T he awful story is always the same: A good, vanilla, father in the suburbs of Oregon abruptly snaps without provocation, slaughtering his wife and their young children before taking his own life in similar fashion. Absent any forensic indication that someone from outside the home was at the scene of the crime, these domestic atrocities might seem like a devilish coincidence if not for the single piece of evidence they share between them, a sinister-sweet birthday card signed “Longlegs.” That serial killer flourish is a fitting coup de grace for a series of murder-suicides made all the more disturbing by the juxtaposition they strike between unfathomable evil and textbook wholesomeness; the illusion of purity draws an unholy contrast with the darkness that intrudes upon it.

It’s enough to make the nuclear family seem like a cover story, or at least to sow a measure of doubt in its promise to protect good souls against a slew of ungodly horrors. Everything you were told about the world as a kid was a little white lie. delights in exposing that, and so does the aggressively unnerving Oz Perkins film to which he lends both his name and ethos.

Terrifying in the abstract even as it grows increasingly absurd to watch, slinks its way into that liminal space between childhood nightmares and grown-up practicalities with the same precision that it splits the difference between serial killer procedurals and supernatural psychodramas (let’s say and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s ). Divinin.