I Watched Longlegs.

I don’t even know what it is to be “scared” anymore. And this is not to say that I have some otherworldly courage or that I have somehow reckoned with Fear on some internal level to be willing and able to conquer all forms of it, to reign dominion over my Fight/Flight response. No, man. I am just so supersaturated in media, namely horror media, that the rational response to anything meant to instill an unease, a Fear, within me instead brings a voyeur’s hunger. I want to be doused in more of the sights, the sounds that are meant to drench me in dread. I want nightmares to freeze me in notions inexplicable.

During Longlegs’ final month run-up to its July 12th release, its ad campaign had slathered me with enough overblown and overindulgent SCARIEST FILM IN DECADES flavored exposure that I knew there was no way it would live up to this hype. Hype. In fact, that’s the word that drove me from being excited (as anyone around me knew was brewing SINCE FEBRUARY 2ND) about the film in the early days of its mention to being just so sick of hearing about the movie by the time it dropped.

I’m one of those creepshows that despite my love of all things social, I absolutely can’t stand going to a movie in a theater with more than, like, five people there. And due to the extreme FIREHOSE of hype, quotes from critics, Audiences Say bullshit, I had to go to the theater on the second day of release, trying my luck at a matinee to just get my eyes all over this thing and be done with it, so I could finally have an opinion of my own, or even moreso to have knowledge of the film that the endless hype miasma was going to try to drag me below. Props to Citadel Mall Stadium 16 Auditorium 6, 1:35PM showing. You guys were immaculate. So silent. You rule.

I went with a friend who knew nothing of it. Only that I had told him that I thought it “might be demons?” But I wasn’t sure. My only voluntary engagement with the movie’s presence was the February trailer, whose caption read:

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

Whether that meant an illusory faceless cult of druidic figures or a demonic entity or a enormous corporate giant… I knew naught beyond that. The trailer showed mostly environments. Desks, crucifixes, satanic imagery, warm lighting, walls covered in runes, a cabin. Loudly shrieked vocal pulses. I was in. It could be anything or it could be nothing. All I knew was that aesthetically, it was my everything.

Sitting next to me during this screening must have been agonizing. I was physically reacting throughout the nearly two hour movie, gripping my hand into a fist, gripping BOTH hands into fists, silently whispering hell yeah, putting both hands out in front of me, fingers spread in… joy? Experience? Whatever.

We both left the theater randomly spouting scenes from the film, and I think we were both completely blown away by it. I immediately was reaching out to friends. The first text I sent out in fact was this:

Everything and more.
Everything. And more.

As we sat down for dinner afterwards, we were talking about music and friends and work, but in between, we would randomly be bringing up MORE scenes from the movie. Things we saw. Things we noticed. Phrases. Songs. Effects. Symbols. It was a movie that clung to me after we left. It still sits with me. I can’t wait to see it again. I think about individual scenes. I think about it abstractly, I think about it specifically.

I’m not here to hit you with plot points. I’m not here to summarize this for you. I will tell you, though, that if all you need to know is my “ReViEw”, here it is:

11/10. Multiple watches per year from here on out.
There are some caveats though.

And I will say from this point on, I do want to talk about this movie both critically and glowingly, and I may need to scrape into spoiler territory. I don’t plan to, but some of the things I reference might glean some more information that you might not want.

In fact, if you have NOT seen this movie, I want to tell you this:

Go no further into the trailers. Read no further into “what to expect.” Go into this movie with AS LITTLE information as possible. I have found that the MORE people know, the MORE people expect, and the MORE people know about the people in this movie, the lower their responses about this film have been.

Another friend who was excited about this film spoke mostly about how excited he was about how Nicolas Cage was in it. He spoke a lot about how Nic Cage is the man, about how he has such a wide range of roles he can play, how he’s done so much over his career that spans drama and comedy and camp and horror and hyperbole and nuance. He has done it all. Despite some people’s reticence to give this man his flowers, I am still utterly floored by some of his performances. Adaptation and Pig are typically the two that I go to when lauding his career, but there’s a lot to be said about how off-the-rails he allows himself to go in films like Mandy and Renfield.

