Nicolas Cage’s last theatrical release (at the time of this post) is a real doozy. So it seems quite fitting that I come to this penultimate review in the WATC(H) not only on a high note from a quality watch perspective, but also during a specific time of the year that focuses on spooky shit! Since it’s nearly Halloween, what better time to review #110: 

Longlegs (2024)

To start with, Longlegs is not a film for the faint of heart. Directed by Osgood Perkins, this film puts on a Master class in how to create a very unsettling environment that just seems to get creepier and creepier the more you watch. While many films in the horror / psychological genre rely on “jump scares” and the “supernatural” to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and scream, Longlegs relies on the character(s) and the plot: twisted human elements and explanation-defying evil acts drive the suspense.

While exact comparisons will fall short, there are elements of terror in Longlegs that I haven’t seen fully realized since Silence of the Lambs and The Blair Witch Project. 

That’s not to say there are NO jump scares or supernatural elements in this film, but these serve a broader purpose and are enlivened by what you don’t know yet about the evil at play, and the heart-pounding puzzle that the good characters in the film slowly piece together.

I’ve said a lot already, so let’s get into the key plot points.

SPOILER WARNING: PLEASE STOP NOW AND GO WATCH THIS FILM. If you have any interest in horror or psychological thrillers, I can’t stress this enough. This one is probably worth your time. If you read this summary, you’ll know too much.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

Longlegs Summary

When Longlegs open the camera frame starts as a tight, rounded red square, similar to the view from an old school slide projector. 

Then, there’s a little prologue, the from the 70s band Thin Lizzy:

Well, you’re slim

And you’re weak

You’ve got the teeth of a hydra upon you.

You’re dirty sweet

And you’re my girl

T. Rex (1971)

Then a grainy looking image from a time before (late 70s, early 80s perhaps). A car pulls up to a remote white house in winter–snow covers the ground. The first perspective is from the car looking to an upper bedroom of the house that sits off the road some ways.  A young, maybe 9-year old girl, sits inside the house at a desk looking out from the second floor. She notices the car and looks out to see who has arrived. Putting on her winter clothes she goes outside to investigate and walks towards the vehicle.  As she nears the car, it looks dark inside, and she hears a noise behind her. She turns to see a figure quickly hide behind the back of her home. 

Approaching cautiously, the girl walks slowly to the back of the home and is startled when she turns to find a man there. He is wearing multiple layers of denim, a pink vest, a scarf, and he has long gray scraggly hair and white makeup on his face. At first you wonder whether or not he is a transvestite based on the makeup and clothes. 

His face is obscured, just his nose down is visible in the frame. He tells the girl in a high pitched but whispery voice:

“There she is, the almost birthday girl. Oh, it seems I wore my long legs today. What happens if I…?” 

And then he squats down quickly showing his face for a second to eerie music and then the scene cuts away. 

The camera frame starts to widen as the opening credits roll in to a raucous rock-n-roll song.

Part One: His Letters

The girl (we wonder or assume) is now an adult, Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) and an FBI Agent. Harker and her partner Agent Fisk (Dakota Daulby) are listening to the FBI debrief on a manhunt for a murder suspect. They are tasked with canvassing a neighborhood door-to-door in search of a middle-aged man, probably armed and dangerous. They roll up into a cloudy neighborhood (Portland) in the suburbs. Harker seems a bit distracted or introspective and Fisk mansplains how he should be the one to go and knock on the doors. While Fisk is knocking on a few doors, Harker scans the row of houses and finds one with a second floor window that catches her eye. She seems to know exactly where the man in question is hiding. She tells Fisk the suspect is in that specific house as if she has some inside information or intuition. Harker wants to call in for backup, but Fisk thinks they shouldn’t do this based on her “hunch” and goes to the door and knocks.

Someone comes down the stairs, opens the door and before Fisk can finish a question shoots Fisk in the head. Harker, who hung back from the front door, draws her weapon and runs into the home to chase down the suspect. 

Inside the home, plastic covers walls and ceilings. Searching the house, Harker climbs up the stairs and finds a man sitting on a bed facing away from her with his hands up, as if in surrender. 

The next scene opens with Agent Harker in a dark room looking at a blank projection on the wall. A voice outside of the room speaking through an intercom asks for her name and tells her to say the first word that comes to her mind as she looks through a series of images. This seems to be an abstract psychological test they are giving her (presumably to test her mental state after seeing the murder of her partner.) The images that show up are multi-colored geometric shapes–like from a modern art museum. She is then asked to guess a specific number from 0-100. When she fails to guess right, they ask her the same question again for multiple rounds.

