Osgood Perkins

It’s fashionable to judge horror movies based on how scary they are. It’s a fair albeit reductive question; if comedies are supposed to make you laugh and tearjerkers are designed to make you cry, then a good fright flick should presumably make you catch your breath and clutch your armrests. By this measure, Longlegs, the fourth feature from writer-director Osgood Perkins, is moderately successful; it’s a thoroughly unsettling experience, even if it’s unlikely to have you covering your eyes in abject terror. But in terms of cinematic construction—its building of mood, its manufacture of tension, its rattling spookiness—Longlegs is a small-scale triumph. This may not be the scariest modern horror movie ever made, but it is surely one of the creepiest.

Conceptually speaking, this is nothing new for Perkins, whose prior pictures—the re-titled Blackcoat’s Daughter (changed from February), the annoyingly titled I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, and the gender-flip-titled Gretel & Hansel—all cultivated an inescapable sense of doom. They felt weird and looked great (Gretel & Hansel made my Best Cinematography ballot in 2020), but they prioritized bone-chilling atmosphere over legible plotting. With Longlegs, Perkins has properly calibrated his nerve-jangling sensibility, locating the proper balance between apprehension and entertainment. He hasn’t curtailed his gift for upsetting his audience—a number of scenes here are deeply disturbing—so much as channeled it into a more propulsive story. He has his cake and taints it too. Read More