I believe that simply the knowledge that Nicolas Cage is in this movie sends it into a different territory. Your mind is looking for Cage. Your mind is acknowledging that within one of these characters, within the framework of one of these people, the actor, the Coppolla who has given himself a new name to avoid the benefits of nepotism (what’s the full story of that anyway?), is IN this movie. He showed up to set. He brought experience and weight to the role. And in a recent discussion I had with someone, he even brings the expectation that he will have a greater amount of screen time shared with other actors simply because of his prowess in Hollywood.

The less you know that Nicolas Cage is in this movie, the better. That’s not to say that he does not absolutely command your attention with every dripping and arresting second he remains on the screen. This might be one of his most powerful roles per capita to date. But the volume of time he spends on the screen is comparatively low to his co-stars. He will live in your mind for the entire film, but he doesn’t exist on screen for much of it.

His co-star, Maika Monroe… listen when I tell you… absolutely DESTROYS in this role. She demands your attention. Her ability to exhibit fear and weight and predisposition and knowledge and burden throughout this film are all beyond compare. I don’t think anyone else could have played this role in the way that she did. Part Clarice Starling, part Jesse Faden, she manages to play the role of special agent with deep intuition incredibly. Within that space, she also carries a dark magic with her, a more paranormal knowledge, but one that she shoulders like a burden. Throughout the film, anytime she begins the need to summon the predisposition, you can get a sense that she’s leaving her body, and doing so with a simmering terror, being exposed to thoughts and insights that she doesn’t want to bear witness to. The performance is marvelous. Absolutely captivating.

It wasn’t until I started seeing her show up in promotional photos for this film, on red carpets, on my Instagram feed that I started to see how she carries herself in the public eye. She goes full vixen, wearing clothing that exposes so much of her body. She writhes with confidence. She emanates joy.

Listen. I love that for her.

But combine this presence, this persona with the idea that Nicolas Cage, both a legacy actor and a modern performance enigma AND a major performance from Blair Underwood (also, incredible job)… and it drags me kicking and screaming into the uncanny valley and my sense of suspended disbelief is annihilated.

I’ve rolled around with this thought for a while. I’ve brought up the argument with myself many times. What about ubiquitous actress Natalie Portman in Annihilation? What about Toni Collette in Hereditary? Why don’t these effect my ability to engage with the mediums they are a part of? What about Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler?

I can’t be positive. But I think it might have something to do with the “preciousness” of Lee Harker? And with the “otherness” of Longlegs? And the suspension of disbelief within those roles are so beyond what their reputation and their actual confident selves portray. This is why they’re actors and likely why they were cast in these roles! I GET IT, man. But also, I think seeing their presense IRL gives me more of a sense of Tom-Cruise-In-Fat-Suit vibes from Tropic Thunder than it gives Christian Bale vibes in Batman. There is something so remarkable about the transformation and what that transformation makes of them that feels jilted to me.

This film was blessed with one of the greatest ad campaigns from one of the most aggressive PR firms around. And I get it. This movie is rad. If I were a part of this team’s creative post-production crew, I would be doing everything I could to put this movie in front of as many people as I could.

Though.

I don’t think this is a film that is ready to be in front of this many people. I don’t think this has the universally ‘acceptable’ story that a baseline “HoRrOr” movie like The Conjuring invites. It’s not an easy date movie. In fact, as soon as I got out of this one, I was saying that I hoped the friends that are planning to see it don’t find it cringey. I can easily see this movie making people laugh at how committed the people are to these roles, especially the character of Longlegs himself.

This is a movie that is primed for memes. I can already see a level of tension building between people who are able to submit to this film and allow it to get into their bloodstream, and then the other camp of people who will think it’s “too weird” to indulge in. I remember seeing brilliant films which I believe are in this same headspace (the aforementioned Hereditary, Midsommar, The Lighthouse) and having people openly saying “What the fuck” in the middle of it, or just being appalled by it as they’re walking out of the theater, immediately talking bad about it.

There are at least three scenes that I believe in a month’s time will be all over TikTok. Me on my way to work. // Me when my boss calls me. // Me alone in my car. // Literally me. // I can see it coming from a way’s off.

