Culture | Film It’s a grim, thankless task. The hunt for that elusive, ‘genuinely scary’ new horror movie is like picking through a wasteland of desiccated bones with barely an ounce of twitching flesh on them. Last year, Talk to Me unsettled satisfyingly with its kinetic jump scares, and more recently Sydney Sweeney chewed through the gore splendidly in Immaculate.
But then there were the so-so Russell Crowe exorcisty outings and that abysmal attempt to reboot The Exorcist. So hopes were high and pulses pumping after the Longlegs trailer dropped. Oozing with rapid-cut demonic imagery, swirling in a frenzied noise only the devil’s hi-fi could produce, and flashing up a rack of five-star ratings (admittedly all from specialist horror genre critics), this promised to frighten audiences witless.
It begins with a generic 1970s prologue of a little girl being approached outside her home by a freakadoo babbling nonsense (face concealed, but no one will be shocked to discover later that it’s mad, bad Nicolas Cage ). Rather refreshing then, that blood-red, monochrome opening credits follow with a quote from T-Rex’s Bang a Gong (Get it On) and we are whisked via a scuzzy instrumental of that track to the 1990s. The glam of T-Rex is a curiously more leftfield reference to the satanic peccadilloes of rock music than, say, Black Sabbath.
So the omens are hunky dory as we catch up with rookie FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), who has been assigned to the cold case of Longle.