’ll have the burden of knowing that’s what Longlegs is all about. I don’t see how he could be as scary.
This has been a harsh review, but don’t take it as a complete dismissal of LONGLEGS, which I’m sure many people here will like. It’s certainly more interesting than many low budget serial killer thrillers or religious horror movies, and if I was more fond of reading into vague symbols and puzzles without answers it might be a banger. It’s obviously worth watching for any devotee of Cage. But bring your decoder ring.
P.S.
SPOILER THEORY ABOUT WHY HE CALLS HIMSELF LONGLEGS
So, if I understand this correctly, the reason this guy signs his Zodiac-rip-off-letters “Longlegs” is because he’s trying to get the attention of the person he first encountered as a little girl in 1974, when he said something like “oh no, I have on my longlegs today” and crouched down to talk to her. And he keeps referring to his friend, “the man downstairs.” So the latter suggests that he works for someone in Hell, while the former suggests he’s used to being in a body with much shorter legs.
Do you see what I’m getting at?
Yep. Stealth SPAWN prequel. You see? And in SPAWN that clown even shows up at a child’s birthday party. That’s his whole deal, he’s obsessed with birthdays. He should just admit it to himself, become an openly birthday themed slasher, kill people using candles, a piping bag, a bouncy house, cover the bodies in wrapping paper or make them into piñatas, you know the drill.
Okay, no, it probly doesn’t make sense for him to be the clown from SPAWN. I kinda took it that he was possessed by the Devil himself. If that’s the case then my actual theory is that in his primary form in Hell the Devil is a cute little guy with stubby little legs. And then sometimes he forgets he’s in the Nicolas Cage body until something reminds him and he’s like “ah shit, that’s right, I got on the longlegs.” It’s really too bad the movie is such a hit, because I would’ve loved to see a series of LI’L LONGLEGS movies from Full Moon Video. Obviously they’d pit his dolls against Puppet Master and the Demonic Toys, but Evil Bong is the matchup I’d really look forward to.
July 22nd, 2024 at 7:49 am
I think “lost me” is a pretty apt phrase for this one, it started out nice enough but ultimately had too many ideas lifted from other, more interesting movies. “Referencing” stuff is fine, but at some point I need to see your work.
SPOILER
I thought it was pretty strange that they went to great lengths to say that the dad was the perp in every previous murder, and then she’s from the only family w/o a dad present and they just don’t follow up on that at all