This story contains heavy spoilers for Longlegs. Osgood Perkins’ nightmarish new horror sensation Longlegs begins with a lyric from the 1971 hit “Get It On (Bang a Gong)” by the glam-rock band T. Rex: “You've got the teeth of the hydra upon you / You're dirty, sweet, and you're my girl.” Their music opens and closes the film, harkening back to the Satanic Panic conspiracy that rock music featured subliminal messages—but it's the connotations of girlishness and impurity that crawl under your skin in that first moment, and throughout the film.
Perkins’ new film (released by NEON on July 12) is largely about the stories our parents tell us, but also seemingly has a feminist horror bent. Not only is Longlegs interested in exploring the essence of evil and how it manifests, as many classic horror movies have done before, but its Satanic themes can be interpreted as critiquing the traditionalist, religious expectation of the nuclear family structure and belief that girls should be docile and pure. Frequently, the film following the investigation of FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) into the mysterious, cipher-obsessed serial killer known as Longlegs (Nicholas Cage) features references to girls and “little things” needing to be safe from the “cruel world.” By the end, that all comes to a head and you feel unclean yourself at what you’ve witnessed.
The confounding case on Lee’s desk revolves around a string of murders committed across decades in the Pacific Northwest in which a father kills his entire family and himself. They always happen within six days of the daughter’s 9th birthday, which always falls on the 14th of the month, and a cipher signed by “Longlegs” is always left at the crime scene. Lee becomes convinced that Longlegs has been somehow committing the murders outside of the homes, leading her onto a tireless search to discover his identity and how he’s been manipulating families for so long.
Eventually, Lee’s detective work leads her to revisit an old farmhouse where one of the murders happened, which is where she finds an immaculately crafted doll that resembles the slain daughter. Inside the doll, she and her team at the FBI find a metallic chrome ball, which Lee believes is how Longlegs does his bidding.
As Lee obsesses over the case, she also finds herself reflecting upon her childhood and her mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) who she’s distanced herself from. She visits her, finding her seemingly in poor mental health and failing to take care of her home. Ruth, a devout Christian, asks Lee if she’s been doing her prayers to which Lee says she stopped doing them a long time ago, and that they always scared her when she was small.
At her mother’s house, Lee finds an old photo that triggers a memory that Longlegs visited her ahead of her birthday—January 14—before she turned 9. She remembers that he approached her when she was playing outside with a camera—which proves to be the scene that opens the film. Lee snapped a photo of the stranger and, although she cut off much of his face, his stark white completion and long hair are enough to use as evidence to find him in the present.
When the FBI puts out a search, Longlegs—whose real name is Dale Ferdinand Cobble—senses they’re coming for him and waits by the side of the road. As Lee asks to interrogate him one-on-one, he muses about how he’s helping “a friend of a friend,” or “the man downstairs,” which is meant to be Satan himself. At this point, Lee has assessed that the mysterious perpetrator has an accomplice who brings the doll with its demonic device into the victims’ homes, so she demands he tell her who it is. Eerily, Longlegs says she should talk to her mother. Before she can get any more information out of him, he recites Revelation 13:1, which describes two beasts rising out of the sea to convince humanity to pledge allegiance to Satan, implying it’s how he sees himself and his accomplice. He then gruesomely kills himself by slamming his head against the interrogation room table.
Terrified and realizing just how much she may have forgotten about her childhood, Lee visits her mother yet again, only to find her with a doll of 9-year-old Lee. In a storybook-like tone, she explains that Longlegs wanted to make the Harkers his victims until Ruth convinced him to let her help him so she could protect her daughter. He then lived out of and crafted the life-like dolls in their basement, and Ruth began posing as a nun offering a gift from the church to the families that met their criteria.
In the film’s final moments, Lee realizes that Ruth is continuing the deal she made with Longlegs by targeting Lee’s boss Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) and his family on his daughter Ruby’s (Ava Kelders) birthday. Upon arriving, she sees that Ruth has already given Ruby the doll and that Carter is acting peculiarly. Not before long, he kills his wife (Carmel Amit) and Lee shoots him. Her mother yells that Lee will be damned if she doesn’t murder the entire Carter family, so she tells her mother that her prayers were always been useless and kills her in self-defense. Then, when Lee looks at Ruby’s doll—which she’s already attached to—the agent freezes and is unable to shoot it. Still, she grabs Ruby and takes her out of the crime scene, and just before the film ends, it cuts to a final wail of, “Hail Satan!” from Longlegs in the interrogation room.
As Lee is forced to kill her mother, it’s as if Satan’s grand scheme all along was to terrorize Lee from girlhood to womanhood so much that she needed to kill her mother; for his final act, he’ll show her just how pervasive evil can be. Staring at Ruby’s doll and unable to destroy it, it’s like she’s facing the trauma she’s suppressed her entire life. Despite getting away, it’s unclear whether Ruby is possessed by her doll that was never destroyed—or even if Lee still is, considering how much of her childhood she misremembered because her doll was hidden at her childhood house. Simply put: Evil still looms.
Frequently, Lee is confronted with darkness; it was below her basement steps for years, after all. When she tries to question a survivor from one of Longlegs’ massacres, the now nearly catatonic Carrie Anne Camera (Kiernan Shipka), Carrie Anne tells her, “You’re not afraid of a little bit of dark because you are the dark.” While Lee is nervous around Carrie Anne, they share a great deal in common: The two of them had their girlhoods taken from them and have been punished by those so committed to their faith for no reason other than growing up and away from their innocence.
As Lee says she only felt scared when her mother would spew prayers about how she should remain nothing short of safe, devout, and good when she was a child, Perkins certainly seems interested in how stories told by our parents affect us all. Although, it’s hard to ignore that all of Longlegs’ victims are girls. The gendered messaging even feeds into the way the serial killers’ dolls that he so lovingly crafts are cemented in porcelain-perfect eternal girlhood, and how he even has even altered his looks to have drastic feminine attributes—like he’s adhering to a sort of beauty standard to impress the Devil himself.
Like Lee feeling wrong listening to her mother’s scripture, by the end of Longlegs, it’s as if we’re made to feel unholy for what we’ve just witnessed.
