Longlegs

Longlegs is a 2024 American horror thriller film written and directed by Osgood Perkins. It stars Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage, who also produced the film through his Saturn Films production company. The cast also features Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt, Michelle Choi-Lee, Dakota Daulby and Kiernan Shipka in supporting roles. The film follows an FBI agent tasked with tracking down an occultist serial killer responsible for murdering multiple families across America, without having been physically present in the crimes.

Longlegs was released in the United States by Neon on July 12, 2024. It received positive reviews from critics.

Plot
In 1970s Oregon, a little girl with a Polaroid camera notices a car outside her house and follows a mysterious voice behind the house, where she is approached by an erratic man in pale make-up.

In the 1990s, newly recruited FBI agent Lee Harker displays inexplicable intuition in the field, such as correctly assuming a nearby home houses a murderer. Through testing, she is theorized to have possible clairvoyance. As a result, she is assigned to a decades-spanning case of a series of brutal murder–suicides involving families throughout the state of Oregon. In each incident, the father murdered his wife and children before taking his own life, and left at each crime scene is a letter with cryptic, Satanic coding, that is signed "Longlegs." The handwriting belongs to none of the victims, despite no forensic evidence of any home invasion or outside parties present.

While she is on the phone to her mother late one night, Lee hears a loud banging on her front door, and sees a figure outside in the garden. She goes outside to search for the figure, only to turn around and see that they are now inside the house. She returns inside and finds no-one, only an envelope addressed to her. Inside is a 9th birthday card with a coded message like those found at the crime scenes. She decodes it with the help of her Bible. In the message, Longlegs threatens to kill Lee's mother if she tells anyone about how she worked out the code.

Lee swiftly connects similarities between the families: Each had at least one 9-year-old daughter born on the 14th of the month, and the murders all occurred within six days before or after the birthday itself. When written out on a linear calendar, the dates of the murders form an occult symbol of an inverted triangle, with one date missing to complete the shape.

Following a clue, Lee and her supervisor, Carter, unearth a doll buried beneath one of the former crime scenes, and inside its head, find a strange metal orb that emits high energy readings despite apparently being empty. Despite Carter's skepticism of the supernatural, Lee theorizes that each family received a similar doll from Longlegs, and he has been infusing the orbs within each doll with some sort of evil energy that can possess and influence those near it. Carter grows concerned that Lee is connected to Longlegs after seeing hints of Longlegs' knowledge of Lee and her mother Ruth.

Lee goes to visit her mother, who denies any memory of Lee's 9th birthday but subtly directs Lee to search through her childhood belongings. Upstairs, Lee finds a chest in her childhood bedroom containing a stack of Polaroids. Among them is a picture of the pale-faced man, revealing her to be the girl from the introduction. Knowing now that she was visited by Longlegs, she submits the picture, allowing the FBI to track him down and arrest him.

Fearful after realizing the missing date on the inverted triangle is that day, Lee believes Longlegs may have an accomplice. In the interrogation room, he tells her that he serves "the man downstairs." He tells Lee to question her mother's involvement in his crimes, proclaiming "Hail Satan" before repeatedly slamming his face and jaw into the metal table, eventually killing himself after shattering open his forehead and nose.

Agent Browning drives Lee back to her mother's home. While investigating the house, Lee sees Ruth murdering Browning with a shotgun. Ruth then shoots the head off a doll resembling a young Lee, causing Lee to lose consciousness.

In a narrated flashback, it is revealed that Ruth has been Longlegs' accomplice ever since Lee's encounter with him. Longlegs returned in the night to attack and subdue Ruth, forcing her to make a choice—let her daughter be murdered as part of the ritual, or to do his bidding to spare her. She complied, leaving Lee to be the missing birthday on the triangle. Longlegs has lived in the Harker house basement ever since, creating dolls he would infuse with his Satanic magic. Ruth would pose as a nun delivering a gift from the church to bring the dolls to the families. Lee's doll has been guiding her with the Satanic influence of Longlegs since childhood.

Awakening in the basement, Lee answers the phone to hear a demonic voice proclaim, "You're late for Ruby's party." Realizing Agent Carter's daughter, Ruby, has her ninth birthday that day and that the Carters' deaths would complete Longlegs' triangle, Lee races to intervene, only to discover that Ruth had already delivered the doll to the family, who are all already possessed. After Carter murders his wife, Lee shoots and kills Carter to protect Ruby. Ruth brandishes a dagger, forcing Lee to shoot and kill her mother.

Lee attempts to shoot the doll's head but her gun misfires repeatedly. Lee tells Ruby they need to leave but remains frozen, staring at the doll in anger and horror of Longlegs' victory.

