CW: Mentions of murder, suicide
If you were driving in Los Angeles this summer, you may have seen it: a mysterious billboard showing a sliver of a pale face and a phone number. No other information.
Curious commuters who dialed the number heard a prerecorded message of heavy breathing and a reedy, strained voice murmuring, “There she is. What’s your name, little angel? Nice to meet you. I’ll be waiting.” Gross!
On June 14, a coded, Zodiac-like message was printed “at the request of Longlegs” in The Seattle Times. The message pointed readers to TheBirthdayMurders.net, a Web 1.0-style true crime website detailing the victims of a decades-long string of supposed murder-suicides.
The internet loves a mystery. People with too much time on their hands quickly pieced together that these clues were part of a viral marketing campaign for the latest serial killer horror film from director Osgood Perkins, “Longlegs” (2024).
After the movie opened in theaters, it quickly became the highest grossing indie film of the year. Much of that success is owed to the attention-grabbing marketing campaign, which was shortlisted for a Clio Award, the Oscars of advertising.
After several reviews called it the scariest movie of the year, or even the decade, I spent three months psyching myself up to watch it. One fateful day in September, I gathered some friends, pulled on an adult diaper and braved “Longlegs.”
But when the end credits rolled, my overwhelming feeling was one of baffled disappointment. What did I just watch? And where was the movie I had been promised?
While it’s probably unfair to project our grubby audience expectations onto a director’s art baby, the reality is that almost nobody walks into a movie theater completely blind. Audiences, myself included, approached “Longlegs” already hyped up by its marketing and loaded with preconceptions.
Trailers largely billed the film as a procedural mystery with some occult flavor. Its most obvious ancestor is “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991), a comparison which “Longlegs” frequently invoked in both its marketing and the film itself. Both movies follow rookie female FBI agents hunting an elusive serial killer through ’90s rural America, and both wrestle with gendered violence and our failures to shelter innocence from the evil of the world.
In one of the first scenes of “Longlegs,” Agent Lee Harker sits on the floor of a dark office puzzling over a collage of disturbing clues: encoded satanic messages in children’s birthday cards, haunting crime scene polaroids, unnerving 911 call recordings. Dozens of fathers who, without warning, butchered their families, then themselves. Each murder-suicide seems unconnected to the others, except for a note left at each scene pointing to a mastermind known only as Longlegs.
But there’s no evidence Longlegs was ever inside the houses. So how did he do it?
I settled in for a tightly-wound mystery, eager to see how each clue would fall into place. There was just one loophole: Harker is psychic. She quickly decodes all the messages, which barely end up mattering anyway, as she can sense where to look without them.
“If horror is all shadow, a good mystery wields a spotlight, requiring a satisfying reveal where every question is answered.”
As the web of mystery begins to fall apart, that’s when I knew “Longlegs” was about to go straight to hell.
While they’re often paired together, the horror and mystery genres require different approaches to handling the unknown (the concept, not the thing from the Glasgow Wonka Experience).
Horror taps into humanity’s instinctual fear of the unknown by keeping the “big scary thing” in the dark for as long as possible, letting our imaginations run wild with horrible possibilities. If horror is all shadow, a good mystery wields a spotlight, requiring a satisfying reveal where every question is answered.
So creating an effective horror mystery is a tall order: when it’s unmasked, the threat not only has to make sense, but it has to be even more terrifying in the light of day than the audience imagined.
Avoiding spoilers, there is one location-based reveal in “Longlegs” that pulls off this difficult combination. But for the most part, the horror and mystery elements work against each other. What should be compelling clues are quickly rendered irrelevant by Harker’s psychic shortcuts.
When the fine machinations of evil’s plot are fully revealed, it more closely resembles a convoluted Rube Goldberg machine. And there’s nothing scary about a Rube Goldberg machine.
The story, which started as haunting and understated, slowly unraveled until all that remained sounded more like the premise to a cheesy Blumhouse flick about spooky dolls. “Longlegs” is chock full of suspenseful moments and eerily beautiful imagery, but it all hits harder in the trailers — when they don’t have to explain any of it.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the film’s handling of the killer himself, played by Nicolas Cage, who should loom over the narrative as a mythic, unknowable presence. The trailers understood this, even censoring his face in marketing materials to build up intrigue.
But twenty minutes into the movie, we’re getting well-lit shots of Longlegs’ whole face constantly — Longlegs driving to town, Longlegs putzing around a hardware store. If I wanted to see a pasty freak being off-putting in public, I would just look in the mirror. Each time he shows up and sings (yes, he sings — a lot), a piece of that horrific unknown falls away, until the embodiment of evil is just Nicolas Cage hamming it up in a greasy wig.
But here’s the greatest twist of all: I rewatched “Longlegs” this week, and I enjoyed it.
After the hype of summer marketing had died down, I was able to watch the movie on its own terms, and finally found myself being pulled into its bleak, claustrophobic world.
The plot still fell apart like wet tissue paper, but I started to understand that maybe Oz Perkins wanted me to feel disappointed. Promises are worthless, the film seemed to say; both the promise of a parent to protect their child from evil and the promise of a movie trailer. There is no satisfying resolution, no clues that build to understanding.
The deepest evil evades such pedestrian things as easy answers, or good films. Hail Satan.
Niko Kay Smith SC ’25 is a dirtsy, flirtsy ol’ angel bitch. “A Nightmare on 6th St’” is TSL’s horror column, where Niko covers their journey from scaredy cat to rabid horror fan, one movie at a time.
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