Longlegs is a film so obsessed with subtext that it often loses sight of delivering satisfying text. It is understandable why it might have lost some audiences – and critics – on that basis. But the best horror is often found when reading between the lines. The darkest, most impactful moments found in Osgood Perkins’ atmospheric nightmare are the ones which leak into our reality, as the cultural and political mainstream attempt to re-cast the 1990s as the last ‘normal’ era of safety and fun.
In 20 years (if I am still alive, and civilisation still exists in a form where cinemas can function), if a film festival was to ask me to programme a night of films to summarise the year 2024, I couldn’t do better than a double-bill of Twisters and Longlegs. Starting off the screening, a tedious tribute act of a movie, attempting to gloss over two decades of inconvenient history, and pretend that the cracks in capitalist democracy are simply not there.
Twisters came out in the same year as Hurricanes Helene and Milton showed that the American ruling elite has done nothing to learn from the devastation of Katrina. It is a haunting insight into a world where ‘unprecedented’ storms can spend two decades getting steadily worse (and become very much ‘precedented’), and rather than improving infrastructure to help you survive the storms you can’t afford to escape, the best the elite can stretch to is making light entertainment of the fact you are now unemployed/homeless/dead. But it is supposed to be a bit of fun, harking back to a simpler, happier time of the 1990s. A time where people still saw the idea of a really big tornado as a bit of thrilling entertainment – something to be survived, and then forgotten – rather than an omen of a far greater climate crisis ahead, which the powers that be ought to be make (expensive) preparations for.
More broadly – due to Bill Clinton’s success at getting some lines on a chart to go upwards – has been framed by centrists as a way to get the forces of decay back in the box. With no ideas left to sell, the Democrats and their client-artists in the Hollywood studio system are doubling down on nostalgia. Of suggesting that America (or the West as a whole) is fine – there are no problems a few rodeos and firework displays can’t set right.
Longlegs is the perfect companion to Twisters, because its main goal is to scythe down this misty-eyed longing for a return to the 90s. The story follows fledgling FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), as she is assigned to a case involving a series of murder-suicides in Oregon. Harker is fast-tracked onto the case because she exhibits signs of clairvoyance – something the FBI unflinchingly approaches as real, and not coincidence.
Writer-director Osgood Perkins has some direct motives for this. He needs to make it clear he isn’t interested in producing a detective procedural. We aren’t being invited to try and solve anything – the protagonist can pull the answers out of her intuition whenever the plot deems necessary. At the same time, the audience needs to be primed for moments of fantastical horror which can creep their way into the seemingly banal every-day.
But perhaps there is another angle to this. Perkins may also be priming us for moments of supreme bureaucratic absurdity akin to The Men Who Stare at Goats. He may be pushing us to contextualise the institution’s shortcomings within the dominant ideology of the 90s. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 90s were the birth of the ‘unipolar moment’, in which America became the world’s only super-power. The victory of individualist capitalism was presented as complete. In this moment, overconfidence in the American state became increasingly prevalent – while individualism became the only way of understanding and addressing any problem unfolding.
By the end of the decade, these conditions would lead to the infamous Columbine massacre. A school shooting, which occurred after two years of police interaction with the killers, and which yielded no meaningful changes after in response – to either address the causes of the incident, or make it harder for others to carry out similar attacks. Mass shootings have continued for decades since, with incompetent police somehow ‘caught out’ every time, and are still framed as the actions of an individual, rather than part of any wider social or political problems. – a school shooting which might have been a watershed moment akin to Dunblane, were it not for this toxic ideological concoction.
Is it any wonder, then, that the killer known as Longlegs is having such an easy time evading the FBI? Not only is the institution seemingly convinced of its own infallibility – to the extent its actors are able to immediately convince themselves one of its members is a psychic, and not just lucky – but every agent is steadfast in their belief that this could only be acting alone. Even when all the evidence suggests otherwise.
Each case involves a father killing his family and himself, leaving behind a letter with Satanic coding signed “Longlegs”, whose handwriting belongs to none of the family members. So, somehow the person masterminding the series of killings is convincing the victims to go violently to their own graves.
Now, I’ve waited long enough, but it’s time to talk about the man himself.
There’s a danger when tackling any Nicolas Cage film, that your article will inevitably become pre-occupied entirely with Cage’s performance. There is so much to say about his turn as Dale Kobble, in Longlegs, but it’s the way that Osgood Perkins uses the performance that I think is most important here.