Production
In November 2022, it was reported that Osgood Perkins would direct from a script he wrote. Nicolas Cage signed on to produce (under his Saturn Films banner) and star in the horror thriller film as a serial killer. In February 2023, Maika Monroe signed on as FBI agent Lee Harker. The following month, Alicia Witt and Blair Underwood joined the cast.

Deadline Hollywood stated that Dave Caplan's C2 Motion Picture Group financed the film for under $10 million, while The Hollywood Reporter reported the budget at $16 million. Principal photography was scheduled to take place in Vancouver, British Columbia, from January 16 to February 23, 2023.

Music
The film's soundtrack was conceived by Zilgi, a pseudonym for Elvis Perkins (the brother of director), credited as composer of the score compositions on the digital soundtrack album. There were contributing tracks by sound designer Eugenio Battagila and Melody Carrillo with Elizabeth Wight. The soundtrack was released on July12, 2024 on streaming platforms and on vinyl.

Marketing
To promote the film, Neon utilized guerilla marketing tactics similar to those that led to the box office success of The Blair Witch Project (1999). Perkins credited Neon for the film's marketing, saying the studio "really responded strongly to the movie, the raw materials of the movie really excited them, the way it looks, the way it feels, the way it sounds. They asked me early on, 'Do we have your permission to kind of go nuts?' And I said, 'What else are we doing here? Go for it. Do your thing.'" The film's total marketing budget was under $10 million, focusing on digital content and not having television ads.

Promotional materials included teaser trailers that first appeared in January 2024 and did not mention the title until February, building speculation through clips, images, and coded messages using symbology created for the film. Neon posted 11 videos on YouTube leading up to release, accumulating 30 million views. A trailer was also attached to every horror film released in theaters since January 2024. A paid advertisement featuring a cipher was published in the Seattle Times on June 14, a reference to Zodiac Killer. The ad directed readers to an in-universe website detailing murders committed in the film.

Release
In February 2023, Neon acquired the film's North American rights at the European Film Market. The film had a screening at Los Angeles's Beyond Fest on May 31, 2024. Longlegs premiered at The Egyptian Theatre Hollywood in Los Angeles on July 8, 2024.

Longlegs held several special screenings across the United States throughout July 8-13, 2024. This also included a 'parent-free' RSVP screening at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Brooklyn, New York on July 12, 2024. It was released in North America and the United Kingdom on July 12, 2024.

Box office
, Longlegs has grossed $44.7 million in the United States and Canada, and $2.7 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $47.3 million.

In the United States and Canada, Longlegs was released alongside Fly Me to the Moon, and was initially projected to gross $7–9 million from 2,510 theaters in its opening weekend. After making $10 million on its first day (including $3 million from Thursday night previews, both records for Neon), weekend estimates were raised to $20–23 million. It went on to debut to $22.4 million, finishing second at the box office behind holdover Despicable Me 4. The opening marked the best opening weekend for Neon and the biggest total for an original 2024 horror film. It was Monroe's best domestic opening as lead (excluding 2016's Independence Day: Resurgence, for which she was billed) and Cage's first live-action film to open above $20 million since Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance in 2012.

Critical response
Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale, while those polled by PostTrak gave it a 70% overall positive score, with an average 3 out of 5 stars.

David Rooney writing for The Hollywood Reporter praised the film, saying "It might be argued that he stirs too many elements into the mix here — crime procedural, occult mystery, mind manipulation, Satanic worship, scary dolls, a Faustian bargain and a 'nun' not fit for any convent. But Longlegs is [Perkins'] most fully realized and relentlessly effective film to date". Bob Strauss of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: "Most impressive is how Perkins blends psychological and supernatural horror in a manner not quite seen before. Longlegs is a conjuring of dark, poetic cinema where the devil is definitely in the details". Vanity Fair Richard Lawson thought the film was disappointing, writing "Longlegs is stylish but vacuous, a prettily foreboding picture with nothing behind it. As Hannibal Lecter might say, it's a well scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste".

J. Hurtado of Screen Anarchy declared Longlegs "a masterpiece; an unholy, horrifying confluence of high art and anxiety, a film in which every frame is a nightmare, and it's beautiful." Writing for Bloody Disgusting, Meagan Navarro praised Longlegs' performances and atmosphere, concluding, "Longlegs is as stylish as it is timeless, dripping with claustrophobic dread and rot." Bill Bria of /Film called Longlegs "the most terrifying horror movie of 2024," noting the film's "rock n' roll spirit."

Justin Chang of NPR wrote of Longlegs ' many similarities to The Silence of the Lambs. When making Longlegs, Perkins was inspired by his experience of watching The Silence of the Lambs for the first time:"'I figured the way to connect with a bigger audience would be to trick them into thinking that they were watching Silence of the Lambs, and then do a thing where it was obviously not that at all.'"