Osgood Perkins is rightfully getting his flowers for Longlegs, and if you’re looking for something to follow up his satanic chiller, he’s already made the ideal movie.
Satanism, serial killers, psychic powers: Longlegs efficiently tackles a lot of ideas. At its core, the horror movie worships at the altar of The Silence of the Lambs as a procedural set in 1993 about the hunt for a particularly vulgar murderer. (Read our Longlegs review if you want to go deeper.)
Maika Monroe portrays FBI agent Lee Harker, a clairvoyant investigator who gets assigned the case of Longlegs, an elusive killer only known through letters found at incidents of familicide.
She starts to crack the case, uncovering a more bizarre and occult pattern as she goes. Warning: spoilers ahead!
Longlegs is a combination of ’90s thrillers
Playing somewhere between Se7en and The X-Files, Longlegs emanates a haunting atmosphere, pulling us right behind Lee through an investigation that only gets more deranged and macabre as it goes. Eventually, we’re on the doorstep of the Dark Lord Satan, or Mr Downstairs as Nicolas Cage’s eponymous unhinged psychopath calls him.
The explanation presented is that Longlegs and his accomplice, Lee’s embattled mother, were acting on the whims of Lucifer. Regardless of whether you believe these categorically unreliable narrators, the Devil’s shadow looms so large over Longlegs, so much so it almost becomes a spiritual successor to Perkins’s directorial debut, The Blackcoat’s Daughter.
Emma Roberts and Kiernan Shipka lead that picture, the former a psychiatric patient named Joan picked up by a well-meaning couple, the latter a withdrawn schoolgirl, Katherine, at a Catholic boarding school. They’re connected through Rose, a popular student who stays with Katherine over winter break to avoid telling her parents she might be pregnant.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter lives deliciously
Katherine appears to hear voices and become influenced by something in the school’s boiler. She ritualistically worships the object as if it were a shrine, bowing face down to the black iron grimace.
All three provide a different perspective on events stemming from Katherine’s fascination, an obsession that mutates into something more sinister and ominous. An inscrutable dread looms in every scene, just like in Longlegs, where it seems like something else is just off-screen or in the background, watching.
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It’s brilliant, awash in paranoia over impressionable youth, Catholic guilt, and sexual purity, themes Perkins carries into Longlegs, albeit in considerably different forms. They thread the line of manifesting the Dark Lord and being so deeply embedded in the psyche of their characters, you’re not sure if that’s just what they want you to believe.
The horror of indie filmmaking
The Blackcoat’s Daughter came out in 2015, the result of three years of constant pushing by Perkins. The son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins, Osgood worked primarily as an actor for over a decade before moving into screenwriting and directing.
The film suffered in many of the same ways indie productions did at that point (and often still do). Funding was hard because mature, sleek, smaller-budget horror wasn’t fashionable (Read: It Follows and The Witch hadn’t happened yet), distribution was fragmented since streaming hadn’t consolidated the pipelines, and to cap it off, there was confusion over the title.
It originally screened as the rather vague and unimaginative ‘February’ at the Toronto International Film Festival. Praise was strong, so it got a distribution deal with DirecTV Cinemas and a then-rising A24, and the title was changed to The Blackcoat’s Daughter.
Hail Satan
But the shift meant all that original buzz was referring to the first title, making it much harder for passers-by to follow a great review to find the film itself. Throw in that Netflix actually put it out as February in Britain and Ireland at one point, and you have a film that dwells in obscurity.
Longlegs presents an opportunity to right that particular wrong. A winner for Neon from a script by Osgood that involves all manner of ungodly chills, it’s the perfect doorway into these darkened stairs. Finally, the evil can meet the light, and more can feel its purifying gaze… And see just how good Emma Roberts is.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter is available to rent or buy on Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video. For more top releases, check out our new movies list.
