Atmospheric and creepy, Longlegs lived up to its reputation for me.
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If you look at the top grossing movies of 2024 you'll see a lot of the usual suspects. Like quite literally a bunch of movies or kinds of movies we've seen before. We've got sequels to movies from the eighties, from the nineties, from a franchise that started in 1979, from another franchise that started in 1968. from a franchise that started in Japan in 1954. But just outside the top twenty, amongst a bunch of movies that easily cost $100 million to make, if not far far more, there's...an original horror movie called Longlegs that steadily earned over the course of the entire summer to make almost ten times its budget back. And while that's a great win for original ideas, horror movies, and especially indie darling Neon, you might wonder...what is it about this movie that kept people coming back? I've finally seen it, and I think I get it.
The Setup
Maika Monroe plays Lee Harker (far too close to Harper Lee's name for my taste, but that's besides the point), an up and coming FBI agent with startlingly good instincts. After her latest assignment went sideways, not her fault, Harker is tasked with solving a series of gruesome familicide that have been carried out over the course of multiple decades with the same calling card. A note from a killer named Longlegs. But as Harker dives into the killer's past crimes, she quickly discovers that her life, and this killer's past, may have already intersected....
One of the things I love about the explosion of horror movies in recent memory is that more and more films within the genre as looking to capture a feeling. A vibe. A sense of looming dread that's very personal to the lead character, and as such, very personal to the audience. And that's what Longlegs banks on really hard, and in my opinion, with great success.
The main hook is that our killer Longlegs isn't the perpetrator of these violent crimes. He appears to be the instigator. The one who shows up to revel in the aftermath or deliver a dark message. So the question hanging over the movie is...how? How does the killer do this? This is the question that moves the entire movie and dunks every scene and small reveal in dread.
If you have a scene or segment where Lee is trying to break the killer's code and find out what message Longlegs is trying to convey, that's already ominous because for all we know this is how Longlegs infects his victims and perpetrators with his message.
We also get fragments from Lee's past, including images of Longlegs from when she was a child, that only adds to the mystery of Longlegs motivations and how he operates. That's a great narrative thrust, and the lingering paranoia is something that genre fave Maika Monroe can play in her sleep at this point. Something that only gets stronger where you hear how people within Longlegs orbit behave or what they say.
Admittedly the movie falls into the horror/procedural type of fiction that ruled the 90s. Hell the movie is even set during the 90s. So it does need some stuff to make it stand out.
The things that make it stand out are Nicolas Cage's Longlegs and writer/director Osgood Perkins penchant for sitting in discomfort.
Longlegs
One of the best things I can say about any horror movie villain is...I expect to see a bunch of costumes this year. When you have Nicolas Cage as your villain, it can be a giant benefit and potentially a limitation to your movie, especially if he's the villain. He has a hyper-specific energy as a performer, that can be creepy for reasons we'll address later, but visually you're always kinda like "ha, that's Nic Cage."
So to add to this air of "something really wrong is about to happen" Perkins and company have made Cage look like a decaying doll or clown. He's covered in pale white makeup with prosthetics making his face look less angular and much older and stranger looking. Visually oft-putting from the jump.
And in a move, I'm surprised more directors don't do, Perkins doesn't ask Cage to go gonzo. He clearly directed him to be quiet. To say lines really quietly with an air of malice. It's the difference between a villain putting his hand behind a young girl's ear and saying "beautiful girl" (already panic inducing) and hearing a raspy whisper do the same thing while saying "My precious Lee...I've been waiting." Ew creepy. No thank you. Kill it with fire. In a good way of course.
Shot Length/Editing
A lot of discussion has already been made about this movie's use of different aspect ratios or how the image fits in the screen. Notably the film opens with flashback to Lee's childhood that's displayed in a 4:3 aspect ratio to fulfill the moment's sense of memory and nostalgia.
What I find infinitely more interesting is how Osgood Perkins uses longer shots and editing to contribute to the atmosphere.
There are two extremes that horror directors tend to implement. The first is frenetic camera work with quick edits to capture the chaotic feeling of what's happening. The good version of this is someone like James Wan, who loves to move his camera around, always in a motivated way that's easy to follow, and distracts or reel the audience in as needed.
The second are the static shot folks that like to follow a single character or stay situation in a single room to let the terror of the situation reveal itself with a quick arrival (classic jump scare).
Perkins is closer to the second, but in a slightly different way.
For instance, in one of the flashback sequences (showing how a family apparently went insane), the camera holds in a single doorframe inside the house. It gives a relatively clean line of sight throughout the house and we can see members of the family moving around it. But as people enter and leave the frame, we get more and more horrifying pieces of information. We see someone come in and now dad's unhappy. And then the person who came in appears to be terrified and that's a weapon...and then blood spurts into the frame before a character finally moves directly towards the camera. It's a slow burn in a single shot that's made more terrifying by what we don't get to see. That's the advantage of a static shot like that.
Perkins also loves to edit...just when you think the tension of a particular scene and image is going to be resolved. So if Lee is in her house and she hears something. We get quick edits to the doorway. To outside the house. All shots that linger just enough to make you think...something has to be there right? And then we cut to the next day. Fun stuff.
The Verdict: Murderous Moody (In A Good Way!)
Atmospheric and creepy, Longlegs lived up to its reputation for me. 8/10
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