If you’ve heard anything at all about Long legsthe new horror film starring Nicolas Cage, you’ve probably seen someone claiming it is one of the scariest movies ever. From the film’s excellent marketing to the avalanche of disturbed early screening responsesAll the buzz for this movie is that it’s downright scary. It’s not. Most horror fans probably won’t find it scary at all – but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a great, extremely creepy movie. Long legs places itself in the long line of classic horror thrillers such as The shining And The Silence of the Lambs — movies that are better at making people squirm than they are at making them jump. Director Osgood Perkins (The daughter of the blackcoat) is clearly more interested in the nervous laughter of the audience than just the screaming.
At first glance, the film is a fairly straightforward serial killer hunt with a few supernatural twists. Horror veteran Maika Monroe (It follows) plays Lee Harker, a young FBI agent who seems unusually talented and intuitive. As a result, she is assigned to investigate one of the FBI’s longest-running mysteries: a series of brutal murders in which a father murdered his family in their own home and then committed suicide. The only things that connect the murders are that a daughter in the family has a birthday on the 14th of the month and that at each of the crime scenes there is a coded, apparently satanic letter from someone calling themselves Longlegs. But there is no evidence that anyone outside the family was ever at any of the homes when the crimes occurred.
Image: Neon
Perkins’ script plays out all of this setup deftly, using visual and narrative references from films like Zodiac, SevenAnd The Silence of the Lambs to help orient the audience as quickly as possible. Within the first 20 minutes or so, we already know all the details about the case and everyone involved, which gives Perkins the freedom to fill the film with his unique brand of eccentric creepiness.
Take Lee Harker, a character visually modeled after The Silence of the Lambs’ Clarice Starling, but lacks her artificial steeliness. Monroe plays Lee with a repellent vacuity. She’s undoubtedly brilliant, but her interpersonal behavior is uncomfortably curt, as if talking to people or even looking at them is an unpleasant chore for her, and a distraction from finding her next clue. This dynamic makes every scene she appears in unsettlingly uncomfortable, cleverly making viewers uncomfortable even when there aren’t any brutal crimes on screen, and it contributes to the film’s ever-building sense of tension.
Perkins also doesn’t shy away from using Monroe’s fantastically weird performance for comedy. In one of the first scenes, Lee meets the daughter of her FBI boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood). Lee sits on the girl’s bed, her entire body tense, scanning the room like a crime scene, desperate for something to talk about. Eventually, after the awkwardness has been worked out, she picks up a ballet trophy with its head missing. When Carter’s daughter says she doesn’t know where the head is, Lee deadpans that finding a missing head would be her job, not the girl’s. It’s a perfect joke about her own weirdness, and Lee is the only one not in on it.
Image: Neon
It’s a genuinely funny scene, but in a way that feels refreshingly antagonistic. It’s as if Perkins is daring us to laugh at the characters’ discomfort. Long legs is full of these kinds of inappropriate little jokes — and as the film’s violence increases and its tone darkens, they become even more effective. Each one is a little challenge to see how disturbing a scene can be while still making the audience laugh uncomfortably.
Balancing a mood like this, equal parts scary and funny, feels nearly impossible, especially when falling too far to either side would completely destroy the film. But Perkins never slips up — he keeps the tension and discomfort perfectly in check. That tone is just what Long legs creepy, instead of scary.
Scary, in this case, is something physical that a movie does to you: a racing heart, a nervous sweat, muscles tensing in anticipation of an inevitable jump. Scary comes in waves. It comes and goes, writhes and discharges in a steady rhythm. Creepiness, on the other hand, is fear that builds up continuously. While the fear of a scary movie comes from the anticipation of the tension that is released, scary Movies find fear in the idea that the tension might never go away.
Image: Neon
Perkins has often cited David Lynch as an inspiration, and films such as Mulholland Drive or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me are prime examples of the heights of this kind of creepiness on film. In Long legs‘ case, every inch of the film feels constructed to heighten this oppressively uneasy mood and the uneasy feeling that you’ll never escape his particular brand of eccentric, Satanic weirdness. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Nicolas Cage’s performance as Longlegs himself.
Far from the sophisticated psychopath that usually defines the serial killer, Cage’s performance is built on uncomfortable silliness. He screams in his car over hard-rock music, speaks in a clownish voice more suited to a character on a children’s TV show from hell, and generally floats around scenes with a perverse giddiness that suggests he’s confident he has Satan’s full support. It’s a thoroughly unnerving performance, but also a hilarious one. Perkins has Cage play off Longlegs’ silliness for laughs, only to immediately contrast it with his gruesome murders. The humor and horror enhance rather than undermine each other, making every laugh feel like a slide deeper into Longlegs’ own twisted, gross-out reality.
Image: Neon
That said, Cage’s performance is undeniably grand and full of bold choices. It’s probably a litmus test to see if you’re on the film’s wavelength. Long legs‘The lack of immediate jump scares, combined with Cage’s performance and the humor of the script, will likely turn some viewers off of the film right away, especially when combined with the overemphasis the marketing places on the film’s scary content.
Long legs is not the generation-shattering film it is being sold as. It is funny, strange and creepy in just the right amounts, but that won’t stop some viewers from being disappointed because their expectations were set wrong. With Long legsPerkins doesn’t want viewers to be startled in the theater; he wants them to be startled later, when they hear a noise in the dark. Or to wonder for a few days what made them laugh at something so grotesque, even though the film invited that laughter in the first place. If we get far enough away from Long legs‘ marketing push to forget it altogether, we’ll still count ourselves lucky if the film asks those questions on its own terms.
Long legs will be released in theaters on July 12.