The Nine Circles of Hell - The New Oz Perkins Film Longlegs is Breathtaking

Warning as usual, this article is full of spoilers, please see film first!

Argh, new nightmare unlocked!

On this planet, there is possibly nothing creepier than a surgically enhanced Nicolas Cage blowing you kisses, singing happy birthday. This is the gist of Oz Perkins' recently released horror picture Longlegs. But another paramount takeaway is that, congratulations Mr. Perkins, you are our new shooting star in the skies of horror, an auteur of our own!

Let's first have a look at this delicious work of art which charms with beautiful and clever point of view shots, marvelous set designs and lightning, clashes of warm and cold colors in locations, and the combination of all these as a visual feast right from scene one!

All these technical assets aside, this movie repulses AND amuses at the same time with one of the most unique villains in horror history, Longlegs, with his magical craft, eerie outbursts, and disgusting antiques.

At first glance, Longlegs is a kind of homage, a bow to one of horror cinema's staples; The Silence of the Lambs (1991). A newbie FBI agent, a woman of almost autistic traits and supernatural intuition, is given a case of a series of murders of utmost brutality. Each murder involves the father of the family going berserk and killing his wife and daughter, whose birthdays always fall on the 14th of a month. Lee Harker is able to find an algorithm and to decipher the letters written by Longlegs in some unknown codex, and what she finds there leads her to her very own story, to her mother, and to a fateful past encounter.

The similarities between the two pictures are by no means limited to their lead characters; the respective villains, Buffalo Bill and Longlegs share some uncanny features as well.

The widely known critique that American horror cinema has massively contributed to sexually motivated hate, i.e. homophobia or transphobia, does hold weight. Classically seen, many villains, besides being non-traditional people who think outside the box (a trait inherited from Shakespeare's progressive and matter-of-fact villains), represent people who "threaten" the system with their behavior, including sexual behavior. So it has become a sort of a convention that horror villains more often than not have some sort of sexual attribute which deviates from the societal norm, contributing to stigmatization in real life. I underline emphatically that I don't equate any one of these to another, in the case of Lambs versus Longlegs, transsexuality to pedophilia. What is highlighted here is that there is an added sexual component to villains in these movies, which aims to exclude and estrange the villain a little more; from Angela "chick with a dick" in Sleepaway Camp, to Buffalo Bill who wanted to be in a woman's skin, to Freddy Krueger and the Nightmare on Elm Street series, where it is only hinted at that he was a child molester, and let's not forget Hellraiser which is all about SM... And now we have Longlegs who has an unhealthy interest in girls around the age of nine.

 

Both Buffalo Bill and Longlegs also have that rock-star-ish, slightly feminine energy and a keen interest in music. Given that Longlegs opens with a quote from the T-Rex song "Get It On" (Well, you're slim and you're weak; You've got the teeth of the hydra upon you; You're dirty, sweet and you're my girl) which also plays during the end credits, and that the titular villain has portraits of both Marc Bolan as well as Lou Reed hanging in his house, I think we can safely say that this baddie is inspired by 70s era hippie rock, which, of course, is very very cool. It is, by the way, another Shakespearian trait for the villain to be cool. For comparison, Buffalo Bill was based on serial killers. 

 

A second film I felt reminded of while watching Longlegs is David Fincher's Seven, which is one of my all-time favorites and my personal bar that is hard to reach for any film. While religion is the central motive in Seven, the religious aspect only slowly, gradually creeps into Longlegs so that it is only at the end of the movie that we know who we are dealing with and to whom Longlegs reports to. The solving of the mystery was for my taste a little spoon-fed and I pined for the delicious subtlety that Oz Perkins' previous movie, The Blackcoat's Daughter (2015), offered, but hey, no one is that perfect.

The kind of Satanism displayed in Longlegs is unusual, if not somewhat underdevelopped. There is heavy Christian imagery, crosses and Jesus figures in the homes of the people who hail to Satan, a massive Jesus on a cross on one of the crime scenes, the dolls that spread mayhem are delivered under the cover of "a present from the Church" so that the lines between the two religions are extremely blurry throughout the whole movie. Unlike in Seven, the religious aspect, especially this apparent affection of Satanists for Jesus, didn't make much sense to me and felt feeble, more like a parody of Satanism.

Let's move back to the above mentioned technical wonders of Longlegs - this director has a beautiful own language in film, he totally rules it. Whether it is the view point into a room through the entrance door of another, or breath-taking light effects, the claustrophobia of dark wood as a construction material, the chill and coldness of winter as opposed to the warmth of light - there is so much going on here and it's a banquet for the horror lover, it's a feast. 

 

The quiet overall tone is often interrupted, pierced by deafening outbursts of stringed instruments so loud that the audience can't help but jump out of their seats. These outbursts are so exaggerated that they give you the impression of a farce jump scare, an excessive version that mocks its original. It makes you wonder if it might even be an allusion to one of horror cinema's most infamous scenes which makes use of the same auditive instrument: namely the shower scene in Psycho (1960) in which the villain is played by, surprise surprise, the director's father, Anthony Perkins.

Combine these auditively induced jump scares with the visuals of a surgically altered Nicolas Cage in all his glorious and unashamed... Nicolas Cage-ness, and you have a nightmare of an interesting sort. The movie often blurs the fine line between humor and horror, an impression I may have gained by Cage's extravagant acting performance but he so suits it. This movie is the Nicolas Caige of horror movies. Does that make sense?

My final verdict is that this was exquisite, spine-chilling, beautiful and gives you a lot to chew on. I watched it Friday and went back to the cinema on Monday to re-watch it, it's that good. It is as big newspapers say; If you're going to watch only one horror movie this year, make it this one.