Title: Longlegs
Director: Osgood Perkins
Year: 2024
Genre: Horror / Occult Horror
Starring: Maika Monroe, Blair Underwood, Nicolas Cage, Alicia Witt
Every episode of Scooby-Doo is a tragedy. You get sucked in by the ghost, the mysterious circumstances, and the Halloween color palette of Daphne and Velma. But the writers always ruin the party by solving the mystery. Kids don’t mind that the mystery gets solved the same way every time — they mind because the mystery holds so much intrigue and the solution holds so much banality.
Longlegs gives viewers the Scooby-Doo treatment. A reasonable viewer will eventually say, if that’s the solution, I’d rather the mystery stay unsolved.
With extreme spoilers ahead, let’s rank the film’s explanations from least annoying to most unforgivable:
6. Kobble likes T-Rex.
Good band, least justification needed. Think of the poor man’s plight — there’s not that much satanic music out there. He doesn’t seem to be a metal fan, but everyone likes music.
5. Kobble really likes Satan.
OK, fine. People like all sorts of things. I like pecans.
4. Satan wants Kobble to kill families.
Again, OK. I guess Satan likes destruction generally. All that Revelation talk hints at some cosmic plan – world domination, apocalypse – but nope. He just likes misery, apparently. Good one, Satan. Let’s stick it to Stan in marketing.
3. No one thinks it’s weird that a woman is delivering creepy dolls to people’s houses.
Look, I was alive in the ’90s. This was post–Satanic Panic. No way we’d have let her through the door.
2. Lee’s mom is effectively present at every massacre across thirty years.
Her penance (or bargain) is that she has to witness every murder in the flesh. And yet across all those heavily investigated murders, she leaves zero physical evidence or witnesses. OK, sure. Nobody ever notices a nun hauling an oversized doll through suburbia.
1. Stan and Kobble’s grand scheme
They kill families so that, if you line up the daughters’ birthdays on a calendar in a very specific way, it makes a triangle. Wow – Satan’s favorite shape. No apocalypse, just geometry homework. If there’s a sequel, maybe we’ll find out his favorite color or imaginary animal. (Safe bet: dragon, but I’m pulling for unicorn.)
Compare that to the explanations in other horror flicks:
Escape Room → rich people want to watch others die.
The Boogeyman → a monster’s hungry.
Simple, dumb, believable.
Given what Longlegs ultimately offers, I can’t help but feel something got cut for time, or filmed and didn’t work. You can feel the movie reaching for profundity – maybe Perkins painted himself into a corner. Maybe he thought, Guys, we’ve got Nic Cage. He can sell anything.
Half true. Cage sells Longlegs as profoundly unsettling, but he can’t de-lobotomize the revelations. Perkins, a promising talent, doesn’t yet have the juice to go full Lynch – and that’s a shame, because if the story writing were as thoughtful as the visuals, Longlegs could’ve been an all-timer.
The audience I saw it with literally said “nice shot” when Lee and Carter entered the ranch to find the first doll. The first half is genuinely creepy, beautifully paced, and visually rich. Lee’s house alone could have been the monster here. The unreciprocated buddy movie energy from Carter to Lee is genuinely funny. And of course, Cage, buried under white makeup and stringy hair, looks so haunting that a few black-metal bands will undoubtedly copy him.
If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably just relieved someone else had the same disappointments about Longlegs. But take that feeling seriously – the frustration comes from the lack of fulfillment, not the lack of talent. Perkins clearly has all the pieces in place to deliver a masterwork. I’m eagerly waiting for it.
