Warning: minor spoilers ahead.

Arriving home after watching Longlegs, I felt nervous. It was dark and quiet in my car, and the mundane act of putting my key in the ignition, then later unlocking my cold house, made my heart race a little. I really wished someone else had been home to have some lights on for me.

Does this mean that Longlegs worked on me? Osgood Perkins’ most mainstream horror feature yet doesn’t live up to its tantalising marketing, which was all abuzz with early audiences promising that you’ll piss/shit/vomit/faint at how fundamentally cursed the film is. But I can’t deny that it got under my skin in a way too few modern horror movies achieve; only the most performatively cynical fourteen-year-old horror critic could say that Longlegs isn’t scary. And there’s a genuine thrill in witnessing something that seeks, first and foremost, to terrify us, with the tried-and-true themes of trauma and sordid homicidal tragedy demoted in priority.

Opening with a title card featuring a mysterious T. Rex lyric, and a nerve-shreddingly well-edited scare, Longlegs quickly establishes the horror references it plans to pull from and subvert, just as our heroine Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) lays out evidence before herself on a blood-red carpet. It’s a lotta David Fincher’s serial killer stories, a lotta Silence of the Lambs (1991); Monroe’s FBI rookie is a colder Clarice Starling, with mousy brunette hair and a mouth sewn into a sullen, repressed grimace. 

The titular villain has been writing cryptic, Zodiac-like letters to the cops, suggesting his link to a long string of family annihilations, and the “half-psychic” (or at least “highly intuitive”) young agent Lee is the Bureau’s only chance of finding any answers before he surely kills again. The further she digs, however, the more it appears that this detective work, undertaken with affable boss Carter (Blair Underwood), might ultimately be pretty pointless, as Perkins unveils rogue elements such as Satanic magic and evil dolls. Generously, this could be Perkins darkly murmuring about the futility of man’s laws against the Devil’s, but the loss of this narrative thrust, designed to entice true crime-drunk minds, also has a deflating effect on any gumshoe interactivity the audience might enjoy early on.

Similarly, the secretive, peekaboo nature of Nicolas Cage’s monstrous role has diminishing returns. His unhinged killer is kept at a taunting distance from us via Greg Ng and Graham Fortin’s editing, which is finely tuned to the rhythms of an agitated limbic system, while Cage is teased in profile shots and unnerving wide angles of darkened rooms with plenty of hiding spaces. I felt momentarily anxious that we were just waiting on a Buffalo Bill remix, with Longlegs’ bizarre, feminine face and propensity for bursting into vibrato song signalling something regressive and tired. Instead, Perkins and Cage (also a producer) keep their bogeyman admirably unknowable, leaving us in a mucky bath of questions about any potential Satanic Panic backstory. You never get quite used to looking at his face, true. And the actor’s unique celebrity turns out to be a neat tool, with the grinning Face/Off (1997) or Vampire’s Kiss (1988) Cage sometimes surfacing through a surgically distorted mask in moments that chill. But in the movie’s disorienting mosaic of sinister details and supernatural scheming, it winds up feeling mostly like a pale special effect which, after his climactic face-to-face interrogation scene, drains the plot of its propulsive momentum.

Of course, Lee’s grim home life inevitably surfaces in this larger schema, and some familiar religious terror tropes are cast in an interesting light with the benefit of Perkins’ own personal history. As the son of Psycho (1960) star Anthony Perkins, the director has gestured towards themes of parenthood in his lower-budgeted, female-driven horror features, like warped bedtime story Gretel & Hansel (2020) and The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), which includes an orphaned protagonist. (The latter film’s star, Kiernan Shipka, shows up here briefly as another broken child, perhaps a good luck charm of sorts for Perkins’ bigger leap into trendy genre mastery.) With Longlegs’ title suggesting the sinister bad daddies waiting within, and a few Mrs. Bates-esque mummy issues thrown in for good measure, the film is effective in reducing its viewers to a horrifyingly submissive, childlike state; all our adult sleuthing is rendered ineffective under the tyranny of parents who only want a corrupted, unholy version of what’s best for us. Sometimes Perkins conveys this through political satire, emblazoning his sets with laughably oversized portraits of Clinton and Nixon to bonk us over the head with the movie’s changing time periods. At one point, a senior FBI agent self-seriously notes that Cage can’t be arrested simply for being a Satanist because “this is the United States of America.”

The more powerful and lingering technique here is Longlegs’ use of craft to encourage the feeling that the movie is watching us back. This is implied, first, through the killer’s original victims bearing the surname ‘Camera.’ And while Lee is one of those tormented, hyper-capable final girls, equipped with a gun and ambiguous witchy abilities, she’s still left to suffer after following every rule and hint a genre-savvy viewer might shout at her. Flashbacks to family annihilations place us in a static, tripod-like paralysis, where violence is performed directly before us like personalised puppet theatre. And there’s one blinding, blaring ‘boo’ of a jump scare right in the middle of the feature, designed to feel like a traumatic memory suddenly unlocked from the forgotten recesses of our main character’s past. Just seeing this kind of imagery, the movie boasts, would be enough to ruin one’s soul.

Longlegs is at once made and cursed by the overblown hype its mysterious promo material has inspired, and there’s certainly an it’s-not-even-that-scary-bro backlash looming on the film’s horizon. Trying to receive the film beyond this, for what it is, I must admit that the patchwork plot of supernatural twists and character reveals doesn’t quite live up to what’s promised by that startling opening scene. But as an experience, and an especially jarring homage to more satisfying serial killer films of the 70s and 90s, Perkins’ scary story works. 

The tempo and tone of horror can become toothlessly comforting once you’ve seen enough James Wan or Ari Aster rip-offs, and Longlegs wins at standing out from this contemporary canon through its disturbing employment and abstraction of sound and editing choices. It’s a movie that wants to operate in your subconscious. An early scene has Lee passively responding to projections of abstract shapes and colours in some kind of psychic ability test back at the Bureau; perhaps this is Longlegs teaching us how to take in its unsettling (and sometimes unsatisfying) stimuli. Sit back and let Perkins in: he has some terrible pictures to show you.

Longlegs is now screening in Australian cinemas.

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Eliza Janssen lives in Naarm and writes about movies. A cofounder and previous editor of Rough Cut, she now contributes to The Big Issue, Flicks, and more, and worships Tubi and The Internet Archive.