“Longlegs”: much ado about nothing
The bigger the hype, the shittier the result
It took me a full day and a half to find an appropriate (read: scam-free) torrent with a decent CAMRIP to watch “the most terrifying horror movie of the decade” (or so they said) right after it hit the screens on July 12th. After my search turned out a success (hail The Pirate Bay!), I diligently drew the curtains, switched off the lights to immerse the room in complete darkness, and put on the best open-back headphones I have to live this unforgettable experience of horror and feel the dread crawl under my skin and stay there for a week or two (or so they said!). No way… The ruthless capitalist hype machine had us all once again. Here’s how.
1. A wannabe “The Silence of the Lambs” with magic potion twists and other supernatural tin whistles
If you’ve ever watched the classic starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, you cannot but notice a core narrative similarity: a female FBI special agent on a hunt for a serial killer. But while The Silence of the Lambs makes clever use of inter-character dynamics that drives the plot forward and builds up tension to lead us — rationally! — to a climax nearer the end, the wannabe flick hinges on the supernatural which borders on the absurd:
it turns out the murdered families were each time possessed by dolls of Longlegs’ making with metal orbs in their heads, the orbs being infused with evil satanic energy because Hail Satan!, black magic or whatever.
To be clear, it takes more than a metal orb or two in the screenwriter’s head to come up with a decent procedural narrative. The appeal to the supernatural is a sign of weakness — an inability to conjure a puzzle that can be solved within the laws of physics and human psychology. Divine/satanic intervention explains everything. How very comfortable!
2. Unconvincing heroine with serious characterial flaws
Next is the heroine, the valiant special agent Lee Harker. While her predecessor from The Silence of the Lambs is a real human being of flash and blood, capable of evolving mentally and professionally as she navigates the case, Ms Harker is just a given — a semi-genius cryptic puzzle solving machine that acts on her inexplicably precise hunch and wears a consistently oblivious expression on her face:
One particularly glaring example of her inconsistency and lack of professionalism as a character occurs in the first half of the movie (the one which at least tries to mimic a procedural): she is sitting alone at the desk in her wooden hut in the middle of nowhere, studying the case and talking to her overly pious mother on the phone. Suddenly, someone is aggressively knocking at the door. What would a trained special agent do? That’s an easy one:
- start panting;
- pull out a gun and start running around the house, hands shaking;
- not notice the intruder inside the house and let him go scot-free;
- act cool after finding an envelope that the intruder had left on her desk — nothing to write home about.
To top it all off, even though she is the one holding the clue to the Longlegs’ identity, she only gets pushed in the right direction when confronted by her boss with the questions about her childhood. How very comfortable, Issue 2. I wonder how many flawed characters and predictable plot twists it takes before lazy writers move away from the stale “mentally tortured detective with mysterious past and connection to the killer” trope!
3. False promises and failed expectations
“The scariest movie so far, by a mile”, “Yes, Longlegs is that scary”, “impressively eerie stuff” etc. — there has been no shortage of praise for the movie, but I contend it is misplaced and should be reserved exclusively for the trailers, which are in a league of their own.
All the material shot, including those high-pitched sounds Longlegs makes when they are decontextualised and combined with a rapidly changing series of images, makes for an impressive — enticing, I daresay — invitation to watch the end product, but the whole toolbox, when actually deployed in the movie, wears thin very quickly and the setup, together with the most probable closure, becomes evident somewhere closer to the halfway. To phrase it in the language of film studies,
the effects of horror <in the trailers> initially by-pass the inhibitions and intrusions of the intellect so the thrill can precede the theory.¹
The movie falls short of that.
¹ The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch by Paul Wells.
4. Longlegs portrayed by Nicolas Cage: the uncanniness lost on the viewer
Longlegs’ way of walking, speaking, staring at you and otherwise being in the world is supposed to be uncanny. According to Freud in his widely cited essay “The Uncanny”,
“the uncanny is that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar”.
Longlegs is outwardly human, but everything about him screams (both literally and not) that his is an otherworldly, Satanic presence. Or at least this is what it’s supposed to look like.
What we see right from the start, however, tells a different story. Look at the opening credits:
While other actors are mentioned without giving away their roles, an exception is made for Cage, which downgrades a mysterious serial killer from “an abstraction which makes him a relevant symbolic icon for the systematic destructiveness of contemporary culture”² to just another creepy-ass guy in the pantheon of Cage’s oftentimes over-the-top characters.
² Ibid.
Who/what do you see in the gentleman above? A cryptic, mysterious man with his own mysterious agenda, or a heavily disguised Nicolas Cage playing the part?
“The actor, who has enthusiastically embraced his self-parody era, has been disguised with such ridiculous prosthetics and performs with such outsized excess that it’s impossible to see anything but an actor in a costume,”
writes Benjamin Lee in his Guardian review, and I suppose this unsympathetic judgement is not too far from the truth.
One of the key scenes of the movie is when Lee interrogates Longlegs in the FBI office. The scene looks like it was stolen (sorry — creatively reimagined) from Matt Reeve’s The Batman. Everything — from the interrogator’s confusion to the antagonist’s antics and theatrics — feels profoundly familiar.
5. By way of conclusion
Don’t watch “Longlegs”. You can do better than that. Your time on earth is limited: why waste it on something mediocre which can, at its very best, make you feel even more miserable? After all, such is the nature of theatrical serial killers that they distract attention from the very social disasters that produce them.
On a partisan reading, this film could be seen as a ruthless and dishonest attack on the Church of Satan — a bunch of perfectly polite gentlemen who do not believe in any god but see Satan as their aesthetic identification point because of its rebellious spirit. Don’t let creatively bankrupt auteurs pull your leg.
Read a good book instead. Read something that will make you more sympathetic, wholesome and aware of the real world, such as Beautiful Joe, an 1893 novel by Margaret Marshall Saunders which contributed to worldwide awareness of animal cruelty.
Or, at the very least, watch Eric Romer’s A Summer’s Tale, but don’t let its description (“a romantic comedy”) deceive you — it’s sheer existential horror and the torment of choice without end.
Just don’t watch “Crappylegs”.
