Longlegs is not a good movie.

I was going to write on a completely different subject, but then I reread Angelica Bastien’s essay on Longlegs and I got distracted. Here are my unpolished thoughts on “prestige horror,” fear, and artistic inspiration. Spoilers (grow up!!!!) ahead for Longlegs and Cure.

Longlegs makes a lot of references. The coded notes left by the suspect known as Longlegs look a lot like notes made by the Zodiac killer. The protagonist Lee Harker looks a lot like Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs and is named after Mina Harker from Dracula. There are shots very reminiscent of David Lynch films, others that look pulled from David Fincher, one that is very much like The Omen. Harker looks up something in a book called A Guide to the Nine Circles of Hell, a book that does not exist, but of course the title refers not to actual Biblical descriptions of the circles of hell but instead Dante’s poem Inferno: a reference to a reference to a reference.

When a character dressed as a nun shrieks “Hail Satan!” the feeling isn’t so much that she is celebrating Satan but instead referencing other films of religious transgression where a nun screamed something blasphemous. It evokes a memory of feeling thrilled, rather than thrilling the viewer directly.

Longlegs is a movie that is not very good but it has been mistaken for a good movie because it references other movies that were good. Silence of the Lambs is good, The Omen is good, Zodiac is good, and Cure is good (more on that one in a minute). If you search for Longlegs on YouTube, you will find a lot of videos “decoding” Longlegs, tracking its every reference to other films. As the references are traced – one guy calls it a Faustian story, another a vampire story, which they prove by piling up evidence of references to those kinds of story – the reviewers get excited. This has to be good, right? Because it makes so many references.

People are equally excited about the horror film The Substance, a festival hit starring Demi Moore that combines body horror with aging women anxiety. It’s gotta be good, look at all the references it is making to everything from David Cronenberg to B-movie shlock. It’s true that this kind of stuff is fun, especially when so many films seem to be made by people who haven’t seen a movie made before 1997. And horror movies, which usually work on the viewer via sensation, can easily confuse even savvy viewers. If you had a good time (or a very bad one), that must mean the movie was profound.

What are you afraid of? When I was a kid, both the idea of heaven and hell freaked me out. Hell for obvious reasons, “torture,” although I didn’t really know what that meant. Sounded bad. But heaven, too, for the whole “eternity” thing. I would try to picture it, something that never ended, and I would fall into panic. What if I got bored? What if I didn’t like it? And then there wouldn’t even be the sweet promise of death to release me from my state because I would already be dead. I think I remember telling my mother when I was around five that I would prefer neither one after I died, thank you. I just wanted things to end.

Now Christian iconography, threats of eternal torment in hell, that sort of thing doesn’t really work on me in daily life. I no longer believe that if I get hit by a bus before I’ve had a chance to confess my most recent sins that my soul will be in peril, nor that if I do more bad things than good things I’ll writhe in hellfire forever more. But there’s a core, from those early days of indoctrination, from the childish imagination trying to contemplate infinity, that can absolutely be reached by a horror movie, an album, a work of art, a novel. But making a movie like Longlegs where people yell “Hail Satan” and there are some crucifixes on the wall doesn’t really evoke fear because no one involved in the making of this film feels the terror of displeasing god and you can tell. If there are no potential consequences, it’s not a real transgression. The crosses on the wall reference other movies with demons and beasts. The woman is dressed like a nun because of films where women were dressed as nuns.

Now that I’m an adult, and I have had my own experiences, I am afraid of other things. I’m afraid of losing my mind and falling into psychosis. Because I’ve seen it happen, and I myself have touched the far reaches of sanity and felt how thin the barrier is. Horror movies about women who can’t distinguish from fantasy and reality, women who lose their minds, unsettle me. I don’t have a sense of distance between the protagonist of something like The Haunting and my own self. I’m afraid of violence, both of experiencing it and of committing it. Because I had friends who were murdered by their father, and I’ve known women murdered by their husband, I am afraid of the potential for violence built into every domestic space. I am aware it is there, I can hear it thrumming under the floorboards, and I hope it stays there.

Longlegs attempts to evoke this fear, but then it immediately pushes it away again. The FBI agent is investigating family annihilation, men who one day murder their entire families. The film flashes some crime scene photos, some pictures of happy families that would soon become the site of horrors. But then, before that fear even has a chance to breathe, the FBI agent says, “something or someone is making the fathers do this.” Sure. Maybe the devil?

In Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 1997 film Cure, detective Kenichi Takabe is investigating a series of murders that are all done the same way – the throats slashed with a deep X, from ear to chest – but with different killers. “The suspect teaches elementary school. He is a good teacher.” But then he murdered his wife, and even the suspect doesn’t know why he did it. The detective half-jokes, “the devil made him do it.”

