Note: This review contains potential spoilers for Longlegs.
“Are you still saying your prayers? Our prayers protect us from the Devil.”
Osgood Perkins’s latest horror film Longlegs follows FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) in her search for a serial killer connected to the occult. The film relies on haunting aesthetics and thrills for its scares, though it ultimately presents an uncontested Satanism and a nihilistic portrayal of spirituality that leave both the film and the viewer unfulfilled when the end credits start rolling. This negative space confirms an intrinsic longing for justice and the deeply human notion that good must not merely stifle evil, but in fact, triumph over it in the end—a victory that proves to be an impossibility in the film’s grim world.
Longlegs’s first two acts are promising, containing clues as to just how demonic Longlegs might be, and thrive in the craft of suspenseful curiosity. Throughout Harker’s investigation, she finds crosses left by Longlegs, who claims that “X marks the spot.” It makes sense that a satanic horror film would pervert the cross and Christian piety in a haunting way that’s devoid of true Christian morality and spiritual power, and it does admittedly lend to well-constructed imagery befitting the film’s haunting mood.
The story is somehow a mix of Zodiac (2007) and Hereditary (2018) while also drawing inspiration from The Silence of the Lambs (1991), fusing crime tropes and supernatural aesthetics. The film’s opening scene, in which a young girl encounters the titular antagonist (played excellently by Nicolas Cage), is shot in the 4:3 aspect ratio, its grainy film and vintage mood immediately captivating and framing an eerie experience for the next 100 minutes. Andres Arochi’s cinematography uses shadows and empty space in every dimly lit frame to evoke a near-constant dread that no one is safe. As for Monroe and Cage, they both give gripping performances on opposite ends of the acting spectrum, the former subtly portraying a frail FBI agent and the latter flamboyant and unabashed in his character’s weirdness.
As the film progresses, Harker learns that her suspect is a Satanist and a dollmaker. A particularly striking moment occurs when Harker tries to cement her “intuition”—which is actually her memory of how Longlegs attacked her as a child—that he’s the serial killer and must be detained. Agent Browning (Michelle Choi-Lee) retorts, however, that in the United States of America, Satanism isn’t a crime.
As a crime thriller and religious horror film, Longlegs is concerned with aesthetics but (perhaps) unaware of its own theological claims.
Horror fans may echo Agent Browning, claiming that Satanism isn’t a crime in the horror genre, either; it may even be intriguing for Christians to watch at times. But Longlegs’s Satanism is unrealistic in that it posits a world where the best defense against hell is a frightened cop with a gun. Harker’s mother Ruth (Alicia Witt), the film’s sole religious character, frequently expresses concern for her daughter’s communion with God. The soft-spoken and ever-anxious Harker is too concerned with the darkest case of her career, however, to care about Bible reading and prayer, two activities that might have improved her success against Longlegs.
I don’t seek happy, heartfelt endings in horror movies, but Longlegs ends with no justice or even closure whatsoever for the things that Longlegs’s victims, Harker included, experience. Horror is often used to confront us with life’s grim realities. In Longlegs, the reality seems to be that serial killers often get away with everything and Satanism holds more power than we think. Yet these realities are made simultaneously more frightening and less profound as Longlegs is hell-bent on smothering Christian truth with a bloody bed sheet.
One of my favorite religious horror films is The Conjuring (2013). Not only is it a modern classic of the genre, but it ends with a successful exorcism. The demon’s grip is loosened; bleakness is met with hope. The difference between Longlegs and a film like The Conjuring is that the former casts religion as a madwoman’s respite, a hapless fight against an undefeated enemy. (The film’s disappointing third act reveals that Ruth, once a devout Christian, is the Satanist killer’s accomplice, delivering his possessed dolls to families who then kill each other.) In Longlegs’s world, Satan always answers prayers while God—if he exists—is silently resigned, unable to contest the power of the Devil’s dollmaker.
It’s elementary to posit that a world in which Satan possesses true, supernatural power is also one in which God wields at least the same power. Artists throughout history have depicted the cosmic struggle between God and Satan, and the eventual “war in heaven.” Yet Longlegs peculiarly avoids this, resulting in an anti-climactic third act.
After discovering her mother’s involvement in Longlegs’s twisted string of murders, Harker rushes to his next victims’ house. By the time she arrives, Ruth has already delivered the demonic doll to the family and is patiently awaiting their possession and eventual killing spree. Harker’s reaction is befitting of her character: she stands, stunned and hyperventilating while Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) kills his wife. He turns to his daughter Ruby (Ava Kelders) but Harker kills him first. After an intense exchange with Ruth, Harker then kills her mother, dishearteningly stopping one bloodbath with another. (Why Harker didn’t just destroy the doll to break the curse, as was done with her childhood doll earlier in the film, is a glaring plot hole.) Thus the film’s sole religious figure dies with her head covering and crucifix adorning the cross-shaped bullet hole in her head.
In the end, prayers don’t save the day—in fact, the day isn’t saved—and justice is not meted out to the true demonic force at play. A heaving Harker lowers her gun and beckons Ruby, the only other survivor in the house, to come with her. As Lee Harker studies Ruby’s expression, I wonder if she thought there was more she could have done and if somehow, the evil will continue to haunt others, her rescue only impeding its plans.
The credits roll.
The imbalance of spiritual powers at play serves the film’s purposes; it ends in bleak, straight-up Satanism which is, in truth, quite haunting. But it also serves to deepen our curiosity. If the Devil or any other demonic force indeed has such power, what can we do to defeat it? Is our only hope a fighting chance at shooting our way out of its physical manifestations, a further showing of violence drenched in baseless moral reasoning? Or will evil itself be decimated one day?
The Christian story answers these questions in a way that both recognizes the Devil’s power and satisfies our deepest longings for justice and goodness to prevail. It is true, though perhaps not as apparent in a modern materialistic world, that “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but…against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12, ESV). Longlegs is right, in that regard: Satan is powerful. But God—who is sovereign whether we invoke our prayers or not—will deliver the death blow to evil and Satan in the end. “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet,” writes the Apostle Paul (Romans 16:20). In a sermon on this verse, John Piper muses that “those who think of all struggles in terms of conflicts with the Devil to be fought in face-to-face combat” ought to remember Paul’s words, as well as those of the great Reformer Martin Luther: “His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure.”
Longlegs, instead, claims that Satan’s reign is sure, that all we can really do is forsake our prayers and put a bullet through our problems. It’s not surprising that we feel cheated by this conclusion. While Longlegs argues that we have nowhere to turn in our struggle against cosmic powers, Christ-followers throughout history have argued that there is nowhere else to turn but toward Christ, and that he will truly quell all evil, not merely hinder it. When Jesus asks if the disciples would forsake him, Peter responds, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). G. K. Chesterton is believed to have said that “when belief in God becomes difficult, the tendency is to turn away from Him; but in heaven’s name to what?”
As a crime thriller and religious horror film, Longlegs is concerned with aesthetics but (perhaps) unaware of its own theological claims. Thus, it has no sense of closure, leaving viewers with a hollow victory over evil. But the truth of the Devil’s end is more certain than the film’s depiction. Longlegs is correct in that Satan is surely powerful, but he is not unrivaled. It will not be a silver bullet in the hands of man that undoes him, but rather, the keys of Death and Hell in the hands of the God of peace. Satan’s doom is sure, and all he can do is buck against an already settled truth that he will indeed be crushed.
