Longlegs (Oz Perkins, 2024).
According to the philosopher Susan Neiman, “the problem of evil is the guiding force of modern thought.” Over the past several centuries, she writes in Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (2002), thinkers have attempted to suss out the origins of evil and better understand its expressions in the world. The terms of this debate are existential. “Designating something as evil,” she writes, “is a way of marking the fact that it shatters our trust in the world.” In order for an act or an idea to be evil, it must transgress everything socially acceptable or comprehensible—it must arrive from beyond, as it were, to undo the social, moral, and cosmic orders of our world. You cannot encounter it and remain the person you were before.
Can a film expose us to this evil? Neon’s marketing campaign for Longlegs (2024) has certainly tried to make the case. In the months leading up to the July release of Oz Perkins’s latest horror film, we were fed abstract trailers full of crime-scene photographs and symmetrically composed overhead shots, all soundtracked by screaming strings and panicked 911 calls. The spots emphasized an ambience of menace, despite offering little in the way of plot specifics. Early reactions from influencers and the easily influenced projected onto this texture-forward void something far more sinister than the typical American horror flick, an exercise in “rancid, cursed vibes” that left one previewer “scared to enter my dark hotel room.”
Ostensibly a serial-killer hunt à la The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Longlegs quickly reveals FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) to be a kind of psychic, someone who matches pattern recognition with pure intuition. Able to pull the most telling stray details from mountains of evidence, she is put on the case of the titular serial killer, a Satan-worshiping figure who for the past two decades has been on a peculiar killing spree: convincing fathers to kill their families and then themselves. If not for his signature on the coded letters left behind at every crime scene, these would seem like a series of disconnected domestic annihilations, a distinctly American crime.
For much of the first hour, Perkins pleasingly balances his procedural and occult tendencies, narrating Harker’s descent into darkness via the gradual accretion of increasingly deranged clues. The film presents us with crime-scene Polaroids of entire families seated back-to-back, their feet poking out from under bloodied sheets, while a man tells a 911 operator that his daughter is no longer his daughter. These images were all over the marketing campaign, and they are by far the scariest things in the film, applying a shaggy, tactile, early-’90s mundanity to a slightly abstract, if clichéd, concept of violence as plague, an infection which spreads through seemingly normal suburban homes and leaves no survivors.
M (Fritz Lang, 1931).
Serial killer films are primed to reflect our societal fears and ills back to us. The child-killer of Fritz Lang’s M (1931) targets an atomized Berlin of dirty tenements and shuttered factories, whose public oscillates between isolated paranoia and lynch-mob solidarity. When he’s caught, it’s thanks to the city’s criminal underworld, a quasi-fascist counter-society with its own guilds, courts, and leaders who only band together once the manhunt begins to interfere with their bottom line. Psycho (1960) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) situate their killers in the shadow of American prosperity, the backwaters left behind in the rush to build highways and fight wars and streamline industry for maximum profit.
The 1980s and ’90s saw an explosion of mastermind killers, brilliant men whose crimes possess a perverse and calculated beauty, reflecting America’s sense of itself as ruler of a new world order. Where Psycho’s Norman Bates and M’s Hans Beckert cannot help themselves, Seven’s (1995) John Doe takes pleasure in the arrangement of his crimes, structuring each to enact a kind of grand moral irony: the obese man fed to death, the ambulance-chasing lawyer made to balance the scales of justice with his own flesh. Yet he is merely a moralizing younger brother to cinema’s serial aesthete par excellence. Hannibal Lecter is a Nietzschean cannibal, an educated lunatic who believes his refined palate exempts him from conventional morality. As both esteemed psychologist and avid practitioner, he so thoroughly understands the work of serial killing that he can play with his FBI counterparts, turning their cases into a series of riddles and treasure hunts.
These men reflect a distinctly postwar American unease. As John Ganz details in his new book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, the country experienced a series of shattering crises in the 1970s and ’80s, an abyss that yawned beneath Reagan’s cheery sunrise. White power groups, militias, cults, and more took root in the heartland. The farm crisis killed off the small farmer; many insolvent patriarchs chose family annihilation over facing the bank. David Duke ran for president. Donald Trump published The Art of the Deal. It was a bad time. Rather than inducing dread, Perkins’s vision of the mid-’90s is almost nostalgic, a throwback to a time of physical resources and meat-world killers. Harker, modeled on Clarice Starling, visits reference libraries, flips through hardbacks, and scans microfilm. When she does come up with the killer’s “algorithm,” it’s a sigil sketched in pen on paper. Longlegs himself is a ’70s throwback: a glam rocker in a musty three-piece suit, he croons T. Rex songs and serves “the man downstairs”—the devil.
Top: The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991). Bottom: Longlegs (Oz Perkins, 2024).
Ah, Satan. Plenty of serial killers, from Richard Ramirez to Westley Allan Dodd, have expressed at least a passing interest in the occult. The Son of Sam believed that he was receiving demonic messages from his neighbor’s dog, and later claimed he had been under the sway of a Satanic cult. The devil has shifted in form depending on the culture and time in which he is being interpreted. Yet he always represents the ultimate evil, compelling his acolytes to act immorally. In mid-century America, the devil lurked in pop culture: TV preachers searched for hidden messages on vinyl records, and op-ed columnists claimed that horror movies were corrupting the youth. The American public could point to the Satanic panic to address their suspicions of endemic child abuse in churches, schools, and the foster care system. Rather than distinctly homegrown explanations—the death of manufacturing, the decline of the middle class, and the deterioration of public services—newly down-and-out Americans sought their threats from without, alleging that malign forces had insinuated their way into the community, the church, the family.
