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From writer/director Osgood Perkins who gave us the disturbing possession tale The Black Coat’s Daughter comes the occult/police procedural Longlegs.

Neon

After junior FBI Special Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) displays an intuitive sense that borders on the clairvoyant she is reassigned to William Carter (Blair Underwood) to assist with a perplexing series of murders that stretches back decades. Entire families slaughtered by the father without any physical evidence of another person present but at each crime scene as coded cypher signed ‘Longlegs.’ The daughter of a religious mother (Alicia Witt) Lee is troubled by the strange apparently unrelated mass murders but with her added to the investigation what had been cold dead trails blossom with new leads and clues. By the end Lee discovers that ‘Longlegs’ is no garden variety serial killer and families can harbor dark dangerous secrets to safeguard their children.

Osgood Perkins does not make splatter horror. That is not to say his film are devoid of violence or blood but rather that the horror comes from a deeper character and human condition than any sudden explosion of on-screen violence. The adjective that best sums up the sensation of watched Longlegs is ‘unsettling.’ There are scenes where in terms of movement and action literally nothing is happening and yet the composition of the frame, the ingenuity of the sound design, and delivery by the performs combine into a miasma of uncanny dread.

Perkins and cinematographer Andres Arochi makes frequent uses of characters staring directly into the camera lens turning the fourth wall permeable, subtly drawing us into the scene. In The Silence of the Lambs when characters looked straight down the barrel of the camera it was from Starling’s Point of View, we were slotted into her perspective as a woman in what was perceived as ‘man’s world. With Longlegs it is rare that this is from a character’s point of view, but rather it is the audience that the performers are staring at and making complicit in the scene.

Another area where Perkin and editors Graham Fortin and Greg Ng break from convention is in how the film utilizes ‘jump scares.’ In the vast majority of horror cinema, a jump scare is telegraphed long before the director gooses the audience with a sudden sharp cut and sounds. The anticipation of the jump scare is part of the experience, the building dread and certainty that it cannot be avoided. The jump scares in longlegs are sudden and without any buildup or winding of tension. As much as the characters in the story, the audience is caught off guard by the sudden shift in perspective or revelation.

Longlegs in spite of how it begins as a pursuit of a serial killer movie is in fact an occult horror film and that becomes clear in the story’s final act when all is revealed, secrets bared, and terrible truths endured.

This is not a film for everyone. There are no rampaging monsters, nor an endless parade of scantily clad young adults meeting bloody ends for their adherence of drugs and premarital sex. Longlegs is much more akin to Hereditary in tone. It is unsettling, uncanny, and for many people unforgettable.

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It’s not The Bikeriders which looks fascinating though I suspect I am going to have trouble with the accents. No, the movie I am almost certain to make a trip to the cinema to watch is MaXXXine the direct sequel and third film in the ‘X’ franchise.

A24

When X originally debuted in 2022 I had little interest in seeing it. Slashers are my least loved genre of horror films and nothing in the advertising gave me any reason to suspect that X would pierce that disinterest. Then a number of horror cinema podcasts began touting the movie’s style and quality and I relented taking in a late-night screening at my local multiplex.

X bored me with cliche character acting in stupid manners that no actual person would. It was repeat with the tropes and worn-out ideas from countless other slashers with only the barest of novelties.

Fine. The movie was not for me, and I chalked it up to learning where my tastes differed from those on the podcasts. The prequal film Pearl came and went without sparking any interest in me and this year we get MaXXXine which follows the sole survivor of X and her quest for fame in Hollywood.

Something in these trailers have hooked my attention and curiosity. The cast looks fantastic and despite my utter disappointment with X and its illogical script I am being pulled into MaXXXine’s orbit.

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The podcast The Evolution of Horror for its current season is covering horror films in which nature is the source of horror with Nature Bites Back and last week’s episode reached Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds.

Universal Studios

While I am familiar with the movie and even have some vague memories of it playing on the television while I was present, I cannot actually say that I ever watched the film in its entirety. Now I have and my verdict is that it is vastly overrated.

I am a fan of slow-burn horror which is what The Birds should have been but there is slow and there is full stop dead in the water. The first half of the film is socialite’s Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) and her jesting infatuation and meet cute with Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor). She follows him to his weekend home in the idyllic coastal village of Bodega Bay just north of San Francisco. Meets his former flame, his little sister, and cool, aloof mother. It is nearly 50 minutes into this film titled The Birds before the first bird strike occurs. There had been no real build-up to this, no ominous images of avian observation, in short from the master of suspense there had been no suspense.

The second half of the film is the building level of bird attacks that comes in widely spaces waves with the attack at the restaurant and gas stations providing the most dramatic clips. (It also displays Bodega bay’s fire department as incompetent as they attempt to use direct water sprays to fight a class B fire.)

The films 3rd act retreats to a siege story as the principal characters become trapped in a house, boarded up tight against the flocking fatalities. Then after suffering one last massive valley from the birds the characters in the lengthy pause between waves get into a car and drive away.

