Most horror movies want their audiences to feel like they’re descending into hell. Most horror movies also can’t pull this off with their stories, relying on jump scares to generate as much unnerviness as possible. Only the rare horror film can pull off pervasive evil without really resorting to any cheap ploys. But if you’re gonna try, get a great director like say, Osgood Perkins; the coolest scream queen working today, Maika Monroe; and get Nicholas Cage to play a character called Longlegs. That’s certainly a recipe for movie perversion I can f*ck with.
After a deeply unsettling, Jaws like introduction to Longlegs (Nicholas Cage), we enter the FBI training in the mid 90s. Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) shows preternatural ability to find needle in a haystack suspects. As such, she’s put onto the Longlegs case, run by Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), the most puzzling, opaque serial killer that’s evaded the FBI for 20 years now. Maika’s seeming clairvoyance starts finding patterns in the killer’s behaviors….but almost as soon as she discovers those patterns, new killings start to happen.
In the best ways, Longlegs should remind you of David Fincher’s Se7en. What made that film so successful was the feeling that you were living in a world devoid of goodness: everything around you was malevolent, sucking any hope out of the world. Osgood Perkins crafts a world just like that one in Longlegs. The murders that happen are so brutal and intimate they wash the film in sin, and leave this itch on your body that you can’t scratch away. Longlegs’s big plan feels directly concocted by Satan himself, meaning when Lee eventually confronts this person, she feels like she’s meeting the devil. On top of all that, there’s these chilling investigations of terrifying places: a barn solely lit by flashlights, hoarder housing with unnerving clutter. Hell even Lee’s apartment feels like a house I’ve watched 5-6 horror movies set in already. Nowhere feels safe, which is what makes Longlegs so effective, and is causing people to leave the theater, anxiety ridden filled with nightmare fuel.
The other big piece of Longlegs’s puzzle is its crazy cast. You know what’s better than just Nick Cage in a horror movie? Nick Cage with gnarly character makeup. We’ve got Kiernan Shipka, a Perkins collaborator, chilling everyone with her stripped down transformation that you barely recognize her. Blair Underwood seems nice but has those looks that feel like they’re hiding a well of menace underneath. But the real MVP is the relatively unknown Alicia Witt, playing Lee’s mother Ruth Harker. I suppose if you’re Osgood Perkins and you need to cast one of the most chilling mothers in a movie, you pick a David Lynch player. The more we get to know Ruth, the more sinister she slowly becomes, stealing the movie from all the other great actors mentioned here. And then there’s Maika Monroe, holding the film together. Longlegs shows some of Monroe’s range; yes, she can scream with the best of em, but her Lee Harker is a very insular, emotionally stunted girl. No matter what happens, Lee never goes below a 4 or above a 6 on the emotional 1-10 scale, meaning her 6 is like a 1000 and a 4 is like a -1000. Even though she’s clearly the level head surrounded by evil and crazy, Monroe makes us invest in Lee’s pursuits, and how personal this case becomes to her as she becomes more invested in bringing Longlegs to justice.
Longlegs was so immersive to watch, that when I left the theater, I found myself just inherently a little more twitchy and jumpy, still stuck in the world of bad Osgood Perkins created. And what more could you ask of a great horror flick? Well, maybe Bart Simpson’s perpetual ask I guess. Hey, didn’t Nic Cage play Dracula recently? Nice, Longlegs has everything!