The marketing departments of film studios have no obligation to the truth, merely the hype machine. Depending on what element of a film is being sold, the marketing can be telling one of two lies. The first is an emphasis on the veracity of a film’s production, the assertion that they really went out there and shot in faraway, exotic locations, and pulled off dangerous, never-before-seen stunts without any digital enhancement. To help furnish this idea, behind-the-scenes featurettes with the cast and crew might run online and ahead of trailers in theaters, the point hammered home that all of this is real. As the YouTube channel The Movie Rabbit Hole broke down in a four-part series, there’s an increasing number of these production dispatches that are completely fabricated, with on-set evidence of green screens, wires, and guys running around in blue morph suits entirely omitted or painted out (with CGI) to maintain a paranoid studio-mandated fiction that if audiences don’t believe what they’re seeing was captured authentically, they won’t buy a ticket. The other lie is that the movie being sold is any good, or, when it comes to horror, is really really really really scary.
Longlegs, a new serial-killer thriller from director Osgood Perkins has been at the center of a marketing campaign that attests to its bone-chilling quality. It has been hailed as “the best serial killer movie since Silence of the Lambs.” Refreshingly, Longlegs cribs more from David Lynch and the Alan Wake video games than boilerplate comparisons like Se7en. Substantively, the film feels more like a would-be cult classic from the late aughts.
We can be adults here and note that statements made by critics whose praise was farmed early on by the studio for the sole purpose of sticking them in bright red letters during the teaser aren’t ever supposed to be taken seriously. Filmmaker Edgar Wright once said that he tries to never watch the trailers for a film before he goes to see it, and that attitude might have benefitted Longlegs in a different era. The movie you see is not the movie that was advertised. As it stands, it’s almost impossible for sleeper hits to exist anymore, word-of-mouth rendered inert by hyperbolic early-bird reviews and the sheer glut of viewing options. So, what to make of a movie like Longlegs?
Its writer-director, Osgood Perkins, has been making horror movies for almost a decade and none of them have been very good. His most recent, 2020’s Gretel & Hansel, was a slickly designed reimagining of the fairy tale better suited for out-of-context Tumblr GIFs posted on blogs about witches than a feature-length film. Before that, his 2016 I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House was an attempt at a more classic, gothic-flavored haunted house narrative, much praised for its atmosphere but less so its substance. In my screening of Longlegs, I heard a woman behind me whisper to her family that the director was Psycho star Anthony Perkins’s son, a relation that, upon further examination, doesn’t necessarily convey the credentials it’s supposed to. Osgood Perkins certainly inherits a lineage tied directly to one of the horror genre’s universal touchstones, but he is firmly a product of the ‘80s and ‘90s. In his favor is a genuine affinity for the aesthetic cinematic trappings of those eras.
It makes sense then that Longlegs takes place during the Clinton administration. One of the film’s best sight gags features a gigantic framed picture of Bill Clinton in an FBI agent’s office. It’s also one of Longlegs’ only tethers to the real world. At one point, the protagonist Lee Harker, played by Maika Monroe, is asked if it’s hard being a female cop, which, along with the film’s setting, the fact that Harker is an FBI agent, and the lurking presence of Nicolas Cage’s basement-dwelling, long-haired weirdo, has led to the aforementioned Silence of the Lambs comparison. There’s a serial killer counting down to some sort of ultimate showdown and most of Perkins’s setups are locked-off camera pans across meticulously appointed sets, which has earned Longlegs an erroneous comparison to Se7en when the more fitting David Fincher inspiration is Zodiac. But the comparison to Lynch is perhaps the best way to approach the film, a modern quasi-Brothers Grimm fairytale set in an undifferentiated coastal-rural town (could be New England, could be Oregon) where psychic cops exist largely unquestioned, everyone speaks in stilted, character-revealing monologues, and time passes elliptically.
Longlegs opens in Academy ratio, a square frame with rounded edges that, combined with the 35mm the film was shot on, lends an air of old-school classicism. The pre-credits scene introduces Cage’s titular character, a pale-skinned stranger with a high, trembling voice who has a penchant for little girls’ birthdays. Like the shark in Jaws, Longlegs is only seen in fleeting glimpses until the third act, a tried-and-true tease meant to emphasize the character’s mysterious, terrifying nature. Even in the opening scene, the frame cuts off the top half of his face, the rest filled with snow and Longlegs’s strange monochromatic outfit. In the director’s commentary for The Social Network, David Fincher noted that he liked the opening scene of a film to preview the mood and pace of a film. By that logic, Longlegs telegraphs far more than the film’s atmosphere. It showcases its insistent sound design, all low drones and screeching reverberations, its staid cinematography, filled with center-framed shots that almost never take on any other kind of photographic composition, and its coy editorial style. Namely, cutting away from the most interesting images as soon as possible.
