Now that we’ve retired the idea of “elevated horror” – a popular expression in the early 10’s, when exciting filmmakers started excelling within the genre – what to make of a film like Longlegs? Released by Neon, the latest horror movie hit is getting painted with an arthouse brush. Produced by Nicolas Cage, the film also stars Cage as the grotesque villain, a man in cake make-up who worships the devil and listens to glam rock. He’s the main suspect in a string of vicious murders, but there’s no physical evidence that he’s responsible. The film is written and direct by Oz Perkins, the son of another horror movie legend, Psycho actor Anthony Perkins. One thing you can’t argue is that Longlegs is competently made – with a precise framing that lends every shot a heavy sense of menace.

The maturity in the direction suggests that the movie wants to give you more than cheap thrills, that it aspires to pierce itself into you. There are direct, explicit allusions to other classic serial killer suspense films; particularly Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs and David Fincher’s Zodiac. Those two movies are masterpieces of the genre, and make pains to truly frighten you with the horrifying realization that humanity is capable of tremendous monstrosities. Longlegs flops against direct comparison to those two, and while a direct comparison may feel unfair, it’s the movie itself that brings it up. If you’ve never seen those earlier movies, you’ll likely witness one of the greatest horror movies in the last ten years; but if you have it’s hard to ignore all the ways in which it falls short.

Maika Monroe plays Lee Harker, a young FBI agent whose skill in the field catches the eye of Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), who decides to bring her onto a cold case involving a killer named Longlegs. All of the murders come equipped with a coded letter, signed by Longlegs. They also all involve a father brutally murdering his family – in many cases butchering them beyond recognition – before committing suicide. So you see the problem: there’s no evidence that a third party is performing these murders, other than the signed letters. The Feds understand there’s a pattern, but they can’t quite crack it. While Lee studies the case, buried memories begin to arise, and she begins to fear that she may be closer to the case than she initially realized. Her mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt), lives alone, hoarding junk over decades. Ruth advises Lee to say her prayers, advice that may come in handy against Longlegs’s Satanist rhetoric.

There isn’t much to the story here. The first two-thirds of the script unfold with the audience knowing there is information missing. As you wait for the other shoe to drop, Perkins gives us intense, disturbing sequences that further obscure what we think we know about the case and its principals. This includes scenes where we see Cage’s Longlegs in his dank basement home, traveling in his car, visiting a hardware store. His ultra-conspicuous look causes many to avoid him and not dig into his violent tendencies. The dots don’t always connect so cleanly, and it’s telling that the final act involves a lot of explanation. Most disappointing is the inevitable introduction of the supernatural, a dash of hack work that smears the movie’s well-earned creepiness with a cheap quality that it can’t really shake.

This movie is looks amazing. Perkins and his cinematographer, Andrès Arcohi, have a perfect understanding of what can make a shot scary. I wish the movie had a better understanding of what made a story scary. “The devil made me do it” simply isn’t a satisfying conclusion. Monroe, Cage, and Underwood each serve their roles well, and Perkins has given us proof that he can make a genuinely tense suspense film. I’d like to think that a movie like this doesn’t need to pull outside of the realm of reality to pull off its greatest tricks, but I’m not much of a student of this genre. Silence of the Lambs and another David Fincher masterpiece, Se7en, fight against the constraints of audience expectation. Neon is selling Longlegs as a movie that does something similar, but that simply isn’t the case.

 

Written and Directed by Oz Perkins