Maybe not since Hereditary has the buzz around a horror film (and how scary it is) been this intense. At my preview screening of Osgood Perkins’ hyped-up chiller there were whispers, nervous giggles, and tense clutching of armrests and companions even before the film began. You could feel the collective intake of breath as the garish red and black titles blazed onto the screen to the sleazy-sexy strains of 70s glam rockers T Rex.
The scares begin immediately. A young girl stands in the snow outside her family farmhouse, looking quizzically at an old car that’s appeared in the driveway. A strange, deathly-pale, bloated-faced man speaks to her in a deranged sing-song voice, asking her name. The camera is unsettlingly off-centre, cutting the man’s full face out of the frame, as though a child were looking up at him and couldn’t quite make him out. There is a stomach-churning sense of dread.
And that’s just the opening sequence. Enter Special Agent Lee Harker (a solemn-faced Maika Monroe), that young girl on the driveway, now all grown up. It’s the 90s and she’s on one of her first cases at the FBI, investigating a bizarre series of murders. Partnered with a more experienced agent, Carter (Blair Underwood), Harker is solitary and odd, barely able to mumble a passable greeting to Carter’s wife and child when he invites her over. But that awkwardness notwithstanding, she has a knack – a spooky one – for intuiting details of the case that would otherwise be unknown. Such as the locations where a killer might be hiding.
A serial killer (Nicolas Cage, basically unrecognisable under prosthetics and with a rasping, breathy voice) has struck seemingly at random over the past 30 years, forcing fathers to murder their entire families in their idyllic homes. The common thread between the families is that each has a daughter with a birthday on the same day of the month. But no one knows how he’s doing it, or why there’s never any trace of an intruder. He writes letters in code, Zodiac-style, signing them off with the name Longlegs.
What begins as a grisly police procedural à la Silence of the Lambs spins out into a supernatural-seeming conspiracy. Disturbing, but not without an occasional burst of dark humour from the wisecracking Agent Carter, Longlegs is adept at withholding its secrets – and mostly, its violence – to allow eeriness to take over instead.
It doesn’t overuse sudden noise or jump-scares, instead it luxuriates in its atmosphere – that sense that at any moment, something truly evil is lurking just out of frame.
It soon becomes clear that Longlegs knows who Harker is – and maybe, without her realising it, this trail of murders has more to do with her than she imagined. Monroe is excellent as a haunted young woman, gradually torn up inside by her association to this mayhem. Meanwhile, Cage is having his usual fun being unhinged, but plays it so matter-of-fact (a teen girl scowls at him in a hardware store, calling him a “weird guy”) that it feels doubly believable.
A sign of a good horror film is one that can suddenly turn a leafy residential street into a site of skin-prickling danger. On my way home from the cinema, ordinary things like gabled houses and triangles felt off-putting. Longlegs has the ability to make the banal suddenly and delightfully sinister. Watch it on a big screen – and then try to get it out from under your skin. And good luck.