Is ‘Longlegs’ Really the Scariest Movie of the Year?

Is ‘Longlegs’ Streaming On Netflix Or Prime Video?

Back in the ’90s, when horror was in a disreputable, post-slasher hangover, studios found new and superficially classier ways of bringing the genre into theaters, with the help of ever-industrious serial killers. Movies like The Silence of the Lambs and Seven weren’t always described as horror – they were dramatic thrillers, especially if, like Lambs , they made it all the way to the Academy Awards. Even if the movies were more Copycat or Fallen than award-winners, they had cops or FBI agents as lead characters, played by bona fide movie stars; that obviously wasn’t horror. Horror movies had masked killers picking off teenagers, or maybe monsters stalking the night. Scary as Anthony Hopkins or Kevin Spacey were, their chatty, menacing intelligence was from a different world than the hulking likes of Michael Meyers or Jason Voorhees.

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Longlegs , a new horror movie from Oz Perkins, takes place in the ’90s. There are no smartphones. Bill Clinton’s picture hands dead-center of frame on the wall of a law-enforcement office. Presumably, writer-director Osgood Perkins has set the film in the heyday of big-studio serial-killer thrillers so that he can yank the subgenre back into the realm of pure horror. On paper, it’s a Silence of the Lambs knockoff, and not even an especially exacting one: Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a young FBI agent, is on the hunt for an elusive killer who calls himself Longlegs (played, though not immediately recognizable in his fleeting appearances, by Nicolas Cage). There are traces of Zodiac (ciphers), True Detective (occult-y overtones), and other stuff not quite classified as traditional horror.

Yet Longlegs doesn’t really make sense as a crime movie, which most of these movies and shows do. There is something pervasively and chillingly off about the whole thing; it’s as if you taped a ’90s serial killer thriller onto the VHS from The Ring . There’s a risk of oversell in describing horror movies as particularly scary, intense, unusual, or fucked up, and Longlegs hype may have crossed that line for horror geeks weeks ago. But I can only report what I saw: an unsettling movie that uses its structural familiarity as a weapon. Perkins has a way of finding camera angles that look straightforward, observing his subjects clearly and sometimes symmetrically, but hover just askew enough to look like a dream, or maybe the perspective of an invisible third party. It’s meticulous, but not quite slick enough to feel like just another cop thriller.

The truest and most immediate key to the movie’s effectiveness, though, may be its casting. Maika Monroe is not where Jodie Foster, Holly Hunter, or Angelia Jolie were when they did their own killer-hunting. Aside from a role in the ill-fated (and, notably, ’90s-refugee) Independence Day sequel, Monroe hasn’t really been a big part of mainstream Hollywood. She’s more of an arthouse scream queen; even the horror movie where she plays a teenage victim is It Follows , an unusually moody, witty, and striking supernatural horror movie about a sexually transmitted ghost-stalker. She’s also been the de-facto final girl in the propulsive thriller The Guest , the domestic-strife stalker horror movie Watcher , and the uneasy sci-fi relationship nightmare Significant Other . She looks like a sunny California blonde, but she carries with her an undercurrent of dissatisfaction and unease. Her presence in a normal movie-star role here serves as a signal that scarier, weirder stuff is on the table.

What that stuff is, I won’t spoil. But it does involve Cage, pitching his voice and potentially silly as Lee’s quarry, who seems to be broadcasting on a different frequency, somewhere on a dial between the loquaciousness of a movie-star genius-killer and the less communicative utterances of more conventional movie monsters. Cage was at his movie-star peak around the time that serial killer thrillers were such regular fixtures at the local multiplex, and he’s hunted some in his direct-to-video career, too. It won’t surprise anyone to learn that he delivers an unhinged turn here. What’s more unnerving is the elusiveness of his typically rococo performance. He’s not exactly opposite Monroe – the two don’t share that many scenes – so much as shadowing, threatening to engulf her.

Longlegs isn’t exactly fueled by a power imbalance, even though Cage is vastly more famous than Monroe. It’s more imagining an alternate world where serial killings aren’t “fun” entertainment fodder (though the movie is very entertaining), but material for genuine horror, something unknowable and more remote. The movie achieves the kind of desolate chill that all of the True Detective seasons seem to have been aiming for, in some way or another, before backing off in favor of character studies and more quotidian explanations.

Does Longlegs ultimately mean much more than a scary time at the movies? I’m not sure. The lack of an easy-to-track metaphor is part of what makes the movie so engrossing. It provides no easy moment for the viewer to say: Ah, I see what they’re doing here. It puts the audience alongside Lee Harker, even though she (as played by Monroe) seems a tiny bit more prepared for whatever she finds than we are, even when it should shock her more. Somewhere, in the back of her mind, she seems to sense that unspeakable horror is possible. (That’s literalized early in the movie, as she senses the presence of another killer who she should have no way of detecting.) Even if Longlegs ultimately has little else to unpack, it’s an expert deconstruction of a familiar subgenre that also manages to out-scare its predecessors. It feels like the secret backwards recording underneath a bunch of ’90s basic-cable favorites.

Jesse Hassenger ( @rockmarooned ) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com , too.

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