Do you know what can be detrimental to a movie? A fantastic marketing campaign. Weird, right? Audiences tend to feel betrayed when promised one thing but given something else or given what they were promised but not in the way they were expecting. Horror fans are no exception, and, if anything, they feel more betrayed if they’re told something is going to be scary and then it’s just not. It doesn’t help that scariness is incredibly subjective and is rarely universal. Which is more frightening to you: the image of the dead grandmother standing in the corner of the room in Hereditary or the jump scare of the Lipstick Demon standing behind Patrick Wilson in Insidious? Whatever your answer was, you’re right, and that’s the point. But if you lean more towards the former, the film that’s the topic of discussion is probably more your speed.
Enter Longlegs. The movie you either love unconditionally because of its atmosphere and excellent technical filmmaking, or you hate with a seething rage because it’s slow and tedious and just ambiguous enough to be frustrating. If you look at the reviews and comments online, those are the two camps that people generally reside in. It’s either five stars or one star; you love or loathe it. People rarely voice their opinions on the internet when it’s merely lukewarm, and people who dislike something aren’t always the majority, but they’re often the loudest. The kind of flak that Longlegs seemed to get from audiences can probably be traced back to its marketing campaign, and whether or not, going in, they were familiar with the filmmaker Osgood Perkins.
The film follows FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), who is assigned to a case involving a serial killer who’s given himself the name Longlegs (Nicolas Cage). He’s responsible for the deaths of multiple families, even though, despite the letters he leaves with ciphers inside—because the only serial killer Hollywood apes off of more than Ed Gein is Zodiac—there’s no evidence to prove he was even there. As Harker digs deeper into the case, and as a potential future victim draws near, she realizes that the killings have a religious aura around them, and she might have a closer connection to the killer than she thought previously. Harker is also a psychic…that shouldn’t be phrased as an afterthought, but that is about as relevant as it is to the story.
Based on that description, you would probably assume that this film would have the pacing of something like Silence of the Lambs or Se7en, where it’s always forward-moving, and you can feel the clock ticking as the threat of the killer looms in the background as the detective or agent is on the hunt to find him. If you saw the trailers and teasers leading up to the film’s release, your assumption would’ve likely been amplified. The official trailer had fast-paced editing, Maika Monroe carrying a gun, and a mostly unseen creepy guy doing creepy things. It almost looked like a David Fincher-esque thriller. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that’s not entirely the case. However, by the time the official trailer was released, people were already hooked by the ingenuity of the teasers.
Months before the film came out, Neon released multiple teasers that didn’t give the film’s title and instead had foreboding titles like, “You’ve got the teeth of the hydra upon you” or “Every year there is another.” They contained eerie visuals, creepy quotes, and ciphers that made audiences wonder what the film was about. It was viral marketing that many have compared to The Blair Witch Project, where the mystery surrounding the story was enough to lure people in.
The marketing did its job because it got people to go to the theater, and the movie made its money back and then some. However, a decent number of people who saw the film in theaters were likely disappointed because while they did get a horror movie, it was more in line stylistically with something like an A24 movie than Silence of the Lambs. Just a brief aside: if you see a horror movie trailer that includes quotes like, “The scariest movie of the decade,” and it includes the Certified Fresh symbol from Rotten Tomatoes, take it with a grain of salt. If it’s not an all-out bonkers horror film like Barbarian, quotes like that lead to high expectations, which ultimately end in angry IMDb and Google reviews…Letterbox reviews may be more forgiving. This brings us to the main point: familiarity with the director.
Longlegs was likely a lot of people’s first interaction with the work of Osgood Perkins, but his cache as a horror director has been steadily building since his 2015 debut film, The Blackcoat’s Daughter. As many have acknowledged, his predilection towards the horror genre is appropriate, considering his father was famed horror icon Anthony Perkins, who was most well-known for his performance as Norman Bates in Psycho. Osgood ‘Oz’ Perkins also has Wes Anderson Syndrome—a term coined at this moment—where if you look at pictures of him, he looks like the human personification of the movies he makes.
When his name was announced in connection to the film, a particular group of movie nerds and those familiar with his work were excited, or at the very least, curious to see what he could bring to the subject matter. If you’ve seen any of his previous work, you knew, generally speaking, what you were getting yourself into. Perkins’ style is very specific, and it’s very mannered and slow-paced. He doesn’t go for horror set pieces or full-on scares; he aims for atmosphere and a constant sense of anxiety and dread. If you’ve seen The Blackcoat’s Daughter, you know the scariest thing that happens is a teenage girl bowing to a radiator. It sounds silly when read on paper—or on a screen, if you want to be aggressively literal—but it’s legitimately unsettling in execution.
Because of his style, mainly his cinematography, his films usually come across as cold and almost voyeuristic. He’s been compared to Stanley Kubrick in how he takes his time and lets a scene breathe, often to varying degrees of success—if you didn’t like Longlegs, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House will not be the one to win you over—that being said, it’s effective when it’s done well, such as the investigation with Harker and Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) looking around an empty barn at night with only their flashlights lighting the scene. Once they enter, the shot holds on the trees, giving the impression that the characters are being watched and that Longlegs could be anywhere. There are a lot of moments like that sprinkled throughout the film, and it helps keep the tension going. Perkins’ movies aren’t for everyone, and much like Kubrick, if you don’t connect with the style, it can make them frustrating. Especially how he directs dialogue, which often feels crushingly drawn out by how long characters take to respond to each other.
The one thing in the movie that everyone has a unanimous opinion on is that Nicolas Cage is great as the titular character. The trailers made the clever move of never showing him fully, often only glimpses where he’s shown in profile, in the dark, or only seen from the mouth down. From the few glimpses, creepy lines, and the weird sound editing used when you see him in the general store with his face obscured by his hands, the trailer made it clear that this is The Nicolas Cage Show, and he will make you sink deep into your chair whenever he’s on-screen—though the allure is broken a bit when you learn his character’s real name is Dale.
Part of the appeal of seeing the movie was to see what he looked like and what he would do. He didn’t look like his character Rob in Pig, despite what several YouTube video thumbnails and featured images of articles would have you believe, but he did look monstrous and almost inhuman. Besides his appearance, Cage’s performance is legitimately scary, and he commands every scene. The film is worth the price of admission to see the interrogation scene and witness how unhinged the character is. The decision to have him look right into the camera and stare into your soul while he monologues was a nice touch, too. Probably the biggest detriment to the film is that Cage isn’t in the movie more, but leaving people wanting more means something was done right, and for the limited screen time he has—maybe ten minutes in total—he makes it count.
Is this all to say that the marketing department conned audiences out of their money or that audiences should have done a thorough watch-through of the director’s filmography before seeing the movie? The answer to both questions is obviously no. The marketing department did an expert job of getting people to want to buy tickets—considering how movie theaters are doing right now, that’s no small feat—and if the last few years of the MCU have taught us anything, it’s that you shouldn’t expect people to do homework to enjoy a standalone movie. This isn’t vilifying whether people liked or disliked the film; despite how this is coming across, this is all coming from someone who actually likes the movie a lot. It’s more an observation of expectations versus reality. There were probably plenty of people who liked the movie but never saw any of the trailers, and there were likely many fans of Osgood Perkins who were still disappointed. The one thing that’s a certainty after the release of Longlegs is that everyone now knows that Oz Perkins played David in Legally Blonde. And if you didn’t know that before, you do now.
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