ARTICLE | ESSAY

Nightmare Scenarios

Longlegs carries forward Osgood Perkins’s ethereal cinema of dark isolation.

BY LAURA KERN | July 12, 2024
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About a decade ago, an intriguing new contender stepped into the horror arena. It wasn’t so much a grandstanding moment as a quiet entrance from out of the blue, subtly sneaking into the audience’s consciousness—and lingering there. Previously an actor perhaps most recognized as the lovably awkward friend in the divine Legally Blonde, this novice writer/director, Osgood Perkins, was like a breath of cool, fresh air. It seems the reliable guy providing on-screen support had other, more sinister things on his agenda. After all, one can only imagine how having the man who embodied Norman Bates, the character perhaps most instrumental in a young person’s horror education, as your dad—and even getting to play a preteen version of him as your first role!—would shape your own identity.

Perkins’s debut at the helm, The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), relayed the clear message that he was a natural fit for the horror genre, even if the film didn’t receive a proper theatrical release until nearly two years after its festival premiere. Most of The Blackcoat’s Daughter unfolds at a desolate, snowy school campus emptied out for winter break—a ripe horror locale for playing out the side effects of isolation. Not the peaceful, yearned-for kind of solitude, but the unwelcome, menacing kind: the kind that nightmares are made of. And nightmares are the experiences Perkins has stated he aims to emulate in his films. The visuals he presents are often just a little too darkened, effectively setting an uneasy mood and the perfect backdrop for unholy things to take place. Much contained horror debates the tired question of whether someone is going mad or if there are darker forces at play. In Perkins’s films, there’s room for both possibilities.

At the fictional upstate New York Catholic girls’ school Bramford, winkingly named for the apartment building in Rosemary’s Baby, two very different girls become stranded together when their parents don’t arrive to retrieve them: the nerdy, increasingly peculiar freshman Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and the cooler, more outwardly rebellious senior Rose (Lucy Boynton), who thinks she might be pregnant. The headmaster asks Rose to look after Kat until her parents arrive, but she instead tells the younger girl scary stories of hairless nuns and devil-worship—and promptly leaves her alone. When Rose returns later that night, she enters a new nightmarish narrative worthy of her tales.

In parallel to the escalating terror at the school, we also follow Joan (Emma Roberts), a young woman who’s just escaped from a mental institution and is on her way to the Bramford area, where the couple (James Remar and Lauren Holly) who offer her a lift are headed. The husband, still mourning the loss of their daughter from nine years earlier, volunteers to help because Joan reminds him of someone from his past—but not the someone we’d have expected. In Perkins’s scenario, nothing is in keeping with our expectations; instead, we’re consistently thrilled, and puzzled, by its disjointed chronologies.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter

Judging from the hasty, hopeful comparisons to The Silence of the Lambs by people who hadn’t even seen the new film, it appeared that Perkins’s latest offering, Longlegs, would be his most clear-cut genre outing yet. But like The Blackcoat’s Daughter, whose troubled-teen angst dripped with religious dread and devilishness, Longlegs takes what might’ve been a strictly human-villain story and tosses in similar occultist elements. Consequently, anyone expecting a straightforward serial-killer procedural like The Silence of the Lambs, Seven, or Zodiac—or a kooky, over-the-top Nicolas Cage genre vehicle, for that matter—might be disappointed.

I was admittedly a little concerned about the casting of Cage as the self-monikered villain, Longlegs. The actor has kind of entered his “Jack Nicholson in Wolf” stage (a film in which, coincidentally, Perkins appears as a cop), marked by an inability, or refusal, to escape his persona—with sometimes frustrating results. But he works in Longlegs, largely because he doesn’t resemble himself, and we also don’t see all that much of him. The character of Longlegs is an interestingly designed horror villain because he looks like he’s wearing a mask without actually wearing one. His frazzled blond hair and tacky outfits give the appearance of some androgynous, over-the-hill glam rocker with plastic surgery or fillers gone wrong. (I couldn’t stop thinking of the old-lady-masked killer in the underrated 1983 slasher Curtains, but there’s much talk of the likes of Lou Reed and Mark Bolan, whose band T. Rex infuses the film’s soundtrack.) While prosthetics partly obscure his Nicolas Cage–ness, his voice is still detectable, though he claims to have modeled it a bit after his mother’s. Those not laughing comfortably at Longlegs may find him to be genuinely creepy, as doll-making psychopaths tend to be in horror movies.

Yet even being named for Cage’s character, Longlegs is not a Nicolas Cage movie—it is a Maika Monroe movie. A standout presence in the genre since 2014, she first captured attention with star-making lead performances that year in both The Guest and It Follows, was a delight in Villains (2019), and totally commanded Watcher and Significant Other (both 2022). Longlegs’s FBI agent Lee Harker might be her meatiest role yet, and also her moodiest. She looks tortured every second, presumably due to a dark past and dreary everyday existence, navigating a gruesome job and a strained relationship with her religious-freak mother (Alicia Witt). Monroe’s role presented her with the challenge of playing someone not ostensibly sympathetic—Perkins’s female leads are complex yet never quite generate warmth. It initially felt like Monroe was trying too hard to evoke quiet misery, and I couldn’t quite buy her as a “person.” But as the story progressed, it began to make sense, because everything in the entire film feels askew, ever-so-slightly out of sync with reality. That’s the nightmare effect at work.

