Longlegs Film: 5 Reasons Why it’s the Scariest Movie You Should Watch?
Longlegs Film has an 86% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but it certainly deserves a higher one. The film by Oz Perkins, son of the legendary Anthony Perkins (who played Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho), is a masterclass in crime cinema at its darkest, with a terrifying killer who is inspired by the protagonist’s own mother (Nicolas Cage revealed that he was inspired by her when building the villain) and with a detective who has been compared to Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling, but who has a unique voice and style.
The film follows a rookie FBI agent named Lee Harker, who has a special ability that leads her to be part of the team investigating the strange case of a serial killer. The killer, who calls himself Longlegs, murders families with young daughters and leaves a series of coded letters that are full of clues about his plan and identity but are almost impossible to decipher. Lee, played by the great Maika Monroe, must delve into the darkness and confront her own past to discover who is behind the brutal murders, which appear to have elements of Satanic rituals and are part of the sick fantasy of a disturbed and manipulative man. It’s a tense, slow-building film that builds a terrifying atmosphere that doesn’t need surprises or over-the-top scares to leave you feeling that something terrible is about to happen.
Longlegs Film: A Horror With Realistic Elements!
Longlegs‘ horror has some elements that may seem supernatural, but it actually opts for a more realistic type of horror, which talks about the danger of strangers, about violence that disguises itself as kindness or an innocent visitor, about fanaticism, and about cruelty. It’s a story that shows us how the mind of a real serial killer might work, and the monsters that hide in plain sight. The scariest thing about this story is that it quickly reveals that no one can be trusted and that we should fear humans more than ghosts, demons, or monsters.
A Terrifying Killer
The first moment we see Longlegs is hard to process, instinct makes you want to cover your eyes, but curiosity forces you to look, and what you discover is an unrecognizable, strange, and threatening Niclas Cage, an image that shocks, surprises, and stays etched in your mind for longer than you would like, making you feel like one of his victims. The decision to reveal it that way is intentional and it makes a lot of sense that Andrés Arochi, the director of photography, constructed it that way. Arochi says “The idea is that it is a memory of a girl. It was to play with the perspective of a little girl next to a taller character. This image came from Oz Perkins’ son, we were talking after eating and he was playing with his mother’s legs, getting between her legs, and from there we started to think about how he saw from there and to play with the idea of having the perspective of a child who can only see the legs.
Longlegs is such an intimidating character, that it is also her decision not to want to look at his face and not want to make eye contact with that person. She lowers her gaze and focuses on the hands.” Longlegs is a killer who wants to appear harmless to his victims but ends up causing the opposite effect, which tells us about his inability to behave like a normal human being and his lack of empathy and connection with reality.
“Creating that character was quite tricky because it’s right on a line where he can exist in real life, but if we pushed him one inch further, he would become somewhat unrealistic or could fall into a caricature or a fictional character. We also had certain characters that we wanted to move away from if we moved to one side he became the Joker, if we moved to the other he became Beetlejuice, and we wanted to do something closer to reality, a crazy person who wasn’t a monster, but someone who had plastic surgery, who loved glam rock, and we drew a lot from T. Rex and Lou Reed to create this character,” says Arochi about the construction of Longlegs.
References to Real Murderers and 90s Crime Films!
There is a clear reference to The Silence of the Lambs and Buffalo Bill in Longlegs, but there is also a very clear reference to the Zodiac Killer who, like Longlegs, left letters full of codes and strange symbols, as a way of mocking the authorities and showing them that he was completely sure that they would never find him. Longlegs does things his way, but these references make it strangely familiar and give it an extra layer of realism, which also brings up the issue of mental health and makes us question what could make a person turn into a monster.
“That was the goal, to represent this movie that takes place in the 90s and follows FBI agents. I really like 90s thrillers, and we wanted to do something that had a reference to that, but that looked new. At the same time, we have that whole part of the movie that takes place in the 70s and the way we decided to differentiate these two eras was based on the fact that the 90s was a very digital era, that’s when digital cinema started, so everything that happens in the 70s was filmed on 700-millimeter film with a square look, which separates it from how 90s movies look with widescreen. We started to play with different cameras to generate effects depending on each era,” says Arochi.
Great Performances by Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage
Without a doubt, Nicolas Cage is brilliant in this film and manages to build a memorable and disturbing villain, but every great villain needs an equally powerful counterpart, and that is where Maika Monroe comes in. Monroe has created an interesting and intriguing Lee Harker, full of secrets and traumas that she still carries around. Her character is a normal person on the surface, but there is something about her that makes her different and that makes her the only person who can find Longlegs and makes us think of characters like Danny Torrance or Stephen King’s Holly Gibney, who have a “shining” that makes them perceive the world differently and know and experience things that cannot be explained.
Cage’s performance was so unsettling that Maika Monroe was even shocked when she saw him for the first time, and there’s even a video in which you can hear how the sight of Cage in character affected her heart rate. And that reaction, which is shown in the interrogation scene in the film, was completely real. About the moment when Maika Monroe sees Longlegs for the first time, Arochi says “It was actually very funny because it was a huge complicity between all of us, that we hid from Longlegs and we didn’t want to show her what he looked like until that moment. It was fun to do the scene because, as we wanted to take advantage of the first time she sees him, the camera had to be on her, but we had Nicolas Cage dressed as Longlegs and it was impossible not to film, so it is one of the few scenes in the film that we filmed with two cameras, to respect and generate this atmosphere and for Maika to feel it. The whole team had to leave the room, so I had to operate two cameras at the same time and try not to be in their gaze so that they could both feel that mutual stimulation.”
It’s All in the Psychology!
One of the great successes of Longlegs, which hits Mexican theaters on August 29, is that it explores the psychology of the characters in depth, showing what lies behind Lee, but also the murderer and his motives for committing the crimes he commits, and what drives the degree of violence that occurs in the cases. Everything is explained and clarified, and it helps to understand the motivations, decisions, insecurities, and actions of these two protagonists, although it leaves some mysteries so you can fill them with your own theories and ideas of what is happening.
