Is ‘Longlegs’ Scary?

The arrival of a hyped horror film could herald the introduction of any number of new creepy crawlies or nightmarish characters into the collective consciousness. We never know for sure what good horror will bring us in that regard. But one thing you can count on accompanying a popular horror release is the most pointless of questions. “Is the film scary?” Longlegs, the new procedural thriller from writer-director Oz Perkins, opened in theaters nationwide this weekend, and the debate rages on.

Aside from jokes about the length of bipedal appendages the conversation in the dank halls of Film Twitter sprawled out from early hype for Longlegs all the way to questioning what even constitutes “scary,” citing older films like Rosemary’s Baby.

Does “scary” just mean “jump scare” to some people? Some comments are like, “it’s not scary but it fills you with an unbearable dread that will keep you awake for 2 days”. https://t.co/0945BX1XZI

— Vanessa McKee (@vmenendezb) July 12, 2024

Some of these Longlegs reactions are so confusing, with some tweets being like, "Well, the film isn't that scary, but there's an intense layer of dread and unstoppable evil throughout the entire runtime that'll get under your skin."

Isn't that what scary is? Sounds scary to me!

— Will (@SilentDawnLB) July 11, 2024

Rosemary Baby is one of horror movies that sticks with you after you watch, which in my opinion makes it scary

— Jon Palmer (@jon_palmer4133) July 13, 2024

First, let’s get this out of the way. Longlegs delivers a terrific sense of foreboding, anchored by a skin-crawling performance by Nicolas Cage. It leaves you with a desperate sense of emptiness. But does even that assessment answer the question of whether it’s “scary?” Like most things, it depends on the audience.

I review horror films. If I judged their merits solely on whether they genuinely scared me or not, there would rarely be a horror film I considered good. Why would I, a person who loves horror films, choose to put my preferred genre through such a stringent litmus test to earn my praise? That’s not even the distinct point of horror films.

So where does this question come from? It comes from immature self-promoters who want to posture themselves as the arbiters of what “true horror” is. “That’s not scary. If you think that’s scary, you should watch _____.” The horror community doesn’t need this sort of gatekeeping. It’s tedious and rarely a compass pointing you somewhere you haven’t been already.

People please for the love of God stop using “I didn’t find it scary“ as an excuse for whether you like the movie or not. You’re not eight years old anymore.

— Lee McCoy (@Drumdums) July 12, 2024

If we’re to ask this question at all, the real question we should be asking is in the service of those who don’t venture into the deep end of the genre and stand on the other side of the scares spectrum. “Is Longlegs scary for the average viewer?” The answer is more likely “yes,” but even so, does that matter in the sense of what constitutes good? Where it would seem to matter more, if we’re talking about the average moviegoing audience, is getting butts in seats.

The horror marketing playbook nowadays works like this. There’s the teaser of a teaser, followed by the teaser, and then the teaser of the trailer. Then, finally, there’s the trailer. The trailer includes blurbs from critics after screenings at film festivals. These blurbs always seem to be competing to best prepare you for an experience that will apparently shatter your psyche and somehow kill your dog. Take for instance the blurbs on the trailer for Longlegs.

“The scariest film of the decade.” And “Goddamn scary. A must-see.” (These both came from the same publication.) To its credit, the team at Neon deployed a fantastic gorilla marketing campaign full of cryptic iconography, and even released a video as a marketing stunt of star Maika Monroe’s elevated heart rate when she first saw co-star Cage in full makeup. This sort of buildup creates an expectation that few films, if any, live up to. Reasonable horror fans can take all of that with a grain of salt. We’re going to see the movie anyway. Teens looking for a thrill who have no idea what the genre is capable of in the hands of a director like Perkins, however, will eat it up and lament their shattered psyches at the end of the 101-minute runtime.

So, reducing the whole genre to a cheap thrill translates to easy ticket sales, I suppose. That’s fine for the studios, but that leaves horror fans in a never-ending hype cycle that risks setting up perfectly fine films to fail. Do you want to know what the real scary thing is? The prospect that movies focused on delivering tense atmosphere and the subtleties of the macabre could be lost to the ether simply because they didn’t elevate enough people’s heart rates.