‘Longlegs’: How Osgood Perkins’ Film Became the Scariest Movie of the Summer
Longlegs is the horror event of the summer—a serial killer thriller that plays like a nightmarish swirl of The Silence of the Lambs, Seven, Psycho and Zodiac, albeit with far less rationality and considerably more demonic derangement.
Featuring a maniacal performance from an unrecognizable Nicolas Cage as a fiend who preys upon young girls, it’s the kind of movie that lingers long after the credits have rolled, its shocking images burned into the brain. A genre film whose superficial conventionality masks underlying insanity, it’s a saga of mothers, children, intuition, and dark idolatry that unnerves by providing few comforting answers to its bizarre secrets.
Part procedural, part fairy tale, Longlegs is a uniquely demented affair, if also the recognizable work of Osgood Perkins, who infuses it with the same off-kilter menace and dreamy deviance that he brought to his prior The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, and Hansel & Gretel.