I think the ad campaign for this film invited this. There is no way that a film like this, a movie that has horror elements, should have been listed as a horror movie, let alone “THE SCARIEST FILM OF THE DECADE.” It will fuck with you, sure. But when a dare like this is put out on the table, when a gambit like this is laid out, there are always going to be people who have determined the success ratio of this film as whether or not they left it “feeling” scared. They’re already up and guarded against “jump scares”.

It steals the mystique from the darkness of the film.

I think word of mouth was a far better way to get this movie into the minds of people, although if I were Oz Perkins and my movie was being talked about at this level, especially at the same time a slasher movie within a successful trilogy like MaXXXine was out, I’d be stoked. I just think that in an ideal world, this movie finds its way to you. It calls to you. It sits better when it’s laid out for you with little to know warning, little to no aplomb… and the new viewer digests it with zero expectations.

Now, as I said before, I didn’t follow this film’s ad campaign. In fact, I tried to avoid the details of it as much as I could. I had no idea there were viral marketing campaigns, ciphers which invited stay-at-home detectives to Sherlock-Holmes their way into “Figuring Out” who Longlegs was, and who The Killer is, and all of this stuff.

For me, coming out of the movie, I think I hadn’t really considered The Narrative of the movie at all. And that’s a common thing for me. This is something that I often have to remind myself after consuming a piece of media and trying to talk to other people about it. I usually am not great at defining what something is “about”. So in a heated discussion about trying to pin down why someone thought the film was pretty good versus the amount of love I had for it, I saw myself at a standstill for their reasoning behind much of the film itself.

Throughout much of the beginning of their response to the feature, they were mentioning that they knew X piece of information right away. And then during another scene, they knew that Y was being foreshadowed. Immediately, I had to pull away from that conversation because neither of these aspects of the film are ways in which I engage with media, kind of ever?

A great insight into why I don’t usually care too much about narrative or story is that one of my two favorite authors is William S. Burroughs. Anyone familiar with his texts can likely see why when it comes to storytelling, I am FAR MORE of a fan of exposition and the language that a creator uses to get us there than I am about actually telling the story. Burroughs uses a wildly erratic style, oftentimes comprised of cutting up multiple pieces of previously written prose and literally taping them together to create new forms of language, new prose, new ways of telling stories. Reading Naked Lunch for the first time was a deeply consumption-altering experience for me.

Another great example is that one of my favorite films is Terrance Malick’s Tree of Life. This film is comprised mostly of visual poetry, bringing us to and from childhood to adulthood to PREHISTORIC TIMES, all the while trying to give us a glimpse of what it means to have your life flash before your eyes. We agreed on films like Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future and his son’s Possessor. These are both films that (like them or not) focus more on what you’re seeing on screen than the actual story that they’re telling.

Where we disagreed (and I think it’s still up for debate) is on the work of David Lynch, though we both kind of found common ground there. The work is abstract and again finds itself more in the composure of Poetry than it does Fiction. In my mind, I don’t believe that Lynch actually tells a story at all, whereas in his perception, Lynch does bring it all together to a point. End of the day, where he ends up is not the point, it’s more the concept that the work is comprised of far less of a traditional storytelling scheme than it is about Showing rather than Telling.

I will concede, this film probably doesn’t have the best Story. To retell it, I think I could probably spice it up but would likely have to abbreviate much of what happens. At its core, the heat and the fire and the triumph of this film does not lie in its tale. This film works for me as a Museum of Moments, a string of incredible visual scenes that, again and again, overjoyed me with excitement. The framing, the film quality, the use of color… so many of these things brought me sheer delight. Not to mention so many of the things that were shown on screen were some of my very favorite aesthetic elements: runes, satanic exposition, quotes from Revelation. Maybe I was being dosed with what I find joy from my Instagram feed.

Maybe I was being so tumblr-brained that I allowed it to fill my heart with a seething dark delight that I allowed that captivation to overwhelm my sense of storytelling compass?

A lot of What Happens in this film relies on just how much you allow yourself to Believe in the occult. How reliant are you on grounded elements of reality to keep you roped in with the stories you’re being told. Do you have to be able to reach out and touch these stories, these people, these locations, to find quality and value in the story you’re consuming?