Harker, a lonely social outcast, is recruited to help solve a serial-killer case that’s been stumping investigators for decades. Longlegs has been connected to the slayings of multiple families, but mysteriously can’t be placed at the actual crime scenes—it seems it’s the fathers who kill their families and then themselves. Is Longlegs an evil mastermind, a cult leader of the Manson sort? That’s what Harker needs to find out—and luckily, she has the convenient skill of being partially psychic, and can easily decode all the cryptic messages Longlegs leaves behind. A pattern is uncovered, revealing that children born on a certain day of the month are targets—just one of the things connecting Harker to Longlegs, a figure she interacts with in the haunting opening of the film. Denying us firm ground to plant our feet on, Longlegs continues to unsettle throughout, but, in opposition to the marketing campaign declaring it the most terrifying movie ever made, it’s strangely lighter than its director’s previous films, in part because it has more humor (involving Lee’s interactions with her FBI boss’s young daughter and Longlegs’s camp shenanigans).

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016) is perhaps Perkins’s purest distillation of unadulterated dread. It’s a small red square on-screen that lures us into Longlegs, but this film immediately hypnotizes us with pure blackness. And if Longlegs is ultimately, at its core, the horror of extreme parenting (that’s as spoiler-y as I’ll get), Perkins’s second feature is more about extreme careering. Ruth Wilson stars as a hospice nurse, Lily, sent to look after the dementia-afflicted, formerly prolific horror novelist Iris Blum (Paula Prentiss, a pal and co-star of Anthony Perkins) in her remote New England house—basically trapped there, sacrificing all else in her life, until the old woman’s final breath. The “pretty thing” of the title is the 28-year-old Lily, who will never be 29, as she tells us in her opening voiceover. Her ominous words set up the unpromising resolution to come, but the twisted joy derives from seeing how we will arrive there.

Like Perkins’s other films, this one feels strangely out of time, the only clues to its period being an old long-corded phone and a staticky dial TV, which could be relics of a woman stuck in the past or indicators of an actual setting (we only really know Longlegs takes place during the Clinton era because we see a poster of the president hanging behind a desk at FBI headquarters). I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is a true dark and shadowy Gothic haunted-house tale—which Perkins dedicates to his father—replete with the perpetual nighttime bangings of a centuries-old home. There is an unseen but totally felt presence.

The patient calls her nurse only “Polly”—a character from the writer’s best novel, which the squeamish Lily has been too afraid to read. But she begins diving into the book and the awful history of the old house. While the end of Longlegs will inevitably divide people, there are a few seconds leading up to the chilling finale of I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House that certifiably stand as some of the best, most terrifying moments in modern horror—and the most telling sign that Perkins is a master. One night, there’s a knock at the door; after the camera creeps through the dark house, it returns to Lily, jarring us in a rapid procession of ticking clocks, a reflection in an eyeball, and a literal gasping for breath, with the screeching musical score sounding almost Psycho-like (composed by the director’s brother, Elvis Perkins, who also did brilliant work on The Blackcoat’s Daughter). 

Gretel & Hansel

Inspirations and sources are fundamental to cinema, and Perkins chooses his well. In addition to the Longlegs serial-killer film origins, the spirit of Shirley Jackson guided I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, and four years later, he borrowed from one of the most beloved Twilight Zone episodes, “To Serve Man,” for his dubious contribution to Jordan Peele’s rebooted series—maybe sci-fi isn’t for Perkins?—and inverted the Brothers Grimm for Gretel & Hansel. Of late, it has been well-reported that he’s in post on his Stephen King adaptation, The Monkey. But none of this is to say he’s not an original thinker; his approach is fresh and his films literary yet visionary. Better than popular opinion might have you believe, Gretel & Hansel offered another moody, starkly beautiful, female-centric tale from Perkins that widens the scope for Gretel (while kid brother Hansel does little more than annoy). It’s the only one of his movies he didn’t also script, and it falters a bit for that, but Alice Krige makes for an outstanding witch, and the film engages most when confined to her cottage. With this movie, Perkins again leads audiences astray, undermining expectations while cleverly toying with questions of identity.

“We are made from the same matter, the same filth,” Krige’s witch tells Gretel, encapsulating those blurred lines between good and evil and between would-be innocents and the wicked outside forces getting in their way. Perkins takes the basics of the genre—possessions, hauntings, fairy-tale witches, and now serial killers in Longlegs, the film that will finally bring him the recognition he deserves—and adds his very own truly unsettling spin. His exquisitely framed, intricately plotted movies are to be studied, soaked in, and then shaken off like the bad dreams he’s invited us into. 🩸

Longlegs
LAURA KERN

is a writer, editor, and horror programmer based in New York. She is the editor of Bloodvine and her writing has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Film Comment, and Rolling Stone.

X: @killerkern

How to see Longlegs

The film opened in theaters nationwide on July 12.
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