Later we see Harker in a car on a stakeout with two more senior agents, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) and Agent Browning (Michelle Choi-Lee). Carter asks Harker how she beat the number generator eight times, but she replies that she also missed it eight times. Carter, still impressed, tells her that “half psychic is better than not psychic at all.”

Carter and Browning are investigating a brutal murder of a family of four, the Horns. The father murdered the family with a knife and then killed himself. But a letter was left with the bodies in a coded alphabet and not in the father’s hand or of anyone connected to the family. The agents tell Harker they have ten letters like this that were left in ten houses of ten families that were killed over the past thirty years. All signed with one word: Longlegs. They don’t know what is making the father’s commit these crimes or how this supposed serial killer is forcing his will upon these community-oriented family men. 

Browning doesn’t think Harker is ready for this kind of case, but Carter doesn’t think they have another option. 

Carter is curious how Harker knew about the suspect being in the house in the previous case where Fisk was shot. She can’t explain it, but says it felt as if someone was tapping her on the shoulder.

Carter explains that with the current Longlegs case all the victims have daughters who have a birthday on the fourteenth of any given month, but only the Horns were actually murdered on that actual date. Harker begins to sort through the case files and organize murders by day and case file.

Harker gets so immersed in the case file research she falls asleep until Carter comes to relieve her of her duties and takes her out for a drink (even though she doesn’t drink.) Harker informs Carter that the murder weapons (knife, gun, hammer) used are all from inside the house of the murders, but there’s no evidence that Longlegs ever enters any of the homes. The letters were the only evidence that Longlegs was ever there. They speculate that he must be telling these men (somehow influencing them) to commit these murders (which Carter says is reminiscent of Charles Manson).

Carter gets a ride home from Harker and then persuades her to come inside and meet his wife and daughter. She doesn’t really want to. It’s pretty evident at this point that Harker has to be neuro-divergent as she seems unable to pick up on social cues and appears very stoic / non-feeling in her interactions with others.

Harker returns to her home after midnight and hears strange noises, rustling, as she enters her very dark (and very depressing) log cabin style home. Once inside she calls her mother on the phone and tells her that she is having trouble sleeping. While on the phone she hears sounds and someone loudly pounds on her front door. Alarmed, she draws her weapon and goes to the door to see what is going on. No one replies, so she chains the front door closed and looks out into her yard where she’s a silhouette out in the woods. With gun drawn she looks around in the woods where she saw the figure and turns back to her home and notices someone walking through her living room slowly to the back of the house.) She heads back into the house with her gun pointing and finds that a letter has been left on her desk. It says Lee Harker and Do Not Open Until January 14th. 

Part Two: All Of Your Things

Harker opens the letter left in her home and it is a child’s birthday card (a hippo holding the number 9) with the strange coded cypher on it and it is signed Longlegs. (Words on the inside: Stood On the Sands of the Sea.) The ink was still wet. Harker pulls open a Bible that was lying on her desk and then begins to decipher the coded message, circling three diagonally aligned “6”s. From here she is able to crack the rest of the message which reads: 

Tell them how you got this. How it came into your hand and I’ll cut off her hanging milk tits and bleed your mommy dead.

Harker then gets called into another crime scene with a similar profile as the other murders: father kills family and then kills himself. With the cipher Harker has discovered she is able to quickly decode the message at this new house that says, “Down Low, Too Slow.” The dead family had been decaying in the home for almost a month and the child was thought to be 9 or 10 years old.  

Back at the station, Harker tells her mom she is going to be busy for a while because of the case she is working and that she might not be able to get home to see her. Harker’s mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt), wants to know if she will see Harker for her birthday the next week, but Harker says only that she would “try” to come see her. Ruth asks if Harker is still saying her prayers and that the prayers are what protect them from the devil. 

Harker continues to dig deeper into the case looking into Satanic cult activity and symbols, and other news reports related to the murders that she finds on some old microfiche records. Puzzling through the dates of the girls who have been murdered compared with their birthdays, she finds that the numbers form a pattern (an algorithm) that when plotted out creates an inverted triangle (which also happens to be present in a Satanic symbol.) Decoding all the Longlegs messages, Harker also found a pattern that they all mention the “fine time we had” at the Camera family farm where “X’s marked the spot”.

