In the first scene of Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical drama The Fabelmans, the director’s junior stand-in Sammy is traumatized by a train crash – not a real one, though the footage from The Greatest Show on Earth that he watches through the wide eyes of a child feels just as vivid and affective. The vision of high-speed destruction haunts little Sammy in his nightmares, until he realizes he can tame the memory by rendering it for the camera. Upon restaging the spectacle with his own model train set and miniature figurines, all the hyperkinetic death turns into a game of make-believe played with innocent toys. With this overture, Spielberg lays out his method for the film to come as he dramatizes the metaphorical trainwreck of his parents’ crumbling marriage to reckon with his place in its breakdown. But he also provides a succinct illustration of the intimate, therapeutic power wielded by horror cinema, its potential to exorcise an artist’s innermost demons by turning to the literally demonic.
The long shadows of Mom and Dad also loom over the terrific and terrifying Longlegs, the latest feature from the closest thing the genre has to royalty, Oz Perkins, son of the Psycho star Anthony. While distributor Neon has shrewdly sold the enigmatic project as a serial killer thriller in line with influences Silence of the Lambs and Se7en, two reasons behind his choice to set the film in the 90s, there’s a far darker, stranger, knottier morass of tormented psychology festering beneath the surface.
