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[COLUMN] Longlegs Understands There Are Some Things Scarier Than Serial Killers | by Darren Mooney
🕑 Added 2024-07-15 14:00:16 +0000 UTC
Note: This piece contains spoilers for Longlegs. It’s very good. And if you want to see it, I recommend doing so blind. So feel free to bookmark this essay and come back after you’ve had a chance to see it. ᘰ — — ∴ L ⏁ ᘰLL⊥
Oz Perkins’ Longlegs is an interesting slice of nostalgia.
This is true in a literal sense. The bulk of the film unfolds against the backdrop of the 1990s. In the office of FBI Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), a photograph of Bill Clinton sits in the center of Perkins’ symmetrical composition, looking down on the characters within the shot like some benign deity. It’s tempting to write this off as a pragmatic choice, as a writer and director deciding to amplify the tension within their thriller by setting in an era before mobile phones and widespread internet use.
However, Perkins’ choice of setting feels more deliberate. There is a deeper nostalgia permeating Longlegs. Although much has been made of how Longlegs is “the scariest movie of the year”, the film exists in the same liminal space at the edge of the horror genre as The Silence of the Lambs. Indeed, Longlegs is set in 1993, the year after The Silence of the Lambs made history by becoming the first horror film to win the Best Picture Oscar – even if its status as a horror film is still contested.
The Silence of the Lambs tells the story of young FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), who is recruited by Special Agent Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) to help identify serial killer “Buffalo Bill” (Ted Levine). The basic premise of Longlegs owes a lot to The Silence of the Lambs, with recent Academy graduate Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) drafted by Carter to track a killer known as “Longlegs” (Nicolas Cage).
The Silence of the Lambs was based on a novel by Thomas Harris, who had already codified the modern forensic thriller with Red Dragon. As James Ellroy argued, Red Dragon “spawned an entire subgenre.” In that novel, profiler Will Graham is recruited to track down a killer known as “the Tooth Fairy”, who is killing entire families. He does this using a form of intuition that is uncanny and uncomfortable. It is as though Graham is able to place himself within the minds of these monsters.
Longlegs also owes a great deal to Red Dragon. Like Graham, Harker also has a sort of “heightened intuition” that allows her to sense down evil. This intuition is suggested to be supernatural in nature, and she scores an impressive 50% on the Bureau’s test for such things. When Harker points out that this means she also got half of the answers wrong, Carter opines, “Half-psychic is better than no psychic.” Carter recruits Harker to investigate a series of family slayings.
While Longlegs is explicitly supernatural in its framing, pop culture has rarely approached serial killers in a strictly rational manner. While Thomas Harris was famously obsessed with the finer details of real-life procedure and psychology, his books had decidedly occult sensibilities. In Red Dragon, the killer Francis Dolarhyde is convinced that he is possessed by the Beast as illustrated by the prophet William Blake.
John Baillieul argues “that Thomas Harris is to contemporary gothic fiction what Bram Stoker was to gothic fiction in the nineteenth century.” Indeed, Harris’ novels often read like classic monster stories where the vampires and werewolves have been replaced with horrors much more relatable to contemporary audiences. There is something poetic in this. After all, there is a popular belief that many myths about vampires and werewolves were just early accounts of human serial killers.
This makes sense. It is difficult to imagine what impulses and urges might drive a person who could do such horrific things. It is better to think of the psychology of such individuals as monstrous and alien, existing beyond the confines of rational thought or human empathy. Serial killers are, by their nature, fundamentally irrational actors. Their existence is a reminder that the larger world can be random and arbitrary, subject to rules and whims that are unrecognizable to most human beings.
This is perhaps why the serial killer became such a dominant cultural force in the second half of the twentieth century, what Professor Harold Schechter described as “the golden age of the serial killer.” The precise boundaries of that era are hazily defined, shifting depending on the metric employed. In terms of the actual real-life crimes, the number of serial murders began climbing in the late 1960s and peaked in the 1980s. In reality, the number of serial killers has declined sharply since the 1980s.
However, if one separates the “serial killer” genre from the “slasher” genre, pop cultural fascination with serial killers really only kicked into high gear during the 1990s, prompted by the success of The Silence of the Lambs. This led to a spate of movies serial killers: Natural Born Killers, Single White Female, Copycat, Kiss the Girls, se7en, Fallen, The Bone Collector, In Dreams, The Cell and countless more. Serial killers even came to prime time, with shows like Millennium or Profiler.
However, the popularity of the serial killer dropped significantly in the twenty-first century. These sorts of movies became a lot rarer. Pointedly, most of the modern movies about serial killers – including Longlegs and A Walk Among the Tombstones – are explicitly period pieces. Perhaps replaced by the specter of terrorism or mass shooters, the serial rescinded from the popular consciousness. Culturally, the serial killer was never as dominant as it had been during the 1990s.
Perhaps the serial killer spoke to something about that particular cultural moment. After all, the 1990s were – for Americans, at least – a time of relative peace and prosperity. It was “the end of history.” The Cold War had been won. There were no external threats. As such, the threat of random and inexplicable violence perpetrated by individuals with alien motives was especially unsettling. “Et in Arcadia ego,” to get pretentious; even in paradise, there is death.
Indeed, this anxiety might explain why the serial killer is so often intertwined with religious iconography and language. In se7en, John Doe (Kevin Spacey) murders his victims to make a statement about the ubiquity of sin in the modern world. In Fallen, Detective John Hobbes (Denzel Washington) discovers that he is hunting a literal demon, Azazel. As Millennium progressed through its three seasons, Frank Black (Lance Hendrickson) found himself fighting in a proxy war between heaven and hell.