Uncovering this murder story, Harker discovers that at the Camera family farm, the local priest was making his weekly visit when the father of the house went crazy, killed the priest and his wife and then himself. Since their daughter Cary Anne (Kiernan Shipka) was at school and not home at the time, she was the only survivor. The murders took place six days from her birthday, and she ended up in a mental hospital (where she still currently resides).

Carter and Harker decide to go investigate the Camera family farm for some clues and hope to interview Cary Anne because they think maybe she saw Longlegs that day. At the Camera family farm, a series of “x”s taped over the outer door mark the spot of the abandoned barn.

They enter the dark and creepy building / barn, make their way up to the hayloft area. They find a crucifix affixed to the floorboard and covered with some hay. Dislodging the wood beneath the crucifix, they find a piece of paper with an inverted triangle and a smiley face inside it. Beneath this is a secret compartment / box, which Carter opens, and inside is a very creepy doll / dummy that looks like a child who survived Chernobyl or something with lifelike strands of hair, eyelashes, mouth, etc. 

The agents take the doll back to a forensic scientist to have it analyzed. The scientist is creepily impressed by the doll which has been designed and built by a skilled craftsman. It has human hair (what little remains) and is ceramic and highly detailed. It also had a silver ball inside its head that makes a piercing sound when electrical current is applied to it. Doing so, seems to trigger some psychological response for Harker. She has some vision of Longlegs talking to a young girl / Cary Anne in a basement workroom. Longlegs puts a black blanket over her head. The scientist then tells Carter that he could have sworn that the ball was saying his ex-wife’s name over and over again. Carter asks the scientist if the brain could be opened up and he says it could, but that it probably wouldn’t help because there is nothing inside of it.

Part 3: Birthday Girls

Harker and Carter decide to visit Carrie Anne at the mental hospital where she is being held. The head of the facility is surprised that Carrie Anne is receiving another guest in the span of a week (?) and comments that the visitor really improved Carrie’s mood and condition. Rather than being catatonic (her norm) Carrie is now very conversational. When the agents ask about the previous guest, the director of the facility looks in the guestbook log and discovers that whoever visited Carrie had printed the name Lee Harker and hadn’t provided any identification since the facility doesn’t require it. (Yeah, right.) 

Carrie Anne talks fondly about her visitor (much like one of the Manson cult) and talks knowingly about Lee as if they shared some commonality or history. After this interaction and based on all the clues left so far, Carter correctly believes that Longlegs has some relationship or tie to Harker and that Longlegs may have had some close contact with her as a child. Carter encourages Harker to return home and ask her mother about the police report she filed when an intruder tried to enter the Harker home / property about the time of Lee’s 9th birthday. 

Harker returns home to question her mother–who seems to be a somewhat disturbed religious fanatic and hoarder. Harker’s mother talks about the sacrifices she’s made for Harker so that she can have a life but she is worried about her daughter’s lack of prayer / faith. Rather than fully explain what happened on the day of the intruder (so long ago) Ruth tells Harker that she has kept everything up in her room and that she should start there. Sorting through some old polaroids, Harker finds the photo she took of Longlegs (on that wintery day we witnessed at the very beginning of the film.) She somehow knows that this picture is the man who is Longlegs and the police put out an APB for his capture and arrest.

The police find Longlegs with his suitcase at a rural bus stop and he does not resist arrest. Back at the FBI station, a group of agents watch the interrogation of Longlegs, a.k.a. Dale Ferdinand Kobble, who does a creepy serenade rendition of Happy Birthday to You and says that he’s “the friend of the friend” who lives downstairs, and that he will only speak directly to Lee Harker. Fearing that Longlegs still may have accomplices and that another murder may be forthcoming, Harker agrees to talk to Longlegs.

Alone in the interrogation room, Longlegs greets the “almost” birthday girl in his uber-creepy fashion and talks about how “they” had a long laugh when they heard of Harker’s choice to go into law enforcement. He answers Harker’s questions in cryptic psycho-babble, speaking again of the main downstairs and how soon he’ll be “everywhere” and that Harker is the seventh she who will be given the same choice as the others “crimson or clover”. Then at the end of his conversation, he yells “Hail Satan” before slamming his head violently against the table he is sitting at, crushing his skull to smithereens, and bloodying his face until he is dead. 

In shock, Harker can only stare at the dead corpse of Longlegs. Leaving the room, she is questioned by Carter who is furious that Longlegs will not face justice for his crimes, berates Harker and sends her back home in his anger. 

