Longlegs (2024, Dir. Osgood Perkins):
Moviemaking as an art form has always relied on showmanship—You’ve never seen anything like this!—but as a genre, horror movies thrive on it. That’s why we watch them, anyway; to get ambushed by surprise, to thrill to directorial sleight of hand. Gory or bloodless, psychological or supernatural, a memorable horror film puts one over on us even when we know the scares are coming, shorts out our neural defenses, gives us what we expect and subverts it: You may be ready, but are you ready for this? Good horror movies tend to muster up at least one or two of these moments, enough to induce nervous laughter; great ones do the same, only they freeze the blood.
So it’s probably no coincidence that some of cinema’s best promotional gimmicks—the equivalent of a carnival showman fanning up audience frenzy for the main event—are tied to horror films. Hitchcock’s doozy of an ad campaign for Psycho (1960) revealed much without revealing a single frame from the actual film, capped with an audacious warning: No one will be allowed into the theater to watch the movie once it has begun. Like moths to the flame, audiences flocked, eager to see what the fuss was about, only to stumble out of theaters like disaster survivors, having witnessed hitherto unseen sights such as a cross-dressing serial killer, the film’s star killed off in the first third of the movie, even the forbidden image (at that time) of a flushing toilet!
Psycho was a rare, happy case of the finished product exceeding the hype; so too was Alien (1979), which used one of the best movie taglines ever (“In space no one can hear you scream”) and a trailer that was a piece of art by itself. Claustrophobic and panicky, it was even more frenzied than Ridley Scott’s movie, yet an accurate representation of it, with a sly doling out of spoilers (pay close attention and you’ll notice that the blink-quick shots of each character in the back half of the trailer are from the moments just before their demise).
Often the promotional gimmickry is so good it outdoes the movie itself. Take The Blair Witch Project, which in hindsight comes off as a respectable if flawed found-footage chiller, but a ton of audience members in 1999 believed this shit was real, thanks to a marketing push that insisted on the film’s true origins and took advantage of that newfangled thing called the Internet to become one of pop culture’s first viral sensations.
Audiences today are so well-versed in horror movie tropes that it’s difficult to trot out a movie that promises something truly memorable or original. Longlegs achieved this feat and built a ton of lead-up buzz thanks to its killer marketing campaign. The setup—a Silence of the Lambs procedural featuring Nicholas Cage as a wacko serial killer—seemed commonplace enough, until this simple little clip frazzled everyone’s nerves.
The message was straightforward: You may think you know what you’re getting, but you really have no idea. Instant cult classic, crowed hundreds of Redditors and YouTube commenters, even though none had seen the film, but the anticipation was enough to propel Longlegs to over $100 million in grosses, easily the most for an indie movie in 2024.
The bald truth is that Longlegs isn’t a great horror movie, maybe not even a good one, but its first three minutes makes good on the promise of the promotional fervor. Director Osgood Perkins (son of Anthony Perkins from Psycho) lingers on each element for maximum dread: wintry landscape, an isolated house, an ugly seventies station wagon, a lone girl in peril, and (the scene’s one stroke of genius) a view of the murderous Longlegs (Cage) from the chin down, as if the camera, just like the girl, is too scared to look him in the eye. “What happens if I…” Longlegs teases, then hops down into the frame to reveal himself for a subliminal second as we cut to the film’s title—and just like that, we’re hooked, as we were with the promotional video, already scared out of our wits, with the full Cage experience yet to be unleashed.
Sad to say, the rest of the movie doesn’t hit the same heights. Not that that’s unusual—even good horror films are often just jewels of moments encased in the amber of boring stuff like plot and characters. But there’s a particular disappointment that comes with a movie that front-loads its best scare right out of the gate. Longlegs’ plot is legible enough even as it delves into the supernatural, and if Maika Monroe (It Follows) makes for an unconvincing FBI agent, she’s just fine as the dogged heroine on Cage’s trail. But though Longlegs’ opening scene hints at further bananas moments to come, a payoff to all this pent-up unease, the remainder doesn’t live up to the hype. Compare this scene below with the film’s opening:
This is Cage dipping into his usual bag of self-indulgent tricks, reduced to a clown in pancake makeup as he lets his freak flag fly. Just as his character loses its stature as the story goes, so does Longlegs lose its dread, as it busies itself with family trauma, satanic dollmaking and a climax that’s supposed to be galvanizing but comes off as a bloody shrug. While the film’s studied atmosphere and hushed tones suggest the accoutrements of a prestige thriller, it contains none of the substance, and can’t offer any scares to compensate.
And yet, we can’t escape the gravity of that opening moment, the anticipation it brings, as if there’s a better movie out there somewhere that can be conjoined with this beginning. Sometimes a horror movie asks us Are you ready for this? and shirks from delivering on that enticing insinuation—but for all its faults, at least Longlegs gives us a moment that supplies the thrill of what might come, if not the release. ■