Most serial killers are hardly diabolical masters of the universe, but pitiful, pathetic people desperate to excuse their desire to hurt. More than a decade after propounding the former view in Seven, David Fincher used his Zodiac (2007) to prove the latter. While the real Zodiac killer was never caught, Fincher fingers Arthur Leigh Allen, a pedophile who kills chickens in his front yard. When the police search his trailer, they find that he has been raising squirrels for food. Fincher plays the moment for awkward comedy: he’s not a brilliant mastermind, but a loser who copied his signature from a wristwatch ad.
Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007).
Perkins positions Longlegs as some amalgamation of the two archetypes. He is an able devotee of the devil’s work, creating life-size dolls that hypnotize the families who receive them. After an unclear amount of time, this hypnosis convinces the father that his family is no longer real—and that they must be destroyed. Yet, as played by Nicolas Cage, his affect is unbelievably goofy, a whinging, campy performance of a total outsider. Even when smashing his face open in an interrogation room, he's too silly to be scary, but his flamboyant delivery injects a bit of fun into the otherwise grave atmosphere. The least lifelike thing in the film, he at least feels alive.
Considering that the titular killer is so devoted to him, the devil proves largely irrelevant to Longlegs. He looms in shadows and behind windows, a massive black figure with the suggestion of a goat’s head. As much as the film telegraphs his influence, it is never truly felt. Perhaps that’s because Perkins himself is not afraid of him. “The devil,” he has said, “is delicious, sexy, charming, funny, and smart, and it’s a nice counterpose to the presumed, pristine nature of God.” Rather than being either a morally corrupting force or a pervasive threat, he is a mere symbol, referring to what once frightened us, but without the power to shake our trust in the nature of the world. “I don't think anybody's saying, ‘Hail, Satan’ when we are colonizing a land,” he says in the same interview. “They're saying, ‘Praise Jesus.’”
The devil cannot scare us because he is no longer to blame. “Modern conceptions of evil,” writes Neiman, “were developed in the attempt to stop blaming God for the state of the world, and to take responsibility for it on our own. The more responsibility was left to the human, the less worthy the species seemed to take it on.” In order to be genuinely frightening, a film must directly engage with this responsibility. Raymond, the killer at the center of The Vanishing (1988) is a proper French bourgeois, a sociopath who treats his crime as a question of will: if everything in his upbringing tells him not to kill, then to do so becomes a matter of self-revelation, an assertion of one’s true self against the order of the universe. In innocuous gifts from his wife and daughters—a sweater, a photo album, a keychain—he finds a toolkit that will allow and empower him to carry out the perfect murder, thus sealing his own fate. Evil doesn’t shatter his world; it supports it. He doesn’t need the devil: his inner life is inspiration enough.
Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997).
In its vision of violence as an infection, spreading throughout society to destroy it from within, Longlegs is worth considering alongside the works of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who has made man’s susceptibility to evil one of his great subjects. Cure (1997) follows an amnesiac as he wanders a prosperous but declining Japan. Absolutely empty inside, Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) ignites the resentment and prejudice in everyone he meets, from the cop who is always irritated by his partner to the doctor discriminated against by her male coworkers. All it takes is a simple hypnosis technique—an X drawn in the air with a lighter—to actualize this latent violence.
Longlegs apes this gesture, claiming that there’s a murderous little bit of the devil in everyone. But the devil isn’t to blame—we are. Kurosawa’s filmography is full of horribly empty people, primed by their sadness, loneliness, and frustration to destroy others and themselves. Some, like the murderers in Cure, require convincing. But the college students in Pulse (2001) are inspired by only a grainy webcam suicide video to become ghosts—a readiness which speaks to how isolated they already are. However hollow they feel, the society surrounding them is even more alienating.
Chime (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024).
Kurosawa’s mid-length film Chime (2024) compacts and extends these themes even further. A student (Seiichi Kohinata) complains to his cooking teacher (Mutsuo Yoshioka) of a strange, persistent noise only he can hear. As he speaks, the student slowly slides a large knife into the side of his head: explaining nothing, but effectively transferring the sound from himself to his teacher.
There is plenty to upset in Chime, from the grinding sound design, to the teacher’s sudden compulsion to murder one of his students, to his wife’s strange obsession with putting out the recycling. Kurosawa’s preference for peripheral spaces—side-streets, concrete backyards, underlit dining rooms—only heightens the unease. A viewer searches his scrupulous compositions for answers, and finds only mundane, meaningless details. Where Cure intimates a human solution to its mystery, Chime does not. In Kurosawa’s universe, evil is so pervasive as to be invisible to the untrained eye, but for those buzzing on the correct frequency, it will come into view.
What a contrast with Longlegs, which in its final act collapses the mystery to fit neatly within Harker’s own backstory. Nothing is transformed, no order unmade. What should be sinister and opaque becomes petty and small: what should unsettle ends up safe, reassuring, proof that the devil isn’t real and can’t hurt you. By deploying these off-the-rack symbols, Perkins smothers his own film, and any potential evil within it. I prefer Kurosawa’s confidence that his films do not have to shatter our trust in the world. Something much worse is already here.