There are few sweeter victories than an indie film managing to snag success in the grossly competitive Hollywood market. Pixar, with its near-endless supply of elite family films, has little trouble staying above the line, while James Cameron’s Titanic remains one of cinema’s crown box office jewels with its lifetime gross of $2.2 billion.
Longlegs — Osgood Perkins’ sensational exercise in dread — comparatively grossed just $126.9 million following its theatrical release last summer. But, in doing so, it became the highest-grossing independent film of the year; a feat it partly owes to its idiosyncratic marketing campaign that only a film like Longlegs could have. And now, it’s even the main Hulu course, ahead of both Pixar and Titanic.
Per FlixPatrol, the Nicolas Cage-backed supernatural horror thriller is charting at the top of Hulu’s offerings at the time of writing, beating out an all-star trio of Pixar titles in Finding Nemo (second place), Ratatouille (third place), and The Incredibles (fourth place). Also bowing down to the Longlegs regime is a ninth-place Titanic; oh how the tides change in the Wild West of streaming charts.
Longlegs stars Maika Monroe as FBI agent Lee Harker, who gets assigned a case involving a string a family murder-suicides in Oregon. Her key clue is the name “Longlegs,” which is left at every crime scene. With every layer that gets peeled back on her increasingly personal hunt for the perpetrator, her arc becomes a one-way ticket to a reality most sinister.
Cage produces and stars in the film as the titular Longlegs — a role he infuses with a controlled-yet-gonzo ticking time-bomb energy. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that he steals the show, although the film’s standout performance could be more honestly attributed to writer-director Osgood Perkins.
Say what you will about the myriad of plot elements Perkins includes in this film, but if one pays attention to the actual story beats and visual presentation of Longlegs, it’s easy to see why the film has become so revered.
Every shot composed by Perkins (and/or the film’s cinematographer, Andrés Arochi) is an attempt to instill discomfort in the viewer. This includes what the camera is capturing, and the angle/depth from which it captures those subjects. The audience, of course, welcomes this discomfort because it’s a horror movie.
But, without giving anything away, the slaughter-happy expedition undertaken by Longlegs is directly related to the impulse to ignore discomfort, rather than confronting or even acknowledging it, which is necessary to our humanity. This parallels the film’s own necessity to evoke the uncomfortable so as to be the best version of itself.
Indeed, Longlegs is among horror’s most elite modern orchestrations, and its commercial success means the spotlight has made some much-deserved space for Perkins. His next two films, The Monkey and Keeper, arrive in theaters on Feb. 21 and Oct. 3 this year, and if they manage to stick a landing even similar to that of Longlegs, we just might find ourselves in the vicinity of the next great horror bastion.
