By Nicole Veneto

There’s more horror on the horizon, but “Longlegs” will undoubtedly stand as one of the buzziest chillers of 2024.

Longlegs, directed by Osgood Perkins. Screening at several New England theaters, including Coolidge Corner Theatre, Somerville Theatre, and Showcase Cinemas.

Maika Monroe in the presence of true evil in Longlegs. Photo: NEON

It takes a lot to get people to the cineplex these days. Now that audiences are trained to wait a few weeks for new movies to stream in the comfort of their homes, the added time and costs of visiting your local AMC for the theatrical experience no longer seem worth the trouble to many people. Even before the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023 put 2024 releases in a precarious fix, theaters were having a tough time bringing in audiences after COVID. Notably, the two biggest hits of last year, Barbie and Oppenheimer, benefited enormously from aggressive marketing, particularly the social media phenomenon that was Barbenheimer. Procuring potential viewers’ attention via hype has become critical to box office success, which is why I found NEON’s campaign for Osgood Perkins’ new film Longlegs arresting in both its omnipresence and for how it capitalizes on the True Crime craze and Analog Horror trends.

Chances are you’ve encountered some of Longlegs’ marketing. From its eye-catching posters to the ciphers featured on billboards and in Letterboxd comment sections, NEON has made daring the public to brave Longlegs in theaters its biggest priority this season. There’s a Geocities-style blog that gives you all the details of Longlegs’ victims. A trailer — in which Maika Monroe’s heartbeat races to 170 BPM upon meeting Nicolas Cage in his much teased Longlegs transformation — went semi-viral. Over the last couple of months, NEON’s touted Longlegs as the scariest movie you’ll see in 2024 — a risky move should the film fail to live up to its promises. Admittedly I found myself somewhat underwhelmed on first watch — it didn’t quite meet those sky high expectations. Still, something lingered in the days after that prompted me to go back and see it again with an audience. It took some time for Longlegs to really get under my skin. I now realize that Perkins’ latest is best experienced as a slow-burn exercise in cinematic dread, not as a tightly-plotted, scare-a-minute procedural.

Psychically-gifted FBI recruit Lee Harker (Scream Queen Maika Monroe of It Follows and Watcher) is tasked with investigating a Satanic serial killer known as Longlegs (Cage, near unrecognizable beneath grotesque prostheses), whose thirty-plus year murder-spree annihilating All-American families along Oregon’s coast has long stumped the bureau. There is a dearth of physical evidence: no signs of forced entry, no witnesses, no indication of a third party’s involvement. Only one thing links these supposed murder-suicides to the entity that calls itself Longlegs: birthday cards written in cryptic code left at each horrific crime scene. As Harker’s uncanny intuition guides her deeper and deeper into the increasingly occult case, she enters a cat-and-mouse game with Longlegs that ties back to her own upbringing by her reclusive and religiously devout mother Ruth (Worcester’s own Alicia Witt).

I’ve seen many recommend going into Longlegs as blindly as possible, yet I found the film much more rewarding on rewatch armed with the knowledge of what’s actually going on. Put as vaguely as possible, the movie is really about a (re)encounter with evil that takes a deep dive into repressed familial trauma. Longlegs — and NEON’s marketing — leans towards comparing the film to Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, but its ts dark, droning ambience is really closer to Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure. This is a “bad vibes” movie first and foremost, way more interested in cultivating an oppressive atmosphere than in unraveling a satisfying mystery. Arguably, Perkins isn’t really interested in prompting the audience to solve the plot or baiting us with twists and turns like Zach Creggar’s Barbarian. What we have here is something way more esoteric, which is why it took me a second watch to appreciate what the director was aiming for. Longlegs exploits familiar tropes (none of which I’ll name here to be relatively spoiler-free), but the sharpness in Perkins’ direction steers the story clear of the worst tendencies to be found in so-called “Elevated Horror.”

Shot by cinematographer Andres Arochi (his first feature credit no less), the film relishes changing aspect ratios and center framing, thus creating a compelling sense of offscreen menace. The camera frequently trails Monroe like a malevolent specter — it seems ready to clasp a cold hand around her shoulder. Subsequent rewatch illuminates why this is, and the reasons supply valuable context to the unerring emotional detachment Lee has towards her work. It was an iciness that I initially mistook for thin characterization. Though he’s the titular character, Cage’s Longlegs is used sparingly, which might be a merit, given how over-the-top the performance is. More dosage would have made it a candidate for one of those “Top Ten Nic Cage Freakouts” compilations. With his stringy white mane, pallid skin, and bloated brow, Longlegs resembles an aged glam rocker who’s gone under the knife a few too many times — a visage that becomes especially frightening when seen through a VHS recording of his manic interrogation. But it’s Witt’s Ruth Harker who comes away as the ensemble’s dark horse, but to say anymore about her character would give away the game. Her performance here possibly surpasses Cage’s; she’s long overdue for critical attention given her career began playing tiny terror Alia the Knife in David Lynch’s Dune.

Even though I needed another go at Longlegs to really understand and appreciate what Perkins crafted, NEON’s marketing campaign has clearly paid off in spades: it opened this past weekend to over $22 million dollars, making it not just the biggest opening for a NEON release, but one of the most lucrative openings for an independent horror movie in the last ten years. Clearly there’s more to Oz Perkins than the horror legacy he’s inherited from his father Anthony (or as co-star to Gary Busey wearing a dog collar in Quigley). Longlegs is by far his most assured effort after he broke through with 2015’s The Blackcoat’s Daughter and then stumbled with his defanged PG-13 take on Gretel & Hansel in 2020. There’s more horror on the horizon, but Longlegs will undoubtedly stand as one of the buzziest chillers of 2024.

Nicole Veneto graduated from Brandeis University with an MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, concentrating on feminist media studies. Her writing has been featured in MAI Feminism & Visual Culture, Film Matters Magazine, and Boston University’s Hoochie Reader. She’s the co-host of the podcast Marvelous! Or, the Death of Cinema. You can follow her on Letterboxd and her podcast on Twitter @MarvelousDeath.