It’s a grim, thankless task. The hunt for that elusive, ‘genuinely scary’ new horror movie is like picking through a wasteland of desiccated bones with barely an ounce of twitching flesh on them.
Last year, Talk to Me unsettled satisfyingly with its kinetic jump scares, and more recently Sydney Sweeney chewed through the gore splendidly in Immaculate. But then there were the so-so Russell Crowe exorcisty outings and that abysmal attempt to reboot The Exorcist.
So hopes were high and pulses pumping after the Longlegs trailer dropped. Oozing with rapid-cut demonic imagery, swirling in a frenzied noise only the devil’s hi-fi could produce, and flashing up a rack of five-star ratings (admittedly all from specialist horror genre critics), this promised to frighten audiences witless.
It begins with a generic 1970s prologue of a little girl being approached outside her home by a freakadoo babbling nonsense (face concealed, but no one will be shocked to discover later that it’s mad, bad Nicolas Cage).
Rather refreshing then, that blood-red, monochrome opening credits follow with a quote from T-Rex’s Bang a Gong (Get it On) and we are whisked via a scuzzy instrumental of that track to the 1990s. The glam of T-Rex is a curiously more leftfield reference to the satanic peccadilloes of rock music than, say, Black Sabbath.
So the omens are hunky dory as we catch up with rookie FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), who has been assigned to the cold case of Longlegs, a serial killer who appears to be able to make families butcher themselves without even entering their homes. The only clue at each massacre is a letter written in an occult alphabet, signed “Longlegs”.
Harker is only on the case because her boss (played by Blair Underwood) is desperate and she’s described as “half-psychic” (of course she is, how handy). Also, irritatingly, she seems to be able to read the killer’s script as easily as if it were her native tongue. Even more annoyingly for the chances of any gradual turning of the investigative screw, all Harker has to seemingly do is jot down a few dates and details to solve Longlegs’ “algorithm” (did they even have algorithms in the 1990s?).
Now let’s loop back to that “genuinely scary” question. Well, gone is that terrifying, maniacal sound in the trailer, to be replaced by the usual spooky drones, swoops and peaks. Not frightening in the slightest. Jump scares are also in short supply. Fan of maggot-infested corpses? You’re sorted. Encroaching dread? Not from where I was sitting.
Director Oz Perkins (son of Psycho actor Anthony, good to know for lineage and nepo nerds) throws in some jump-cuts of bubbling goo and slithering snakes, which might have been more disturbing if I had a clue why.
There’s a smidgeon more to the plot (mothers, creepy dolls) but too simplistically and too bleeding obviously, all roads eventually lead to the full reveal of Longlegs.
Dressed like a dishevelled glam rock dinosaur (yes, T-Rex again) who’s been under a cosmetic surgeon’s knife at least a dozen too many times, Nicolas Cage has rarely been as crap. The man is a legend of lunacy, Goddammit! But all he does here is wail incomprehensibly like a banshee jacked up on meth. Pitifully disappointing.
Long before the end I’d wearily whispered to self, “Can this be over soon”, followed soon afterwards by, “Please, will they all just die”.
Hardcore obsessives of the horror genre might gorge their hearts out on this (dare it be suggested that they set the bar somewhat differently to the rest of us), but for the fairweather fan the search for genuine scares continues…
Longlegs is in cinemas from July 12
101 mins, cert 15
