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Longlegs, The Exorcist, and the Future of Religious Horror

My first introduction to Oz Perkins’s Longlegs was last March, during the opening trailers at my local movie theater, the way God intended movies to be discovered. The teaser flipped between procedural footage of police work, occult imagery, and the back of Nick Cage’s prosthetic-covered head. Beyond these vague signifiers, it was impossible to decode the film’s actual plot. In a climate where it’s expected to go into a movie with its best punchlines and scares spoiled for you because you’re too lazy to download an ad blocker, the mystique was far more interesting than any synopsis could have been. 


The marketing went far past a well-edited trailer, however. The lead-up to the film included an alternate-reality game built around a cipher (distributed through social media comments and newspaper ads resembling a zodiac letter) and a billboard-blasted phone number that led to an audio clip from the movie. What film distributor Neon was advertising was more (or arguably less) than a plot: it was an aesthetic, a vague sense of dread, and an insistence on comparisons to Oscar-sweeping horror drama Silence of the Lambs.  Unfortunately, this campaign far outshines the lukewarm film it was designed to push. 


In 1973, David Sheehan reported that a little movie with a 25 theater release was causing at least a dozen people to faint or vomit at each showing. As news programs continued to document this phenomenon, The Exorcist began its own inadvertent guerilla marketing campaign. There’s no shortage of parallels to be drawn between these two films. Both depict a protagonist ripped from the secular world as she discovers that demonic forces are infiltrating the lives of adolescent girls and using childhood toys as their vessel. But while Longlegs is a milquetoast drama, The Exorcist broke barriers with its graphic depictions of sex and violence, so much so that the film remains a case study for moral debate surrounding child actors and on-set safety. 


This alone makes the film feel like it was destined to become a classic, but its canonization was expedited when Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith’s Michelle Remembers was published in 1980. The memoir details alleged memories of satanic abuse endured by Smith and discovered by Pazder using recovered-memory therapy, a now-defunct and discredited method of uncovering repressed memories. The existence of repressed memories remains contested among psychologists, but the moral panic that followed Michelle Remembers was undeniably fabricated, with over 12,000 parents coaching their children into allegations of occult ritual abuse at the hands of babysitters, schoolteachers and neighbors. What’s now known as the “satanic panic” seems almost prophesied by the terror audiences experienced at the hands of The Exorcist; it’s even theorized that many of these “repressed memories” were actually just recollections of scenes and trailers from the film. But for the parents fueling this paranoia, it felt for a moment that the devil really had come to suburbia. 


However, nearly three decades after the thick of the panic has died down, it seems that Satan holds little power over the imaginations of middle America. In 2014 Gallup reported over 15% of US adults self-identify as “religiously unaffiliated”; in 1994 this number was reported to be just over 5%. According to Pew Research polling this percentage had risen to 28% by 2024.  Long story short, America is becoming less religious, and in many ways horror trends are following suit. 


Why, then, has The Exorcist survived? The answer is found when we strip away all its head spinning and pea soup. In fact, demon possession is one of the least interesting dramatizations the film has to offer. At its core it depicts a Catholic priest failing to protect his mother amidst the vulnerabilities of old age, an atheist failing to protect her daughter amidst the vulnerabilities of youth, and the subsequent crises of faith each experience as a result. It has remained beloved, not because it’s universally horrific, but because it’s compelling regardless of how scared you are of the demon in your attic. The movie’s ethos transcends the barriers of belief, depicting a conflict that is entirely human. 


Even if Longlegs choked on its marketing campaign, it is possible to imagine a near future where it’s looked at with fonder eyes. The movie has plenty of shiny features: a ceaseless parade of gorgeous cinematography, a striking opening sequence and equally compelling montages, and memorable deliveries of an enjoyably cartoonish script (I’m looking at Kiernan Shipka’s we-have-Flannery-O’Connor-at-home style monologue). It’s promisingly improved upon rewatch, with first act character quirks clarified by a full understanding of the folklore and Alicia Witt’s delightfully batshit performance peeking through her character’s early phone calls, even if it’s emblematic of one of the film’s weaknesses.   


There’s an ongoing tradition of great horror performances being characterized by a dissonance from the larger world of their respective movies, a motif found in both “high” and “low” brow properties. There’s Jack Nance’s Chaplin-esque bumbling across Eraserhead’s gore or Crispin Glover’s nasal whining through the cozily-familiar horror beats of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. Perhaps the issue with Longlegs is that it fails to establish a similarly compelling backdrop to contrast its characters with. There’s Blair Underwood as Agent Carter, who seems ripped from the B-plot of an early Saw installment. Nicholas Cage’s titular Longlegs feels like a water-logged animatronic version of glam rock icon T-Rex, and Maika Monroe straight-man's her way through as protagonist Lee Harker. There’s a world where the movie delights in the rise and fall in tone that these personalities produce and embraces the comedic tensions sparked when their wires cross. Instead, the film refuses to commit to being weird enough to support its more fringe elements, and our collection of characters are given little to work off of besides sweeping shots of Vancouver and the world’s most distracting portrait of George Bush. In fact, the filmmaking seems to want to neutralize these extremes as much as possible, blending them into a vague beige mush while being simultaneously desperate that one of them might scare you. 


But Longlegs’s failure runs deeper than the collection of “cinema sins” it’s been criticized for online (including this eclectic cast of characters, their confusing decisions, and a cluster of plot holes). Sure, it's annoying to watch a supposedly trained FBI agent leave her front door unlocked while investigating a strange noise or fail to notice the identity of the next victim is being spelled out for her in flashing lights, but I’ve forgiven some of my favorite movies for worse offenses. What’s disappointing about Longlegs isn’t that it asks you to suspend your disbelief (a prerequisite for enjoying literally any movie), it’s that this suspension isn’t rewarded by anything substantial. The film’s depictions of Satanism are nothing but water weight, a way to indicate evil without having to support it with character or grapple with its consequences. The movie’s devil looks and feels like a cardboard cutout, an indication of something that may have felt real at one time but we know will fall over with the slightest breeze. 


Protestant horror is a term that’s becoming used to encompass more than just “scary movie that’s not Catholic”. They often involve some form of supernatural involvement, but their villains are typically the believers themselves, using religious hierarchies associated with a variety of spiritual practices as a means by which to gain and abuse power. It’s far from a new subgenre (classics include Carrie, Rosemary’s Baby and The Wicker Man) but with a recent stream of beloved releases (Hereditary, Saint Maude and The Witch) it seems audiences are ready to embrace the niche. The lesson learned from Longlegs isn’t that we’re ready to abandon religious themes altogether, rather, it highlights how the horror is found not in our gods but in ourselves. 

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