Well, you’re slim and you’re weak
You’ve got the teeth of the hydra upon you.”
The opening quote of Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs coming from the not so arcane texts of Marc Bolan’s glam pop hit ‘Bang a Gong (Get it On)’ ironically sets the tone of a film that few people will ever put their finger on in terms of what upset them about it. The walking nightmare aspect of Longlegs is partly because of genre familiarity but also with the way Perkins plucks the strings of the familiarity until it is ineffably strange.
“It’s sort of like a horror movie mixtape,” Osgood Perkins says, describing Longlegs. “This movie really does have kind of everything in it when it comes to the expectations of the genre.” It is indeed like a horror movie mixtape but in the spirit of the period in which it is set, it’s a mixtape that’s being played backwards before being spat out of the cassette player with the spools of tape clogging the wheels.
Split into three chapters the film begins with a section in a boxed academy ratio resembling a vintage slide. ‘The Photograph’ follows a child as she sees a wood panelled station wagon outside her house in the early 1970s. It is Oregon in January. The snow makes her home feel isolated. She walks across her front yard and a man appears. He greets the “almost birthday girl” and laughs that he has his ‘long legs on.’ Nothing about it is comfortable. The half scene face is grotesque and the voice unnerving. The frame expands and it’s now 1995 and a young FBI agent, Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is about to go on a basic door knock to find a suspect.
Lee Harker feels unreliable. She doesn’t make eye contact often. She is ‘gifted’ perhaps with a form of clairvoyance. She is an oddity. After a psychological examination slash test of precognition post a shooting that occurred on the door knock, Lee is picked up by Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) to investigate a long series of killings dating back to 1966. They are family annihilations with the father committing suicide afterwards. They have something in common. A letter or card with cryptic sigils signed by Longlegs. There is no evidence however that the Longlegs was in the house when the murders occurred. Lee is told by Carter to really look at the evidence, and she does.
Lee sees things which were missed by other agents. At first it appears it’s because she might be neurodivergent and able to find patterns where others have not. That would also explain her awkward demeanour and the manner in which she avoids eye contact, but Perkins isn’t going to give the audience the ‘real world answer’ to Lee’s behaviour. He has other things up his sleeve.
In 1995 elements of the Satanic Panic still hung over America. The Ted Gunderson (former head of the Los Angeles FBI) effect. Although not as prominent as it had been in the 1980s and on the wane. Perkins uses the tension of the era to give contemporary audiences a way to suspend their disbelief. Crime procedurals favour logical answers – delusion over possession.
In Lee Harker’s investigation the pendulum swings between madness and something supernatural. Her mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt) is a former nurse and now seemingly a hoarding shut in who asks Lee if she’s saying her prayers. After quite easily deciphering Longlegs’ code she uncovers a strange doll at the home of the Camera family – one of the sites of the murders where a child survived. Science opens the head of the all too life-like doll to find a silver sphere with ‘nothing in it,’ but which emits disturbing frequencies. Once the doll is unearthed its human counterpart, Carrie Anne Camera (Kiernan Shipka) awakes from a catatonic state she has been in since she was nine to deliver a message of her devotion to Longlegs to an increasingly unsettled Lee who has begun to understand that it is no coincidence this case has found her.
Shot with disorienting precision by Andreas Aroch, Perkins plays a long conjuring trick with the audience. From the opening seconds of the film there isn’t a moment where anything feels comfortable. Even an early and friendly visit to Carter’s home for Lee to meet his wife Anna (Carmel Avit) and their daughter Ruby (Ava Kelders) highlights how ‘separate’ to everyone Lee is. One simply can’t imagine the young woman ever having a friend or social group. Lee’s warm wood home is uncanny – the opposite of what is intended for such a structure. Ruth’s home is filled with detritus including toys and teeth. She never throws anything away and has all Lee’s things.
Even if the audience didn’t see Nicolas Cage’s Longlegs in all his disturbing glory, or have the excruciatingly violent cases ‘solved’, there is enough in Longlegs to keep the mind spinning like Perkins is the arachnid himself creating a web trapping the consciousness into his peculiar tarantism.
‘The Book of Revelation’, ‘The Nine Circles of Hell’ stories about wolves staying away from the door, mothers speaking of the blood they spilled to bring a child into the world, fathers denying their daughters are theirs, eternal sacrifice as above so it is below. The motifs Perkins embraces are recognisable; a bloody axe, abandoned barns, dolls, crucifixes, shadows half seen, memories tantalisingly just out of touch, patterns made in blood splatter or emerging from a certain date. Osgood Perkins knows what frightens people – to be pursued by evil and for it to choose children as its avatars and victims.
Longlegs fascinates as much as it repels the audience is reeled in to the depths. Like Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 1997 Cure, Johnathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs or Se7en by David Fincher the hunter vs. prey dynamic is upended. Longlegs is queasy, terrifying, and inexorable. A perpetual nightmare machine.
Director: Oz Perkins
Cast: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood
Writer: Oz Perkins
Producers: Nicolas Cage, Dave Caplan, Chris Ferguson, Dan Kagan, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones
Music: Elvis Perkins
Cinematography: Andres Arochi
Editors: Graham Fortin, Greg Ng
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