The hypnotic, amoral spell of 'Longlegs'

2024 has been a good year for horror movies, with cinema-goers flocking to both art house provocations ("The Substance") and franchise reboots ("The First Omen").

But one film in particular stands out — for reasons that should disturb us.

The scary thing about Longlegs isn't so much his affectation or his methods but the sense that he's backed by a supernatural force that remains hidden to us.

Osgood Perkins' "Longlegs" is one of the year's notable success stories, grossing $125 million on less than a $10 million budget. What it lacked in marketing muscle it made up for in massive word-of-mouth excitement — much of it focused on a nearly unrecognizable Nicolas Cage's unhinged performance as the titular agent of evil.

'Se7en' meets 'Silence'

While "Longlegs" is extraordinarily effective, it isn't quite as original as its initial buzz suggested. It is set in the '90s, and much has been said of its obvious borrowings from two movies of that era. It gets its relentlessly gray, dread-soaked atmosphere from "Se7en" and its tense game of cat-and-mouse between a rookie female FBI agent and an enigmatic serial killer from "Silence of the Lambs."

To these familiar components "Longlegs" adds another classic horror trope. Longlegs kills on behalf of a greater, supernatural evil: Satan. And yet here the movie dispenses with the usual Hollywood trappings. There are no exorcisms or grotesque physical transformations — and it is perhaps for this reason that the movie has largely been left out of the discourse surrounding our culture's increasing fascination with the demonic.

"Longlegs" centers around an elaborate series of murders of entire families — each of which happens to include a 9-year-old girl born on the 14th of the month — somehow connected to it's titular character.

Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is an FBI agent attached to the case who has clairvoyant abilities, an analytical mind, and a childhood connection to the murderer that she doesn't fully understand.

NOTE: As "Longlegs" hit theaters in July and has been available to stream for almost three months, what follows will contain spoilers.

Initially, the police are stumped by the seemingly random killings, but Lee can see through the data and recognize a pattern that is innately satanic. This leads them down a bizarre path where they discover the killer's affection for dolls, his penchant for religious imagery, and his ability to possess people and objects in such a way that they do the bidding of his master.

Hide and seek

The scary thing about Longlegs isn't so much his affectation or his methods but the sense that he's backed by a supernatural force that remains hidden to us. Buried under over-the-top makeup and prosthetics, and playing in an altogether different register from his trademark brand of crazy, Cage seems to make Longlegs deliberately impenetrable.

What little glimpse we get of the inner man comes literally, as he smashes his face against an interrogation table, crushing his nose into a pulp, and praising Satan with his final breath.

This results in the film's curious religious subtext. Lee's mother is depicted as being extremely Christian and constantly asks her daughter if she keeps to her prayers or not. Lee is clearly informed about religious matters, enough to correct others on their factual errors and keep books on religion in her home, but she doesn't seem to be a practicing believer. She has clairvoyant powers, but when asked if she prays, she admits she never has.

Lee pursues the case relentlessly but with pronounced detachment and lack of emotion. Her quarry, meanwhile, is deeply invested in his evil quest.

Longlegs commits his murders by proxy, mesmerizing the family patriarch into a murderous trance, in which he will do the killer's bidding. His is the power of subversion, a creeping ability to possess good people and use them to advance evil, even after the source of that evil is functionally gone.

Controversially, his greatest weapon ends up being Lee’s mother, controlling her to spread his possession powers — completely overpowering her religious soul and puppetizing her in the disguise of a nun.

The story of "Longlegs" ends up being a depressing story of evil's omnipresent ability to spread beyond death and corrupt everything in its sight. The film's darkly ambiguous ending — in which the heroes lose everything while achieving a temporary stalemate at best — questions whether or not goodness can ever hope to defeat evil.

'No Country' for hope?

This bleak outlook very much brings to mind the infamous ending of "No Country for Old Men," where our hero has been killed off-screen before his final climactic dual, the sheriff has given up trying to fight evil, and innocents have been killed for no other reason than that the villain promised to do so.

"No Country for Old Men" leaves us to contemplate the malevolent Anton Chigurh still roaming the world, spreading evil while goodness sits down and surrenders to the reality of cosmic hopelessness and failure. “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” says the villain Chigurh (and also Vice President-elect Vance that one time).

But Chigurh is no satanist, he’s a determinist. He has a clear philosophy. Longlegs lacks that interior complexity; he is content to be a bodily conduit for spiritual evil. And that evil is ultimately stopped not by faith but by a bullet and an act of parricide, the betrayal of a daughter crushing her mother’s hollowed-out Christian affectations.

Unlike its close relatives like "The Exorcist" or "The Conjuring," "Longlegs" has no clear moral compass. It's not so much that evil triumphs at the end but that good seems to lack much in the way of conviction or energy. Lee goes through the motions, without seeming to understand why it matters; there's a sense that the evil she's fighting has long ago compromised her from within; that it's only a matter of time before she, too, gives up the fight.

Lee differs from Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling in one crucial respect: She is almost as alien to us as Longlegs is. We don't root for her as we do Starling; instead, we're invited to take a more neutral, almost hypnotic pleasure in Perkins' hopeless vision, as if the movie itself is one of Longlegs' sinister dolls.

To quote blogger Justin Bower, “In Longlegs's world, Satan always answers prayers while God—if he exists—is silently resigned, unable to contest the power of the Devil’s dollmaker.”

By not asking us to identify with the good, "Longlegs" lets us off the hook from pondering our own evil as well. Could that account for its massive popularity? A culture so resigned to its decline that the best it can do is enjoy the ride.