Horror can be about more than gore, and jump scares when in the hands of the right person. It can use the deepest recesses of your brain against you with your own imagination, filling in the holes of what you do not see onscreen with your own dark version of events. That is what horror master Alfred Hitchcock did with the infamous shower scene in Psycho when Anthony Perkins as “Mother” is a shadowy figure stabbing in the air at Janet Lee in the shower. You never see the blade actually go inside her, but Lee’s horrific reactions are enough to sell the scene as terrifying.
Writer/director of Longlegs, Oz Perkins (the son of Anthony Perkins), must have learned a thing or two from his father and Hitchcock because Oz’s film is a psychological horror movie that is so creepy that you may just be reminded of another classic in the genre, Silence of the Lambs. Like that film, the story follows female FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), who is hot on the pursuit of a monstrously strange serial killer named Longlegs (Nicholas Cage).
Longlegs somehow gets the father of families to murder everyone and then commit suicide, all without any forensic evidence of actually being on the scene of the crime. Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) leads the investigation but is at a standstill until he brings Harker onto the case, who has an almost psychic ability for clues at times, along with her own master detective work by figuring out that the murders all coincide with a pattern of birthday dates.
“…Longlegs somehow gets the father of families to murder everyone…”
The cast of Longlegs is an all-star team that, like the original Dream Team when they banded together, is even greater than the sum of their superstar parts, becoming a Voltron-like juggernaut. Alicia Witt, as Ruth Harker, is another influential mother of horror in this film (like Oz’s dad), who is unnerved, to say the least. Cage is a living legend with versatility and natural eccentricity that others could only dream of. Still, surely insane Kobe Bryant levels of hard work have been part of the equation for success as well. It had to be to pull off an albino-looking, strange-talking creepy freak that hits just the right note so as not to go too far as to become a parody. Blair Underwood has always been underrated and shines while getting a meatier role than usual here.
Monroe is the Michael Jordan of the team by giving a stellar performance that lets the audience see and feel how this horrific hunt is eating away at her soul while she bravely keeps trudging forward, even as she’s getting personal messages from Longlegs himself. She interestingly keeps these strange notes from the killer a secret from Agent Carter, so that’s another part of the mystery to unravel. Lee’s relationship with her mother is complicated, too, and we get the answers as to why as the film progresses.
When you think of the intense killer in the loose, surreal, and dark atmosphere of a movie such as Seven, you could draw parallels to Longlegs. The closer description for me would be the aforementioned Silence of the Lambs because of the storyline but with a more satanic flair in this case. The final act did not feel as fully satisfying as the lead-up (maybe partly because I saw the twist coming), but it’s all about the journey, and this one takes you on a fulfilling and haunting ride that will last long after in your nightmares.
"…it’s all about the journey, and this one takes you on a fulfilling and haunting ride that will last long after in your nightmares."
