Read Part I of this series on Midsommar here.
Two horror films bookend Midsommar: The VVitch (2015) and this past summer’s Longlegs. Both contend that evil is real—and indeed, so is the devil, who is portrayed prowling about the world seeking the ruin of souls.
“In this world, Satan is real,” one Longlegs reviewer put it, with the remove of a historian informing readers that once, the medieval peasant believed unequivocally in a divine cosmos, as if erudite moderns like ourselves could even imagine such a thing. But as I left the theater that night, I heard one man remark to his friend, “Man, I feel like I need to go home and read my Bible.”
“Can we read it together?” the friend asked.
They laughed, and so did I. But it’s the viewer reaction that Pure Flix, the Christian production company behind the didactic God’s Not Dead films, were probably hoping for with its own franchise. Why did Osgood Perkins, Longlegs’ writer and director, succeed where God’s Not Dead succeeded primarily in preaching to the converted?
It’s certainly not because it avoids portraying its villain with over-the-top gusto.
Spoilers ahead, but if Longlegs had been made by Pure Flix, it’s hard to imagine it would have been much different. Even the casting of Nicolas Cage, who starred in a film adaptation of the Christian megahit Left Behind, might have remained in place. The serial killer known as Longlegs is a “Hail Satan!”-shouting glam rock obsessive and an agent of the actual devil. He ensnares traditional families and brings them to horrific ends by means of the pater familias. His minion is a single mother whose desperate situation he has manipulated to serve his purpose.
Perhaps, cut off from community and a true relationship with God, they are susceptible to the devil’s influence.
Cage memorably, disturbingly, plays Longlegs, the film’s eponymous serial killer. The FBI cannot decipher the coded letters he leaves at the crime scenes: grisly murder-suicides of entire families, seemingly all at the hands of the fathers. The FBI identifies agent Lee Harker, a Clarice Starling derivative, as an intuitive investigator whose hunches may solve the cold case. She quickly cracks the code after an unsettling encounter with an unseen visitor. Harker, it turns out, has her own connection with the killer, who she met as a young girl when he showed up one snowy day at the isolated farmhouse she shared with her mother. In a flashback, we are shown how her mother struck a deal with Longlegs (as in “Daddy,” get it?). In exchange for room and board, he let her daughter live. To protect her cub, the isolated mama bear also agreed to do his demonic bidding to slaughter families.
Much has been made of Longlegs’ spiritual (I use the term advisedly) descent from Zodiac, Se7en, and The Silence of the Lambs. There is a lazy reference to Dante’s Inferno thrown in, and there are lots of ponderous shots of the film’s female protagonist gazing analytically at crime scene photos.
But for all its debt to procedural crime thrillers, the only thing getting more recognition than Cage’s creeptacular performance might be the film’s plot holes and inconsistencies. The life-size dolls in the film are a big part of those discussions.
There, however, we might wonder if something allegorical is happening once again.
The film shows us, and later tells us (and then tells us again), that Longlegs is a dollmaker. The murdered families all have young daughters with impending birthdays around which the killings occur. The film’s over-explanatory last third shows how Agent Harker’s habit-clad mother appears at victims’ houses, delivering Longlegs’ life-size dolls by pretending to be a nun from a local church with a prize from a church raffle. Each doll hides a magic (?) silver ball, through which the devil apparently mesmerizes the families into killing themselves and each other, with the fathers finally commiting suicide.
If it sounds a little far-fetched, that’s because it definitely is.
There is, as Blaise Pascal put it, a “God-shaped hole” in the film’s narrative. It treats prayers and organized religion with superciliousness, and its world operates with a dreamlike logic. Amid a satanic ghoul’s decades-long reign of terror, and although the FBI seems convinced enough that psychics are real to put Harker on the case, no one ever even suggests invoking the Almighty as a possible countermeasure. A priest is mentioned in passing, but only as a victim of one father’s murderous rampage.
A stilted conversation earlier in the film may give a clue to the doll motif’s meaning, and the closest the film gets to giving the titular serial killer a motive. Agent Harker talks with a little girl about Barbies. The girl has outgrown her dolls for the most part, she says, but her father keeps them around because he doesn’t want her to grow up too quickly.
Think of Longlegs as a disturbing meditation on America Ferrera’s “It is literally impossible to be a woman” speech in the Barbie movie.
It’s a well-worn, almost cliché critique of dolls that they reinforce traditional gender roles for women and that the patriarchy uses them to keep women tied up in their boxes. Indeed, Longlegs’ murder dolls are identical effigies of the daughters, who are on the brink of growing up. The dolls drive dads to madness: Unable to confront their daughters growing up and making their own way in a confused world, they literally freak out. It is telling that the one survivor of Longlegs that we meet is played by Kiernan Shipka. Audiences also know Shipka as Mad Men’s Sally Draper, the rudderless daughter of Don and Betty, who were themselves playacting roles of traditional masculinity and femininity, roles which ultimately wore them down and drove them apart. Like Barbie, Longlegs seems to suggest that neither men nor women are particularly well served by rigid, outdated gender roles.
In both Barbie and Longlegs, men are threatened by girls who are on the verge of making their way in the world. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie longs to be a real girl in what in some ways works as an updated Pinocchio, and some reviews also liken Longlegs to a fairy tale (presumably of the Grimm variety). Notably, those dark and bloody stories also tend to take place in a godless context, where magic and big bad wolves are real but the Man Upstairs seldom makes an appearance. The intent is usually nonetheless moral, to scare the listener away from some sort of behavior.
So what is Longlegs trying to scare us away from (or into)? Something about gender, perhaps. Something about faith and religion. Maybe it’s not sure itself.
This might be attributable in part to auteur writer-director Osgood Perkins’ own religious illiteracy. Evidently, he seems to think churchgoing folks wouldn’t be at all suspicious of a strange nun showing up at their door unannounced, informing them simply that she was “from the church,” and that they had won a drawing for a creepy, lifelike doll. They would, he posits in the film, be absolutely delighted.
Or maybe Perkins is saying something else. We are told these families are religious, but how real was their faith and their community to them that they could fall so easily for something so silly? The victim families are shown living in isolated farmhouses and cookie-cutter suburban neighborhoods where no one goes outside. Perhaps, cut off from community and a true relationship with God, they are susceptible to the devil’s influence. The lone clergyman shown in the film is unprepared and unable to fight back when the devil comes to call, in what may perhaps be a critique of a different kind of fatherhood—the pastor’s ability to truly protect his flock.
When the film first introduces Harker’s mother, she is giving Sissy Spacek’s mother in Carrie, constantly asking her daughter if she’s saying her prayers to keep the devil away. That is, until she explains late in the film that she doesn’t actually believe prayer works and has in fact been doing the deadly bidding of Cage’s genderfluid, demonic Longlegs. Harker herself later confesses that she has never prayed at all. At the film’s end, she is powerless to destroy Longlegs’ work. Her handgun clicks impotently as she pulls the trigger before she silently walks away.
Maybe that’s the point. In a world where Satan is real, a godless society doesn’t have the tools to fight back. Society absorbed the things the scolds tried to tell us were bad—devil-worshiping rock, broken homes. When the devil came to collect his due, we couldn’t understand how it ended up like this.