I am not bothered by the fact that the cause of the attacks is unknown. I am not bothered by the fact that there is no clear indication that the attacks actually ever end. That sort of ambiguous ending is something I can very much get behind. I am bothered that the characters’ survival and escape has nothing to do with the characters and the choices that they make. There is no moment of decision. No moment of insight. No moment when someone is terribly torn between what they want and what needs to happen. The birds pause and the characters drive away, utterly and completely devoid of agency on any of the characters’ part.

The Birds is a film I shall not watch again.

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I am most intrigued by horror films and stories that swing for unusual concepts and ideas. When the trailer for The Watchers dropped it peaked my interested but cautiously.

New Line Studios

The Watchers is the story if Mina (Dakota Fanning) an American woman living in Ireland avoiding the traumatic memories of her mother’s death. While transporting a Sun Conure to a distant zoo Mina becomes stranded in a deep and threatening forest. One that voice over prolog has already painted as not appearing on any map and that draws damaged souls. As night falls Min discovers a concrete structure and warned to flee inside before the daylight is gone or she will die.

Inside she meets the other people trapped by the forest. Ciara (Georgina Campbell) the surviving spouse of a couple that had become stranded in the forest. Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) a rebellious local and Madeline (Olwen Fouere) an older woman who holds the knowledge of the rules that keep them alive. Each evening ‘they’ strange unseen creatures come to the structure and spend the hours of darkness observing the people on display. No one has ever seen the creatures and to be caught outside after dark is to die, as what happened to Ciara’s husband.

This premise, adapted from a novel by A.M. Shine, holds tons of intriguing promise. There are mysteries to uncover. Who are the watchers? Why do they spend their hours watching the trapped humans? What is the nature of the forest and where did the shelter come from?

A premise such as this lives or dies on the answer to those questions and how those answers are discovers. The Watchers fails on both counts. The answers are inconsistent even within the story’s own logic and most are vomited at the audience by way of ‘info dumps.’ when your 3-act movie has a massive info dump in the third act you know that it has failed at the most basic level.

In addition to the supernatural elements The Watchers expects the audience to accept situations that are utterly beyond credibility. There is no way in hell a professors University office remains untouched, unused for 14 or 15 years so a character as go there and discover the story’s final twist.

The greatest failing of The Watchers is not the clumsy exposition or the bluntly illogic f it backstory and construction but rather that the characters are flat, uninteresting, and devoid of any characteristic for which someone forced to endure a screening might find some form of emotional engagement. I never once cared what happened to anyone in this movie. Throughout the screening I was more concerned about getting some sleep unreservedly uninterested in any of these people’s outcomes.

I can find no reason that anyone should endure this movie.

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Yesterday I wrote about faith being a critical and essential component in the success of 1973’s The Exorcist. Today I am thinking about the other religiously themed horror film that also work for me and how strange it is that an atheist enjoys these Christian stories.

In addition to The Exorcist the other massively successful and franchise inspiring ‘devil movie’ of the 70’s is The Omen. This film’s theology is not as well sourced or faithful The Exorcist playing much more directly as the genre intended for it, horror. It doesn’t raise question but presents the inevitability of the ‘End Times’ and the futility of humanity’s position in the grand scheme. A perfectly positioned movie for its decade The Omen is the bleak and cynical counterpart to The Exorcist’s questions of faith and love.

Two months ago, I went out and watch the pair of religiously themed horror films release in the spring of this year, Immaculate and The First Omen, the latter being a prequel to the aforementioned 70s film.

Of the pair it has been Immaculate that persists in my thoughts. I have a review of the film here on my blog, but I am going to expand on my thoughts a bit. There are by necessity spoilers.

Seriously — spoilers for the big reveal.

Black Bear Pictures

Immaculate unlike either The Exorcist or The Omen is quite subtle in its relationship with the supernatural aspects of religion. It is an easy interpretation of the film that absolutely nothing that occurs is beyond normal accepted reality. A perfectly valid way to view the story is that the fanatical faithful of the convent are deluded. The ancient and rusted spike is not from the crucifixion and the genetic material is not that of Jesus. That their cloning attempts are of some random person and the deformed products are just tragic miscarriages.

It is also possible that the spike is exactly what they believe it to be and that the convent’s repeated attempts to clone the son of god will, if successful, produce the opposite, the ‘anti-Christ.’

A third interpretation is that the convent and its faithful are doing precisely what they believe, bringing about the second coming of the Christian savior by cloning and producing him by way of a virgin birth.

Side note, it is a common misconception that the phrase ‘immaculate conception’ refers to Jesus’ conception without sexual intercourse but theologically it is about Mary and her being born without ‘original sin’ and thus possessing the purity to bear a god.

The film gives no clues if any of the three interpretation I have presented are the ‘correct’ way to view the events of the film. From the story as presented one cannot determine is Cecila is a young woman abused by fanatics, the savior of humanity, or the vessel through which it is damned.

This week I obtained Immaculate on Blu-ray disc and I look forward to listening to the director’s commentary.