Over the opening credits, the Academy ratio stretches into widescreen. The square frame will return in key flashbacks that become increasingly redundant. Jumping into the future, Harker, who displays unreliable psychic abilities, is on a small team of FBI agents trying to catch Longlegs, who has taken credit for the murder of several families even though, in each case, it was the father who actually did the killing. Harker’s superior, Agent Carter, played by Blair Underwood, acts as her charismatic foil, an easygoing, slightly brusque father figure who entertains Harker’s silence and wide-eyed, furtive glances because he sees something special in her abilities. The majority of the first half of Longlegs takes place in wood-paneled rooms where quiet conversations are conducted. Occasionally, the film will cut away to Longlegs in his basement filled with red light, sitting on a floor mattress surrounded by posters of ‘70s rock stars. But the atmosphere is, for the most part, oddly cozy.
Eventually, it becomes clear that atmosphere is Osgood Perkins’s specialty—reminder, really, if you’ve seen just one of his previous films—and that other key elements, like plotting and dialogue, are less important to him than mood. I imagine these deficits will be less troublesome to future audiences more safely removed from the hype. Indeed, a movie that’s all style and no substance isn’t a guarantee of anything, good or bad. Aesthetic strengths can make up for narrative weaknesses if what’s being shown is compelling enough. Tarsem’s The Fall comes to mind in this regard, or Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. That’s not to say either film is narratively deficient, but that their most memorable sequences are often visually striking set pieces (combining not just cinematography and costume design, but staging and editing) on which audiences can chew no matter how many times they’re seen. Movies are more than their plot summaries and it’s often this explanatory element, the spoiler or the twist, that gets foregrounded in horror as the defining feature that makes or breaks a film.
For those seeing Longlegs in the coming weeks and months, while the marketing buzz is still fresh, the caveat of “It’s a slow burn,” or “Trust me, wait until you get to that scene,” might not be enough. Certainly, Perkins has an instinct for production design, for a less frenetic, attention-splintered delivery of story and detail. The first act of Longlegs intrigues for how opaque everything seems, how the perennial stiffness of every character pushes up against the crispness of the image, how the machinations of Longlegs that we glimpse don’t quite add up with the concept that the FBI has of him, how even sudden sprays of arterial blood seem less like horrific outbursts of violence than artfully staged inevitabilities. Symbology pervades the early scenes of the film, letters written in code by Longlegs directly reminiscent of the Zodiac killer. There’s a sense that the events of the film are leading inexorably to some fateful, orchestrated end that will ask more questions than it answers. Hovering in that uncertain space, Longlegs compels for how it might frighten you through suggestion.
But Perkins is too distrusting of his audience, too skittish a filmmaker, to allow ambiguity to linger for long. This has been a defining feature of his work, as is the unfortunate realization that his films seem like the efforts of a talented first-timer rather than a director who’s been around the block. Where a thought or development might have been illustrated visually, invariably there’s an exposition dump, usually with voiceover. Where a gonzo performance might be allowed to stand on its own with some subtle but skillful editing and direction, Perkins lets the moment drag on until what could have been scary instead becomes silly (I’m inclined to believe this is also the danger of Cage’s inherent charisma, which is more powerful than any set of dramatic prosthetics and whispery voice work can stifle, thus rendering his performance more intriguing than frightening). Where a quiet and unsettling image might make audiences squirm, Perkins underlines it with the kind of needling sound design that makes jump scares out of loud, random noises. What’s most disappointing about Longlegs is that, because the audience is expecting a revelation based on a variety of flashing images sprinkled throughout the film, and because the character of Longlegs is treated as a gravity well from which no coincidence or evil deed can escape, the foreclosing of the audience’s imagination when the gambit is finally given up feels less like an “aha” moment than an instance of someone over-explaining what’s already been clearly understood, and what’s been understood isn’t that interesting.
On a practical level, there’s no utility to lamenting Longlegs’ failures. Its reputation has largely been set by critics and Perkins’s next film, an adaptation of Stephen King’s short story The Monkey, releases next February. But it’s worth questioning how much longer the mismatch between what’s being sold and what’s actually offered will be taken in good faith. Sometimes, manipulation can be fruitful when there’s no other way to convince a mass audience to see something they’d otherwise be skeptical of. Longlegs isn’t weird enough, well-crafted enough, or, crucially, scary enough to justify that tactic. Satan, dolls, magic, and the specter of a kind of demonic miasma all make appearances in a film that doesn’t necessarily know how to knit them together. In another life, Longlegs would have been uncovered as an underappreciated curiosity, not a gem, but still worth considering for how its unconventional execution flew under the radar. There’s no chance of that now. Seen in the glaring spotlight of a mainstream phenomenon, Longlegs starts to fade away.
