2024 has proven to be a great year for horror movies. We’ve already had so many fantastic bone-chilling titles to enjoy, like Sydney Sweeney’s critically acclaimed Immaculate as well as standouts including Late Night with the Devil, with several more still to come — including Terrifier 3, MaXXXine, and the one that’s arguably the buzziest of them all, Nicolas Cage’s new Longlegs.
That last one, in fact, is already being hailed as one of the most terrifying, stomach-churning movies of this decade.
What it’s about: Written and directed by Osgood Perkins, Longlegs is the 1990s-era story of a rookie FBI agent (played by Maika Monroe) who’s assigned to a cold case involving a Satanic serial killer who goes by the moniker of Longlegs (played by Cage). The whole situation gets insanely creepier the more the agent digs into the case and runs up against its connections to the occult. Even worse, she comes to realize she has a personal connection to the killer.
The movie already has critics who’ve screen it early (ahead of its July 12 release) absolutely raving, with Longlegs quickly scoring a perfect 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Check out the trailer below, and you’ll get at least a partial sense of why that’s the case.
This is a thoughtfully made film, one for which just as much care has clearly been given to the marketing. The trailer does an excellent job, in my opinion, of getting you interested without giving anything away (and bonus points for using Cage’s voice without actually showing him). Combine high art with the kind of horror that will give viewers disturbing nightmares, and if you’re lucky, Longlegs is what you get as a result.
Reportedly, it’s already even made some early viewers sick to their stomachs. Longlegs is also already drawing comparison’s to 1991’s Silence of the Lambs. It’s that good, and that bleakly horrifying. As for Cage’s absence from the promotional materials, here’s what he had to say about that decision:
“It’s the equivalent of putting a warning label on a jar of nitroglycerin,” the actor told EW. “The monster is a highly, highly dangerous substance. The way it’s moved, unveiled, deployed has to be treated very carefully.”
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