Longlegs isn’t bad. It also isn’t scary

The Zodiac Killer. BTK. The “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez. And, Tiptoe Through the Tulips singer Tiny Tim. 

On the surface, it may seem like these things don’t exactly suit each other — the high-pitched crooning of a long-haired loner mixed with some of the most heinous acts of the past half-century.

But it’s that ping-ponging set of circumstances that Longlegs attempts to caulk together: forcing a creeping tale of subtle suspense alongside a typical over-the-top Nicolas Cage appearance. Though this time with Cage seemingly taking vocal — and costuming — inspiration from Tim himself. 

It’s an audacious pairing, a fresh and daring reinvention of the horror genre that (if we’re to believe the almost inescapably bold marketing) could have led to the scariest movie of the year, decade and even the more nebulous timeframe of “recent memory.”

So it is a particular honour to report that, given that high expectation, Longlegs triumphantly steps up to the plate, calls its shot — then remembers we’re playing hockey. 

WATCH | Longlegs trailer: 

Because despite its impressive performances, beautiful cinematography and carefully crafted atmosphere, Longlegs gets caught up in its own cleverness, then wholly undercut by its big-name star. Any time it manages to build up the necessary feeling of the uncanny by which the genre lives and dies, Cage smash-cuts in to undo it, in what appears to be a zany impression of Jason Alexander in Criminal Minds — hairdo and all. 

Though a good callback to the suspenseful serial-killer mysteries of yore, Longlegs never quite figures out what game it’s playing, or which goal it wants to fulfil. It juggles supernatural horror, neo-noir and hard drama, and director Oz Perkins only seems able to succeed at one of those at a time — before dropping them all in a bizarre and disappointingly underwhelming close. 

But most egregious of all: It’s just not scary.

Genre markers 

That is not to say the horror is an outright failure. In fact, it’s far from it.

Set in the de-saturated, hazily nostalgic office buildings and townhouses of the 1990s, Longlegs is at its heart a psychological thriller, mixed up with a police procedural: a mishmash of occult-obsessed The Omen with the crime formula of Primal Fear. Focusing on any one of those pursuits in a vacuum, Longlegs does fairly well, and with all their entrenched genre markers on full display. 

We follow FBI recruit Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), an eager but naive newbie with obvious parallels to Silence of the Lambs‘ Clarice, Sicario or — with an execution so similar it’s hard to believe it’s a different actor — Shailene Woodley in To Catch a Killer. 

The tropes don’t end there. Knocking on doors of rural Oregon, Harker is soon on the trail of the eponymous Longlegs (Cage): a serial killer amalgam of all the most horrible losers of the 20th century. He invades families’ homes like Dennis Rader’s BTK, leaves coded, taunting messages for the police like the Zodiac and, of course, professes an avowed love for Satan like Ramirez. 

Heaped on top of that true-crime smorgasbord is the supernatural. Brought onboard due to her mystical ability to identify a killer’s home based on bad vibes alone, Harker quickly proves to have some connection to the other side. Her unclear and mostly useless power just helps her occasionally guess things like the number you were thinking of, and mostly exists to tie up the third act. 

But that’s all undergirded by the surprisingly powerful family drama at Longlegs‘s core. Interspersing Harker’s investigation are frequent phone calls home to her mother Ruth (Alicia Witt), whose frequent references to their shared past do a lot to ratchet up the tension. 

Psycho’s son

It’s all the perfect formula for writer-director Oz Perkins, the son of Psycho‘s titular psycho Anthony Perkins and a self-avowed hater of contemporary horror. Oz ostensibly uses Longlegs to bring a sense of awe and invention back into the genre. It’s a noble pursuit, and one made evident by the Hitchcockian tone and Kubrick-inspired framing and set design.

But for someone who’s also discreetly trashed other titles’ attempts to tell the serial killer story as “very base,” it’s astounding how little Perkins seems to understand about depicting them himself.

Though he draws from real-life serial killers, those inspirations themselves were in many ways failures, whereas Longlegs is always formidable. In both the crafting and casting of his serial killer, Perkins punches a hole in the hull of his narrative, depicting Longlegs almost as a super villain straight out of Batman’s rogues gallery. 

Where the Zodiac’s taunts were cracked by an elderly couple and a warehouse operator, Longlegs’s esoteric, coded messages are only cracked after the killer himself lends a hand — in order to further manipulate the police. 

And where BTK was caught because he was too stupid to understand how Microsoft metadata worked, Longlegs’s game with the police is carefully crafted and controlled. 

And while Ramirez likely played up his disjointed Satanism largely to feed his own narcissism, it was at least never as directly validated and reinforced as Longlegs gives its killer in the end.

That last point is especially egregious for a movie filmed on location in British Columbia, the province where the damaging and fake “Satanic Panic” global hysteria got its start. A “good” message is not at all needed to make a good movie, but Cage’s frankly insane character choices leave little else for it to hang its hat on. 

Because although Longlegs‘s slow-growing sense of dread makes it more than worth watching, Cage’s frequent feral screams repeatedly turn that fear into fodder for comedy — a style that, in movies designed for it, often works in his favour. But this movie’s cagey game of cat-and-mouse does not fit that definition. Cage’s infamous “not-the-bees“-style line delivery works well in the campy The Wicker Man, but adding it to Old Yeller would just lead to diminishing returns. 

Shoving him in Longlegs is like if Jaws, instead of keeping its big bad unknown and underwater, chose to have the shark jump out of the ocean every 10 minutes. Except here, the shark is wearing a grin and a funny hat.

So though Longlegs is entertaining and more solid than not, it’s hardly the scariest movie of the year. It’s mostly a lesson in picking a lane — and to Perkins, hopefully the lesson that had he swapped Nicolas Cage for Barry Keoghan, this might’ve been the new Hereditary. Instead, it’s The Snowman.