Longlegs, billed as 2024’s scariest horror movie, is actually pretty hilarious
If you’ve heard anything at all about Longlegs, the new horror movie starring Nicolas Cage, you’ve probably seen someone claiming it’s one of the scariest movies ever made. From the movie’s excellent marketing to the avalanche of disturbed reactions from early screenings, all of the buzz ahead of this movie is that it’s utterly terrifying. It isn’t, though. Most horror fans aren’t likely to find it scary at all — which doesn’t stop it from being a great, supremely creepy movie. Longlegs situates itself in the long line of classic horror-thrillers like The Shining and The Silence of the Lambs — movies that are better at making people squirm than making them jump. Director Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter) is clearly more interested in hearing audiences’ nervous laughs than just their screams.
On its face, the movie is a fairly straightforward serial-killer hunt with a few supernatural twists. Horror veteran Maika Monroe (It Follows) plays Lee Harker, a young FBI agent who seems unusually talented and intuitive. As a result, she gets assigned to investigate one of the FBI’s longest-standing mysteries: a series of brutal killings in which a father murdered his family in their own home, then killed himself as well. The only things linking these killings is that a daughter in the family has a birthday on the 14th of the month and that at each of the crime scenes is an encoded, seemingly Satanist note from someone who calls himself Longlegs. But there’s no evidence that anyone outside the family was ever at any of the homes when the crimes occurred.
Perkins’ script plays out all this setup with a deft hand, pulling in visual and narrative references from movies like Zodiac, Seven, and The Silence of the Lambs to help orient the audience as quickly as possible. Within the first 20 minutes or so, we already know all the details about the case and everyone involved, which frees Perkins to start infusing the movie with his unique brand of off-kilter creepiness.
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