A few weeks ago, I saw a film called I Saw the TV Glow and if you are someone who needs a story, who needs something to ‘make sense’, then based on how much I liked that film, I think I know just how much you will hate it.

This film relies on your ability to suspend your disbelief. To accept the supernatural.

There’s also a pivotal role that religion plays in this film, if you let it. This film (arguably) relies on the amount of power you allow Satan to hold in your life. I never thought that I would have to preface this, but I have heard this stance three times, so I guess I’ll talk a little bit about it.

The assertion has become variations upon this statement: I don’t believe in God, so I don’t believe in Satan, so none of this movie even matters.

Cool, Man. You outsmarted it.
You Win.
Hit me up, and I’ll take you to a movie.
Sorry you wasted your $11–15.

Anyway.

I don’t believe you have to like Football to enjoy Rudy or Remember the Titans. I don’t believe you have to like Hockey to enjoy The Mighty Ducks or Miracle. I don’t believe you have to like Soccer to enjoy Ted Lasso.

My Brother, I don’t know how else to say it to you than I said it to a friend:

That’s just how it is, mayne.

In this film, I get that they talk about the actual entity of Satan. I get that. I hear it. Oh, buddy, I hear it.

But also, did you feel that way when you watched Hereditary? Did you say, “Psh, I ain’t never read the early grimoires. 0/10, not scared.” Oh, didja? Cool, man.

In this film, I Believe what they are summoning and what they are reckoning with is an evil entity which is manifested in what some simply believe to be given a name, whether it be Satan or whether it be Lucifer, I think there is a being of evil which is driving these people who have these deep belief, this wretched evil within them to take shape in the form of whatever presence they wish to call it. I think of it as the same entity that is summoned and that reigns dominion in the forest in The VVitch. Despite the fact that it’s heavily implied that it’s specifically Satan/Lucifer (PS, not scary, don’t believe in God, so it’s not even that spooky, guys), I think its role becomes more of that as some lower being that feeds off of their most carnal impulses and desires and also creates, embodies and actualizes some of their deepest and darkest desires. Murder and blood and filth and death is something that these characters thrive on and I think that in some black ouroboros, that then begets some new spectral evil which inspires them to some new terrible feat.

I think of it as that wickedness that you see in the eyes of Charles Manson.

I think of it as that dead stare in Goya’s ‘Saturn Devouring His Son’.

Clearly, without going too much into the specifics of this film’s plot, there is something supernatural afoot. And I think whoever, whatever presence it is, it’s a foul beast. And whether it is meant to be one of the heads of the beast which rose out of the sea wearing a crown upon its horns, or instead the manifestation of all the wicked that lies out in the earth that is summoned every time a horrible event occurs which shuns the humanity we all comprise… I think the thread which ties all of this supernatural stuff together is a darkness which can be tapped into as the wicked commune with some foul and terrible beyond.

A lot of really great and terrible stuff happens in this film and I left the theater absolutely in love with what I had seen. I love that Perkins took something evil and wicked in his mind and wrote a movie that explored the darkest territories of his storytelling. Last week, I rented one of his earlier films, The Blackcoat’s Daughter and watched it several times. It preaches from the same darkness, summons the same evils, spills similar blood.

I think I will watch Longlegs several more times, and I can’t wait to own it. I will likely watch it a lot, not only to get a deeper understanding of the narrative and try to watch it without the wonder and excitement of the detachment I felt while experiencing it as a mystical sort of collage, but also will take it at its word and try to dig a little further into the story itself. I’ll try to see it through the eyes of someone who isn’t going to that place for the first time.

I also would just like to say that I can easily see this film starting to spawn a few more devices of storytelling. This movie does an incredible job of worldbuilding within its four walls, but I can also see that there are many more questions waiting. As a staunch believer in telling your story in one sitting and avoiding any and all impulses to create sequels, I beg this of Oz Perkins:

• Do Not make a Longlegs Origins film
• Do Not make a Mister Downstairs film/franchise

I loved the ambiguity. I loved the answers that we got and the questions we never had, and I truly adore the imagination that it begs of the viewer to take this tale and run in a thousand different directions with it.

Big recommendation on this film. Will likely go down as one of my all-time favorites.

Hail Satan.