You could easily mistake "Longlegs" for "just another serial killer flick", said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. But, in fact, it is something far rarer: "a horror film that gives you a bona fide case of the heeby-jeebies".
Set in Oregon in the 1990s, it stars Maika Monroe as FBI agent Lee Harker, whose uncanny, almost supernatural, talent for rooting out murderers lands her with a special assignment: to track down an elusive suspect dubbed Longlegs (Nicolas Cage). His MO is to persuade previously respectable men to murder their own wives and children, and then to kill themselves.
The idea that drives "Longlegs", an idea "shared by only the very best horror films", is a thoroughly terrifying one – "that true horror does not reside in something outside menacing us, but the thoughts we can't control bubbling up inside of us".
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In the first half, we only get "cropped glimpses" of him – but "brace yourself for his strangely motherly set of lips", his "hideous wig", his habit of "gradually screaming", and his penchant for "nonsense rhymes".
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