It’s mid-July, so you know what that means: Time for the annual release of “The Scariest Movie Ever,” which has had diminishing returns ever since it became a modern-day staple of the release calendar. Sure, this is just marketing – it’s hard to grab someone and say, “You should check out our new movie, which is more like a bird’s eye chili to the Carolina Reaper-like pain that a movie like The Exorcist or Paranormal Activity or Spoorloos will put you through because… uh, it’s a good time?” But the truth is, like the Scoville scale (I’m assuming people have watched enough Hot Ones at this point to know that this is a chemical evaluation of spiciness in peppers and hot sauces and such, but if you haven’t, well, you now have added context to the metaphor I’m working towards), people have different tolerances for the level of scares in their horror pictures. Plenty of people love a jump scare and aren’t bothered by them, but I couldn’t stand them until a viewing of Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell back in 2009 got me seasoned enough to appreciate that they were, in fact, fun. Likewise, those same people who might like (or, at the very least, aren’t bothered by) getting shook out of their shoes by a Dolby Digital-assisted Lewton Bus may really not like creepy pictures, and others, like me, might not be bothered by a tense and dreadful vibe. That latter category is for whom Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs will reach Pepper X territory: There’s a haunted, dreadful tone that permeates every frame, from Nicolas Cage’s ghastly make-up to Maika Monroe’s weathered features to the arch construction of every shot that emphasizes what seems to be negative space – until you realize there’s an open door sitting in the back of the frame, and your attention gets drawn there, just in case something emerges from it.
But I’d argue that, even for Perkins’ “elevated” horror bona fides, there’s a bizarro sense of humor – a goofy, self-aware one – that isn’t stitched post-hoc onto the feature by Redditors in search of substance as they do with the stylish-yet-banal work that some of Perkins’ contemporaries have passed off as “a-r-t.” For Christ’s sake, the movie opens with a lengthy on-screen quote from T.Rex’s “Bang a Gong (Get it On)” – he doesn’t wait until the credits to hit you with a mid-century pop tune as an ironic twist of the knife, it is out in the open from the first frames that this Longlegs will have its tongue partially placed in its cheek. How could it not, being a story about Lee Harker (Monroe), an FBI agent who may or may not be psychic, investigating a series of satanic family annihilations that look like they were staged without the actual killer – a genuinely weird basement-dwelling Bolan-obsessed creature born with pale white skin and facial features that are the stuff of the Mask make-up department’s nightmares that goes by the name “Longlegs” (Cage) – being on-site to pull the trigger or wield the fatal hatchet. Harker had an encounter with the killer as a child when he showed up in his wood-paneled station wagon at her pastoral and snow-covered home and did a little memorable razzle-dazzle before her mother (Alicia Witt) intervened. The experience vaguely pushed her to join law enforcement (or perhaps something else did?). The psychic business comes up when some strange force moves her to investigate a mild-mannered suburban house, and she discovers the voice is pretty accurate given that her partner, incredulously humoring her hunch, got his forehead hole-punched by a .45 round. The man knows little. He’s not the killer; this man is his unwilling and unwitting tool.
Such begins a cat-and-mouse game between the two, although it’s always in question who the tabby and the rodent are in this scenario. Longlegs begins to steer Harker towards the answers she seeks after her superior (Blair Underwood), a family man who is warm and friendly in all the ways that Harker isn’t, assigns her to crack the killer’s ciphers – a bit of ‘70s Zodiac mysticism – based on her presumed psychic ability. She did get half of the answers on the Bureau’s ESP tests right, after all, and as he says, “it’s better to have a half-psychic than a no-psychic” when dealing with seemingly impossible-to-solve murders like this. Harker had her encounter with Longlegs in the ‘70s, and over the next twenty years, the FBI has had little luck understanding any of it, from the mechanics of the killings to the cryptography to the motives. So, the first break happens in the ‘90s, when Harker gets a bizarre letter from the killer, essentially providing them with a key to his cryptic messages, and everything begins to unravel from there. It turns out Harker was of the killer’s preferred type: a girl, right on the cusp of her ninth birthday, who was born on the fourteenth day of the month. From there, the puzzle slowly begins to assemble itself, potentially providing true-crime nerds with the answer to a burning hypothetical – “what if the Zodiac Killer was a Randall Flagg-style powerful mystic?” Strike up the organ and oscillator, and call Blixa Bargeld, Nick, because it’s a perfect time to strike up the Bad Seeds for a “Red Right Hand” reunion.
What’s incredible about Longlegs is how Perkins can string this patently ridiculous story into an effectively creepy and cohesive work. He successfully applies his visual artistry and tonal mastery as a grounding agent even as the picture careens into a heady unreality unbothered by the pedantic wails of literal-minded audience members. His works have always been technically brilliant – one only needs to look at frames from The Blackcoat’s Daughter or the vastly underrated Hansel and Gretel for proof of what the man can do with a crew and a camera, even on a limited budget – and this feels like his major-label debut, even if it’s seemingly a step away from the studio system. His framing is impeccable, with the previously-cited use of negative space being a primary feature, but his understanding of color, with the occasional Panos Cosmatos-like burst of deep reds emerging from the ether to annihilate the duller tones of the American countryside. His characters are also a substantial part of the aesthetic landscape, particularly Cage, whose make-up job is properly discomfiting. Even though he’s got leading-man looks and usually turns in brilliant performances regardless of the overall quality of whatever film he’s in, Cage truly gets on another level when he’s as much a part of the scenery as the set-dressing. Mandy is an obvious citation in that category, but even his gutter-level DTV work has an aspect of that to it – a prosthetic nose enabled him to make some genuinely astonishing choices in a shitty movie like Arsenal, which I’ve cited in my discussions of his work before – and Longlegs is a chance to see him fully immersed in an otherworldly character. It is an exceptionally creepy performance, assisted by that uncanny valley make-up, while Cage, predictably, swings for the fences underneath it, highlighting this bizarre man’s connections to what may be a vast and terrifying realm beyond our comprehension.
Suppose anything comes close to the “scariest movie ever” branding. In that case, it’s the scene in which Monroe and Cage finally meet face-to-face, which has taken an outsized role in the movie’s marketing as of recently, and for a good reason: It is tense, it is weird, and most importantly, it is gory as fuck. For a visual stylist, Perkins is astonishingly good at knowing when just to let his performers work, framed in medium close-up, like a bit in which Harker visits the only survivor of one of Longlegs’ killings, a formerly-catatonic girl (Kiernan Shipka) who emerged from her state as soon as the killer visited her and has plenty of truly disturbing shit to say to the FBI agent. This is true of many “elevated horror” movies – when they stop trying to impress you and just let their actors work, they can find something truly memorable, like the Toni Collette dinner monologue in Hereditary or the son’s death scene in The Witch (a great movie that doesn’t deserve the EH moniker, but an example nonetheless) – but the difference comes in how they recover once that highlight-reel segment is over. Longlegs keeps you going all the way up until the end, teasing more details, hinting at darker possibilities, and engaging with Monroe’s haunted performance and Cage’s theatrics, but it does so in a way that prioritizes the viewer’s entertainment rather than clumsily stabbing at headier topics like a well-read freshman. And when you get that ironic needle drop at the end, it doesn’t serve as a denouncement – instead, it just restates the thesis, regardless of whether or not you think it’s the scariest movie of the summer or the year or of all time. Perkins cares that you enjoyed the spice (and that those who can’t tolerate the heat had a glass of milk nearby), a kind of courtesy often neglected in the genre’s war with its identity as art or entertainment. That’s for the viewer to decide, after all.