Cage’s character is like if David Firth animated a megachurch pastor. The grotesquery of his plastic visage is only surpassed by the saccharine tone of voice he deploys as he tries to lull his victims into a shocked hypnotic state – he is a stoat with a facelift, dancing about in front of hopelessly entranced rabbits, who can only cower in meek terror as they placidly await their fate.
Kobble’s spellbinding techniques range from nauseating cooing – sickly-sweet flattery and gift-giving – to a bone-chilling improvised song, which Cage delights in tearing through like a glam rock demon. In a post-Reagan America, where swathes of the population have seen what little social security they had pulled from beneath their feet – and the Democrat President whose portrait now hangs above every FBI boss’ desk has continued that legacy – people are desperate enough to mistakenly see the soft-voiced showman as a source of salvation, rather than a bringer of doom.
Releasing this in an election year – amid the previously mentioned scrambling to recontextualise the 90s – this already seemed like a pointed move. Initially, the Presidential Election was set to be contested by two ageing husks, sporting multiple face-lifts and hair transplants – a pair of dried out, murderous mummies masquerading as not only human, but as your friends and saviours. Able to exploit the hopelessness caused by the rapacious capitalism of the late 20th century to get close enough to fresh victims, who will deliver them new opportunities to build on that legacy.
But the twist in the film’s third act adds a whole prophetic layer to that (stop here to avoid spoilers). Because mid-way through this election cycle, the grift finally became too obvious. Joe Biden’s last functioning brain-cell finally disintegrated, and suddenly American discourse was awash with questions about choosing between two murderous old men without the mental capacity to serve as President. The Democrats rolled the dice, and forced him to promote Kamala Harris to lead their ticket.
In the climax of Longlegs, meanwhile, Agent Harker’s clairvoyance delivers Kobble to the FBI. Before brutally taking his own life, he reveals that he has not been acting alone. He hints at an accomplice – someone younger, with a more trustworthy face. But it is not something the FBI are willing to countenance. The individual responsible for the killings is dead, and with that, the case is over.
In a final confrontation, however, Harker finds too late that this is not the case – and that the violence will continue, perpetrated by a woman she has known and trusted her entire life. In the final moments of the film, we see that evil does not die with one man. It can continue to live on in as many vessels as it needs to, and in many different shapes. Harker’s mother is not the disgusting piece of stapled leather that Kobble’s character was, and yet the same ideas that informed his reign of terror now live on in her.
Perkins can’t have known Kamala would end up as the Democrat’s Presidential candidate, but at some point, mainstream politics would have needed new vessels to carry on the same horrors from before. At the same time, he also pre-empted the motives being offered for backing her at the polls in 2024 – having unflinchingly adopted Joe Biden’s genocide apologism.
20 years before the events of the film, Longlegs visited the Harker residence. Begging for the life of her daughter, Ruth Harker was offered a choice: die, or help deliver other victims. Kill or be killed. And now, this is largely the basis on which the Harris campaign has taken to courting the electorate. Insisting that Israel tearing up international human rights laws in Gaza is someone else’s problem, Harris’ camp has suggested at least it won’t aggressively pursue abortion rights or the LGBT+ community in the way a second Trump White House would.
“I won’t stop the killing – but if you keep me around, maybe it will be someone else who gets killed.”
The uncomfortable questions that Longlegs surfaces in its subtext are the most pervasive form of dread Perkins drums up, then. They leak into our everyday lives – and refuse to leave us alone in our quiet complicity. In the 90s, however fun, free and Twisters-like we would like to pretend they were, the elite has nothing positive to offer to strengthen its support base, so it needs someone to attack. Minorities, people on social security, the trans community, Palestinians. The same remains true now, as we revive that mythical era. So, how many families would you be willing to slaughter to keep your own alive? How many mothers, fathers and children could you justify aiding and abating the murder of for that outcome? How long do you think you can keep this up before it ends up coming back to hurt the ones you love anyway?
As long as we remain trapped in our own trolley-problems, weighing up ‘lesser evils’ on a four-year cycle, we won’t be able to move beyond this cycle – and the number of ‘others’ to direct violence towards will only shrink. Eventually, our chickens will come home to roost, too. Until then, as Kobble’s demented song (delivered in a whimpering falsetto by Cage) would have it, the decaying purveyors of dominant ideology will keep coming back for more blood.
“NOT ONCE
NOT TWICE
BUT AS MANY TIMES AS I
LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIKEEEEE”