Oz Perkins’ 2024 film, Longlegs, is at first glance a serial killer film, with references abounding to Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) and, to a lesser extent, David Fincher’s Seven (1995). Perkins has been quite explicit in interviews, however, that he lures viewers in with this promise and then gives them something else. That something else is an occult horror film: some critics have pointed to the influence of The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), but I see more pronounced echoes of Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) and The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976). The “Hail Satan!” refrain—which serves not least as the last line of the film—definitively evokes Rosemary’s Baby.
Longlegs is, though, also folk horror—and I will be developing this perhaps not-so-obvious claim at greater length in an article I’m working on. Thus far, no one has identified the film as folk horror, except for one brief post that compares it to Texas Chain Saw Massacre. (An interesting comparison!)
Hail Satan. A direct reference to Rosemary’s Baby
My argument will rest on three characteristics of Longlegs that I argue constitute its status as folk horror:
(1) the presence of a fabricated folklore, grounded in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and specifically its discussion of sympathetic magic involving effigies and images (dolls);
(2) the fact that the film is centrally structured by a ritual that divests all of its characters of agency; the “handing over of agency is the core quality of the ritual frame,” Barry Stephenson writes—just as it is also the “core quality” of folk horror; and
(3) the presence in the film of the illegible—of symbols, signs, and codes—which “preempts, escapes, and defies the legible,” something Matthew Cheeseman has defined a critical component of folk horror.
For now, I just want to say a bit more, here, about the Frazer connection—because it’s pretty fascinating. In several interviews, Perkins has noted that the “magic of the world” he wanted to create depends on The Golden Bough. Let me give two of these moments here, one in an interview in Inverse and one in the New York Times.
From Inverse: For Perkins, inspiration for the dolls comes from two unlikely sources. The first is James George Fraser’s [sic] The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, an encyclopedic volume “about how ancient tribes or cultures dealt with magic, ritual, gods, or belief,” which features chapters on sympathetic magic (the idea that people can be magically affected by actions inflicted on something that represents them).
“With voodoo dolls, if you want to inflict power on someone, you make a doll of them, and you poke it,” [Perkins] says. “If you want to bring down a regime, you make an effigy of a politician, and you burn it in the streets. Puppets, effigies, sculptures, statues, dolls — that was all in the magic of the world I wanted to create.”
From the New York Times: “The dollness comes from ‘The Golden Bough,’ that huge encyclopedic record of cultures and superstition and ceremony and ritual, and how different cultures have coped. One of the sections that stuck out to me was about sympathetic magic, voodoo dolls, effigies, in the way that in some countries they burn puppets of their leaders. This idea that you can affect a living thing by working the effigy and by some sympathetic transference the object will become messed up. That did feel like a fresh turn on the creepy doll.”
What is interesting, however, is that you wouldn’t know about the influence of Frazer if you just watched the film.
In an interview Perkins did with Vulture, we find this: “The reverse of this shot [Longlegs’ basement workshop, at around 55 mins.], Perkins says, finds Longlegs in bed reading The Golden Bough —a comparative study of mythology and religion from anthropologist Sir James George Frazer.” However, in the referenced scene, while you can see Longlegs reading a book, you cannot see the title.
Longlegs reading in bed, although the title of the book is not visible
The Trivia on Amazon’s digital Longlegs includes a note that Frazer’s The Golden Bough appears at several of the crime scenes. Again, if you watch the film, you can’t actually see any evidence of the book at any of the crime scenes.
However, in what seems a clear nod to the spectacularly successful marketing campaign for 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, Neon created a website to accompany the film: The Birthday Murders. And there are two references to Frazer’s The Golden Bough on that site, indicating that the book was found at two crime scenes. At one, it was open to page 187 and at another to page 226. In the latter case, the website includes an image of the page itself.
From The Birthday Murders website (created by Neon)
Together, these references invoke sympathetic magic and effigies, children born with “the gift of second sight,” who will “be able to see things which are hidden from common eyes, such as devils and evil spirits,” and the close connection between religion and magic. Frazer’s book thus forms a complex fabricated folklore that, I think, undergirds the meaning of Longlegs.
As I develop this argument further, I hope to identify a specific type of US folk horror formation, one that includes Rosemary’s Baby, Paranormal Activity 3 (Ariel Schulman & Henry Joost, 2011), Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018), and Longlegs.
Lots more to say!
Bibliography
Cheeseman, Matthew. “English Nationalism, Folklore, and Indigeneity.” In The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror, edited by Robert Edgar and Wayne Johnson, 404-18. Routledge, 2023.
Frazer, J. G. The Golden Bough, vol. 1. Cambridge University Press, 3rd ed., 1911; 2012.
Stephenson, Barry. Ritual: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2015.