Longlegs is firmly rooted in that tradition. Longlegs works for an entity that he describes as “Mister Downstairs.” Smuggled into family homes in a life-sized doll, this demonic force drives the family patriarch to murder their wife and their children before taking their own lives. Whenever Lee calls her mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) over the course of the film, Ruth asks her daughter, “Do you still say your prayers?” It’s clear that there are forces at work beyond human comprehension.
Part of what makes Longlegs so effective is that it understands the fear that underpins the classic serial killer story. These are narratives about characters attempting to impose order on a universe that they fear is inescapably irrational. Harker and Carter are seeking explanations for events that are perhaps inexplicable. When they find a silver ball tucked inside the head of one of the dolls – which the forensics technician names “the brain” – they are shocked to discover that it’s empty.
In fact, Longlegs ultimately circles back to an idea that is perhaps even much more unsettling than the threat of random violence from a complete stranger. The movie is built around the fear that the home might ultimately be the site of violence. After all, the 1990s were the decade of “stranger danger”, with media messaging warning families about the threats from outside the family unit. The opening scene captures this fear beautifully, with Longlegs approaching a young Lee (Lauren Acala).
However, the statistics argue that the reality is more complicated than a simple catchphrase: victims are more likely to be killed by an acquaintance than a stranger, more than half of female victims were killed by intimate partners or relatives, children are most likely to be abducted by a parent and abused by relatives, neighbors or acquaintances. While it is terrifying to imagine that there are monstrous strangers out there capable of such acts, it’s even worse to imagine a friend or relative.
The FBI are perplexed by Longlegs because the crimes themselves are committed by family members upon family members, by parents upon children. This is a gross and horrific violation of the sanctity of the family home, tapping into the same underlying fear that drives movies like The Shining: what if the person sworn to protect you was actually the greatest threat to you? In such a context, it would be comforting to find some sinister outside force at work, some demon pulling the strings.
Longlegs ultimately becomes a weirdly intimate horror story. Lee discovers that Longlegs has an accomplice: Lee’s mother, Ruth. Longlegs targeted Lee as a child, and Ruth made a deal with the devil to save her daughter. To prevent “Mr. Downstairs” from taking Lee, Ruth agreed to carry the dolls into the households of the demon’s intended victims, dressing as a nun and claiming to deliver a prize from a church raffle. Ruth then had to watch the violence unfold, witness the brutal murders.
In this way, Longlegs becomes something very similar to Hereditary, a horror movie about the horrendous secrets within the family home. Ruth lied to Lee, in the hopes of keeping her safe. Lee repressed the memories of Longlegs. Like the original Nightmare on Elm Street, it’s possible to read Longlegs as a cautionary parable about the compromises that parents make in the hopes of assuring their children a better life, and how those deeds poison the lives that they are intended to protect.
This is an important piece of context that helps explain the movie’s setting. Oz Perkins is the son of actor Anthony Perkins, best known for playing Norman Bates in Psycho. Anthony was a closeted gay man, and he died of AIDS in September 1992. His wife, Berry Berenson, lied to her children about their father’s orientation. Even in the immediate aftermath of Anthony’s death, Berenson refused to talk about how he contracted the disease, stating, “No. We don't really know. No. It's not worth it.”
Her son, Oz, acknowledges that this long-hidden family secret informs Longlegs. “My father was a gay man who was closeted, and in the world that we lived in, it wasn’t acceptable,” he explained to IndieWire. “And it still isn’t, as insane as that is. My mother made this decision that that wasn’t going to be true for our family.” For Oz Perkins, Longlegs is about a very simple idea: “A mother can lie, and she can lie out of love.”
Longlegs is evocative of many of the serial killer films of the 1990s. However, it’s ultimately about some darker secrets buried closer to home.
Comments
Darren Mooney
Not at all! Mileage varies and doctors differ. I found myelf vibing with it a great deal more than you did - the only point that I'd really contest is Cage and Underwood, I thought both were very much in tune with the material itself, but I think that's also a "works for you or it doesn't" element. But I can absolutely understand it not being everybody's cup of tea.
Sean McMillan
Saw this in the theaters. Beautifully made film with great shot compositions and a smothering atmosphere of dread. Also I hated it. I understood on credits roll that this was a movie that required interpretation. Like Dan Olson's (Folding Ideas) video essay about 'Annhialation,' Longlegs is an exercise in decoding metaphor. If you run around looking for 'explainer' videos on Longlegs plot, I'd say you're missing the point. Darren did a great job illustrating some of those metaphors in this very article, including context about director Oz Perkins that helps me better understand his intentions with this film. That said, I didn't find the invitations to dig deeper all that enticing. The plot was nonsensical, the dialogue largely pretentious and hard to track, and the performances ranging from stilted to comical (with Cage and Underwood in particular camping it up). Perhaps I am missing the point, the incomprehensibility of the plot part of the film's subversive approach to the genre; the film's vibes forward approach a message about our attempts to enforce order on the irrational. Well, I still felt the climax was flat and bereft of tension. The twist telegraphed so clearly and explained so bluntly that it felt uncanny by contrast to the film's many ambiguities. The loud framing of the president's portraits distracting and unsubtle. The dense atmosphere sometimes undermined with uneven tone shifts (the scene in the general store comes to mind). Thanks as always for the article and sorry for the negativity! I was really hoping you'd talk about Longlegs so I could better understand a well informed, critical take. Even when I have a different opinion I always enjoy your perspective. EDIT: grammar
