“He worships the devil, that’s for sure– but he’s allowed to do that in the United States of America.” Despite a procedural thriller, Osgood Perkins’ “Longlegs” (2024) tries to map the trajectories that horror has taken to settle in the American psyche. The horror is perhaps that of the orthodox defiling the body of the modern. Hence, an attempt to fathom the ‘Mr. Downstairs’ in the film is an attempt to uncork the bottle and allow the slew of the primordial elements that the liberal and secular social order had repressed.
The modernizing state is unaware that it is simultaneously capable of forging the modern state machinery and fomenting the primordial art of the occult. However, the film “Longlegs” understands this and puts a lens on it. “Longlegs” is a testament to what the modern state has fallen back upon and what it has distanced itself from.
This article contains spoilers for Longlegs.
Longlegs (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
A Mysterious Childhood Encounter
In 1974, a car drove through snow-laden winding alleys in an Oregon neighborhood and halted in front of a lone white house. A little girl watched the car stop by from her windowsill and ventured out of the house with her Polaroid camera. As her prying eyes scanned through the snowy backyard, an even whitish man appeared, referring to her as the almost birthday girl and muttering something about wearing his long legs.
The film then cuts to the 1990s. On her first day of door-to-door searching, FBI agent Lee Harker displays some psychic ability as she identifies the house, which is no different than any of the cookie-cutter houses in the locality where the suspect could be hiding. Her intuition is cemented as her unarmed partner gets shot while interrogating at the same house.
A Serial Killer’s Twisted Game
Her supervisor, Agent William Carter, assigns her to a string of murder-suicide cases where there is a uniform pattern of the father of the family hacking the entire family to death before killing himself. Carter explains that there is another common string that binds the ten similar murders that have reached the FBI desk over the past 30 years: the presence of a letter in coded alphabets, loaded with Satanic connotations, undersigned by a ‘Longlegs.’
The handwriting is untraceable. All the victims have daughters whose birthdays are on the 14th of any given month. While judging the evidence at hand, Harker notices that there is no reported forced entry. For Longlegs to commit the crime, Longlegs had to be inside the house to make use of the murder tools, which are all from inside the house, owned by the family. However, the physical evidence gathered says he was never really present at the sites. Harker fears that the families perhaps follow the dictum of Longlegs, who direct what they should do to each other and themselves. Additionally, he ought to have an accomplice.
What does Lee find out about Longlegs?
While speaking to her mother on the phone at her cabin, Harker feels someone’s presence around her. She goes out to check while the intruder sneaks into her cabin. Returning to her cabin, she finds a birthday card left by Longlegs. It asks Lee not to open it before her birthday, which is on January 14. Nonetheless, Lee opens it and decodes the coded message only to find it to be an open threat.
As Lee’s birthday is knocking on the door, Lee’s mother, Ruth, reminds her that she should never stop saying her prayers. Lee discovers that each victim’s family had a 9-year-old daughter born on the 14th of the month. Furthermore, the murders all take place within six days before or after the birthday itself. More nefariously, the murders form an occult triangle symbol on the calendar, with one date missing. Lee decodes all of Longleg’s letters, which constantly harp on references to a particular Camera family farm. The surviving daughter is at a psychiatric hospital. Lee believes Longlegs will kill again.
At the Camera family barn, Lee and Carter discover a porcelain doll. Upon dissection, it is found that the doll has a hollow metal orb inside its head, almost resembling a brain. Lee and Carter visit Carrie Ann and are baffled to find someone has visited Carrie Ann under Lee’s name. Carrie Ann says she can recall Lee’s face. She says she never wants to forget the man who visited her before Lee’s visit. In the end, she becomes threatening, so Lee leaves.
Why does Lee’s mother act so weird?
Carter is sure there is more to Lee’s involvement with Longlegs than just being assigned to the case where he is a suspect. Carter reveals to Harker that he has found out that Ruth had called in a police report on January 13, 1974, a day before Lee’s 9th birthday, and described a trespasser. He advises Lee to go back to her home and find out more about the trespasser from her mother.
Lee asks her mother to recount the events of her 9th birthday when she called in the police. Ruth adamantly refuses any such thing had ever happened but deliberately leaves the question hanging with her ambiguous replies. Her replies are such that they aim to constantly shield the secret from Lee while dropping enough blind hints and leading Lee on so that she finds the answer by herself. Sensing that her mother is concealing information from her and treating her as a child, an infuriated Lee snaps back.
How Did Longlegs Know Lee Harker?
Ruth, who is pretending to have forgotten about things, says that it is better if, instead of asking, Lee checks her childhood possessions. She finds the Polaroid of the chalky-toned man from her childhood. This means the man we see at the film’s beginning is Longlegs, and the little girl with the camera is Lee Harker. The FBI arrests Longlegs on Harker’s birthday eve. At the interrogation chamber, Longlegs sings the birthday song for Harker, and the record is shown to every officer in a brief session.
Agent Browning reminds Harker that no evidence points to Dale Ferdinand Cobble, aka Longlegs, being directly involved in any of the murders. He worships Satan for sure, but the State does not banish him from doing it. However, one glaring question remains elusive: how does Longlegs know Harker?
Who is Longlegs’ Accomplice, and Where Will Their Killing Spree End?
Lee reminds the agents of her earlier contention that Longlegs works with an accomplice who puts up the masquerade of a trusting well-wisher for the families. Reminding Carter of the missing 13th date, Lee is apprehensive of another killing that this accomplice would execute. Lee is directed to go downstairs to the interrogation room to meet Longlegs. This brings back the memory of Longlegs who had introduced himself on their first meeting as a friend of a friend who lives downstairs, alluding to Satan who lives below Earth.
The cycle is completed as ‘the almost birthday girl’ Lee is forced to be at arm’s distance with Longlegs again on the day before her birthday. With a face dabbed with powder, which makes it look chalky, and botched-up plastic surgery jobs, Longlegs is as deranged as a Satanic serial killer can get. However, he has managed to keep alive the streak of a rock singer.
What happens when Lee interrogates Longlegs at the FBI office?
Longlegs talks to Lee like an old family friend, dropping hints that he has been privy to all major developments in Lee’s life. Longlegs says that there is a seventh ‘she’, a seventh girl, who had been given the choice that all others had been given. The choice was to “accept the gift and destroy it and destroy yourself…or keep it and bow all the way down, and get right down to the dirty, dirty work”.
There is indeed an accomplice– a lady who brings in the message of a ‘gift’ which can be collected from the church. It is a gift mandated by the “Man from Downstairs.” Lee asks Longlegs to reveal the identity of the man from downstairs, to which Longlegs replies: “Why don’t you ask your mommy?” As Lee sits there in disbelief, Longlegs utters his last words– “Hail Satan,” and dies by smashing his head at the interrogation table.
This enrages Carter, who further reveals that while she was with Longlegs, Carrie Ann had jumped off the roof of the mental hospital.
Longlegs (2024) Movie Ending Explained:
How is Agent Lee Harker related to Longlegs?
Agent Browning and Lee reach Lee’s home, searching for answers from Ruth. As Lee goes into her house looking for Ruth, Ruth, dressed in a nun’s attire, appears out of nowhere and guns down Browning. There is a porcelain doll resembling Lee, too, which her mother destroys. Lee falls and loses her senses as she blows off the doll’s head.
It is revealed that Longlegs, a dollmaker, himself dropped by Lee’s house to deliver the porcelain doll, purporting it to be a gift from the church. In return, he demanded Lee to be the sacrificial lamb. However, Ruth protested but was ultimately tortured by Longlegs. Ruth begged Longlegs to spare Lee’s life, so she entered into a pact with the devil. Longlegs was housed in the Harker’s basement. It was now Ruth who went around delivering the porcelain occult dolls.
The Devil resided inside the dolls. Ruth stuck around the families as they went on a killing spree as she had to be the witness to the perfect execution of Satan’s wishes. The devil in the form of the doll debarred Lee from revisiting her childhood memories. As the doll loses its head, the memories come flooding back, revealing that her mother kept the game alive by suppressing Lee’s memories. Throughout Ruth’s association with the devil as a slave, Satan– “having seven heads and ten horns”– is seen hovering tantalizingly around Lee.
A Final Showdown: Will Lee Harker Triumph Over the Devil’s Influence?
Lee regains her consciousness in the basement. There is a phone call. It is the devil on the other end. He reminds Lee that she has to be present at the birthday party of Agent Carter’s daughter, Ruby. The missing piece of the triangle would be completed with the Carters’ death. However, Harker is late as Ruth has already made it to their drawing room with her gift. Harker tries to tell Carter that Ruth is Longlegs’ accomplice, but he is already under the spell. Carter’s wife is already dead, but she is still walking around and talking like nothing has happened.
Ruth tells Harker that if the Carters do not die, Harker and Ruth will burn and twist in the eternal flames of Hell. Whatever she has done is to keep Lee untouched by the devil, which would allow her the chance to grow. After stabbing his wife to death, Carter returns from the kitchen in search of his daughter. Before he can kill her, Lee shoots him. The girl, seemingly possessed and unaware of the mayhem around her, remains clinging to her doll. As a vengeful Ruth tries to attack Lee, Lee shoots her, too. As she unclenches Ruby from the doll and points the gun at the doll, Lee realizes there is no bullet left. The film ends with Longlegs’ risque reminder to ‘Hail Satan.’
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