Agent Browning drives Harker back to her family home where she searches for her mother. Not finding her immediately, she turns back to the car she came in, where she witnesses her mother shoot Agent Browning, murdering her in cold blood with a shotgun. Running from this horrific scene, Harker finds (or funs by) Longlegs car covered in a garage. Then Harker sees her mother pointing a weapon at one of Longlegs creepy dolls that looks eerily similar to Harker her. Ruth says that it’s finished and shoots a round into the doll’s head destroying the metal ball inside and releasing a black gaseous substance. Harker passes out and awakes in a basement.

Upon waking memories come flooding back and Harker remembers that her mother was captured by Longlegs back on her 9th birthday. After being hog-tied, Ruth was given the choice to either help him deliver his dolls to unsuspecting families (as an imposter nun representing the church) OR face the victim’s fate–death for Lee and her at his hands. Ruth agrees to assist in the murders by delivering his creepy voodoo dolls into the home and witnesses the fallout that the psycho-subliminal messaging spheres were playing on the innocent. 

In the basement, Harker realizes that Longlegs had been living in her home (Mr. Downstairs) all these years and her own doll had prevented her from remembering any of it. The mind control / devil magic of the dolls had kept her in the dark even though we saw snapshots of Longlegs and a young girl throughout the film. 

Then Harker realizes that it’s Agent Carter’s daughter who is celebrating a birthday, and Ruth is no longer at home. In a panic, Harker takes Longlegs car and drives to Carters home for Ruby Carter’s birthday party. Things have already started to progress in a downward spiral when she arrives as Carter and his wife are acting very erratic, Ruby is playing with one of Longlegs creepy demonic doll’s and Ruth is sitting on the couch in nun’s habit. Harker tries to remain calm and get Ruby and the Carter family to understand that they are in danger, but this makes Agent Carter, now possessed by the dark magic, even more angry. Harker tries to reason with her mother as well, but Ruth is already long gone from serving Longlegs all those years. 

In the end Agent Carter forces his wife into the kitchen and can be heard stabbing her to death with a knife. When Agent Carter returns, Harker is forced to shoot him to protect Ruby. In response, Ruth tries to stab Harker, which means Harker has to shoot her, too, and she does splattering her brains all over the front window. In the end, Harker separates Ruby from the doll and tries to shoot it as well, but she runs out of bullets. The scene flashes to Longlegs back in the interrogation room laughing maniacally and blowing a kiss.

Roll credits.

Unsettling Intrigue

There is a claustrophobic element to most really good horror movies. It’s that feeling in the back of your mind that there’s an unsettling pattern just beyond your reach–something not quite right hiding just there in the shadows–but easing you steadily towards that eventual revelation. 

Longlegs jump-starts this awareness of impending doom by introducing us to Longlegs in the opening frame. We get a glimpse of the devil himself–enough to know he’s a creature not right in the head and that we really don’t like him–cause he’s creepy and has no business being in the vicinity of any child. But then he’s immediately eclipsed again into shadow and time. 

The brutal murders we discover are not by his hand. His face, unlike those of Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger, is not seen for a very long time. But he is the “architect” working behind the scenes, inside coded, knowing messages, and with an unholy design and reasoning. 

What’s also unsettling is the knowledge that we have that Longlegs pursuer, the force for good, in the film, Lee Harker, has some unknown tie to him. Even she is unsettling because of how she responds to the world–whether from neurodivergence, a neurotic nurturing, or the trauma that lies eclipsed from dark magic inside her head. In literature, she would almost be seen as an unreliable narrator because we are not sure about the veracity or reliability of her memories or inner motivations. 

At various times, Harker has visions of snakes writhing in a dark room under red lights. She sees a basement with doll maker tools, or glimpses of Longlegs (in her mind or memories?) sitting at rest–plotting the next evil acts he will inflict upon the world.

Even the setting has a way of adding to the unease: the overcast skies, the empty suburban streets, the rural highways, and poorly lit office rooms reflect an abysmal void where warmth, light, and hope are squeezed to obsolescence. As we get closer to the truth of the matter of who Longlegs is and how he knows Harker so intimately, the suffocation actually gets worse, not better. 

The third act culminates in gut-punching unveilings and heart-wrenching complicity. Not that Harker is to blame for what she can’t know, but that she was powerless to stop it. That her mother was incapable of protecting them because as was mentioned several times, “no one ever came to visit them.” While the film quickly builds to its final showdown between Harker and Longlegs posthumous darkness and dolls, there are less similarities between this film and Silence of the Lambs and more similarities with films like Seven and The Blair Witch project. While those latter films leave little to no hope at all for the protagonists, Longlegs is ambiguous, and therefore also unsettling. Can the doll even be destroyed or will Longlegs live on everywhere, in bits and pieces, on the “father’s wings” as he alluded to. We don’t know. 

And that’s disturbing in and of itself.

Was Cage Right for the Role

Unless it’s a serious role that he is playing “straight up” (as I like to say) with no embellishment, the answer to this question is always YES. Yes, Nicolas Cage was right for this role. BUT some people I know who have seen this film said they had a hard time taking it seriously because of Nicolas Cage being Nicolas Cage. But who better to play a character like this? Do I want to see Liam Neeson taking on the transy-glam Satanist? How about, I don’t know, Tom Hanks, or Timothee Chalamet? No, hell no. The criticism (I guess) was that the film wasn’t a scary horror film–that Cage’s “over-the-top” acting style broke the mood or affected it in some negative way.

I can’t disagree more. He’s the type of unsettling, unconventional type character that makes for a truly creepy serial killer and cultist. To me this film was a good horror film in that it built a steady simmering tension that boils up and over from unconscious to conscious mind–we start off believing that the problem is with a twisted human with dark and violent appetites–and we end up believing in a demonic force with the power to manipulate and mold the very thoughts in the human mind. It’s pretty horrifying and like I’ve said, unsettling.

Other Hints and Things I’d Like to Know More About 

• Agent Carter wants someone (other than his wife) to talk with about his “beautiful Mariners”. Yeah, don’t we all.
• There’s an interesting discussion between Carter’s daughter, Ruby, and Harker about “veal” continuing to grow even though their legs are all tied up. Longlegs gets his name (presumably) by his comment that he was wearing his “long legs” that day and needed to bend low so Harker could take his picture with the polaroid. In many ways, Harker continues to grow and aspires to be in law enforcement even though her mind, in a sense, is “tied up” all that time due to the black magic doll. Arrested development abounds.

• Harker wanted to be an actress instead of an FBI agent. Does this signify anything or is it just a bit of info about the main character?
• Ruth asks Harker if she has been saying her prayers. She said she never said them because “they scared her” (Is her mother talking about Satanic prayer since she obviously is now a believer in Longlegs and his dark religion? I think so?)
• The relationship between Cary Anne and Longlegs is interesting, too. Her devotion to him in somewhat inexplicable. Did she regain her sense of volition when Harker and Carter found the doll and had it “dissected” or was Longlegs using another doll to control her the day he visited her?

Firsts for Nicolas Cage as Longlegs

• Kills himself by slamming his head repetitively into a table
• Occupation as a creepy (so creepy) dollmaker
• Playing a quasi-cross dressing glam rocker
• Singing Happy Birthday

Recurrences

• Saying the line, “Hail Satan” (Renfield)
• Satan affiliations (Ghost Rider 1 & 2, Sympathy for the Devil)
• Serving as a dark distributor of death (Renfield, Lord of War)
• Playing in a film set in the Pacific Northwest (Mandy, Running with the Devil)

Quotables:

Conclusion

This film is what Halloween scary movies are all about. It’s great to see a character-driven, well-plotted thriller hit the market that isn’t derivative of every other horror franchise we’ve seen ad nauseum over the last 30 years. I’ll admit that the first time I watched it, I loved the first two-thirds and was disappointed with the third act. I think my disappointment was because the film shifted dramatically from a psychological thriller confined to the motivations and activities of twisted men into the mystical dark arts type of horror we are used to seeing–where demons and possession run amok and destroy the lives of men. It felt uneven (to me) for that reason and a little bit too deus ex machina in its explanation of the mystery. I also remember being surprised that a demonic doll could force a devoted family man like Carter into murdering his family so easily.

But watching the film with new eyes, knowing what to look for and what each portent along the way actually represented, the film did hold to its own logic and flowed to its ultimate conclusion. Nicolas Cage may make another hundred films before he retires or is raptured up into the heavens. We don’t know. But if this were to be the last film he ever made, I could still say with confidence–it was like no other. 

Longlegs is a character unique to Cage and unparalleled in his expression of him/she/they. I will watch it again and jump on cue. Just can’t help myself. Like Hannibel Lecter’s intonation of the name “Clarice” Longlegs singing of “Happy Birthday” will linger uncomfortably in my mind likely for many years to come.

Shiver. Shiver. Down the spine.