In Longlegs, that is literal. A demonic force moves into the family and wipes it out. Phew. For a minute there I was worried I was going to have to deal with my fear and traumatic memories of fathers killing their daughters but instead I just have to worry about “the devil,” which is about as scary as those obviously fake TikToks of haunted houses, where cabinet doors swing open exactly as if the handle has been pulled by an unseen string because it has. The director provokes the audience with some disturbing and violent imagery but coddles them at the same time.

In Cure, the killers have been caught, but the murders between intimates keep happening. A cop kills his partner. A man kills his lover. A doctor kills her patient. Takabe thinks a man present at some of the scenes before the killings is somehow responsible, is maybe hypnotizing the men and women into committing these murders, but a psychologist tells him that even with hypnosis “you can’t change their basic moral sense.” Someone who wouldn’t commit a murder while awake won’t do it when put under hypnosis. But maybe the hypnotist isn’t controlling them by implanting this desire to kill from the outside, he’s just bringing to each person’s attention their desire for violence, their resentment, their anger, their frustration that they have been repressing for the sake of a happy home, calm workplace, career ambitions. He’s finding the fragile flame within and feeding it.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa has billowing curtains in almost all his films. Never as the focus, but something in the background, marking a shift in tone and mood. In Cure, when a man realizes he has killed his wife and he doesn’t know why, the curtains in the back of the room start to stir. Later, when the detective approaches the hypnotist with a gun in his hand, the curtains dance. These curtains nod to how permeable we all are, influences and encouragements blowing in from without. But also the image suggests the air is moving and circulating all the time. It’s only visible now because something got in the way. Much like the man’s desire to kill his wife, circulating deep inside him unseen, only became visible because the hypnotist got in the way.

Both Takabe and Harker from Longlegs are deemed special by these people who want to influence them – the hypnotist in Cure and Longlegs in you know. Harker is special because she is “half-psychic,” whatever that means. But when the hypnotist tells Takabe he is a “special person,” it is because Takabe doesn’t have any repressed desires for violence. They are all out there in the open, working on him all the time. And that is maybe because Takabe has not repressed his desire to murder his wife. He’s aware of it. After a moment where the hypnotist tries to influence him, Takabe returns to his home and has a vision of his wife’s death. He sees her hanging from the kitchen ceiling by a noose. But when the hallucination ends and he sees his wife, alive, standing in front of him, there is no wave of tearful relief.

There is no polite performance of a happy family with Takabe. His wife Fumie is insane, and everyone he works with knows it. The domestic space is not one of repressed violence, it is disquieting. Fumie runs the laundry, but the machine is empty so nothing is cleaned. She presents food to her husband but the meat is uncooked so no one is fed. She can’t even follow a routine; she tries to run errands to places she has been many times before and gets lost. There is no comfortable barrier of well played roles, cozy routines, domestic bliss between their relationship and the threat of violence and murder. If Takabe has nothing repressed, he is resistant to influence. The hypnotist can’t pull a thread to unravel his sweater, his sweater is already undone.

There’s a scene at the beginning, with Fumie talking to her doctor. She is reading the folktale Bluebeard. In the story, a wealthy man brings a new bride into his home and tells her she can have access to every room in their enormous castle except for one. She can never enter the room with the locked door. Her curiosity overcomes her, so she steals the key to the room and takes a look, and she finds the bodies of all his previous wives. He has murdered them all. When Fumie remembers how the story ends, the table before her starts to shake as if by telekinesis. The information that men murder their wives makes the world go wrong. As it should. This is the information Longlegs does a lot of work not to look at.

When Takabe does kill his wife, it’s still a shock, though. We thought maybe Fumie was the bride who finally outsmarts Bluebeard. Instead, she’s just another body on the pile.

I once listened to a man talk for twenty minutes about how political Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films are, and how despite these politics being central to understanding his work they are so infrequently commented on by critics. And as he sort of laid out his understanding of Kurosawa’s commentary on the exploitation of capitalism and the unravelling of the social fabric under the pressure of financialization, he never once mentioned how Kurosawa uses the domestic scene as the site of terror. That the patriarchal family might have some connection to capital, that the politics of the home might be tied into the politics of exploitation, went unnoticed. This despite Cure, Creepy, Tokyo Sonata, Séance, Wife of a Spy, and many others having as their primary core a family, a house, a marriage. The information that the site of love, comfort, and care is also a place of violence and horror is indigestible. It sticks in our craw, if you will. So best pretend it’s not there. Or make a movie that distracts us from it.

Recommended:

• You should watch Cure. It’s on the Criterion Channel. Even though I’ve seen this movie like a dozen times, there is always a moment in the movie, different each time, where I have a strong desire to turn it off, walk away, get out. I watched it last night. About an hour in, I decided I immediately had to go wash some dishes.

• I will watch just about any movie with Kōji Yakusho in it. He has such a good face.

• I read this piece on how the exploitation of Britney Spears should be considered a labor issue rather than a family problem. Corporate greed allowed to run amok in music with no checks on abuse of power.

• Pankaj Mishra wrote an essay for the Globe and Mail, and they took out any references to Gaza. He explains in an interview his understanding of the censorship.