Longlegs

In a few days, Lee Harker made serious progress in investigating this case, because the pale and distorted face of the maniac has been haunting her since childhood. In addition, the girl is helped by a gift that looks more like a mental illness. It cuts her off from the outside world, but allows her to feel things that others do not know. For example, death between dry autumn trees.

Most of the time, the main character of “Longlegs” is not in a hurry. She slowly investigates anonymized plasterboard and wood interiors, or peers into the flickering of wall lamps and computer monitors. The atmosphere is exacerbated by the routine and illogical nature of events, and their growing power prepares Lee to face the troubled past.

But the horror is followed by a parody, so that it makes you laugh with surreal humor not so much with hopelessness. Sudden plot twists destroy mundane life and throw reality into chaos, with Satan and the Longlegs, who serves him, at the center of this whirlpool.

This couple, who only appear on screen for a moment and mostly hide in the thick shadows, is completely alien to the stylized realism that surrounds Lee. Evil doesn't fit into the frame in its entirety and thus creates a paradox: the dark reality of Longlegs deliberately rejects its destructive core.

Osgood Perkins centers the second half of the film around the conflict between his fabric and his character who embodies evil. The ridiculously powdered and botox maniac doesn't go to the extreme and doesn't try to make you laugh, but he still serves as a source of nightmare that distorts symmetrical spaces.

Longlegs doesn't scare with immorality or atrocities — he destroys the familiar world with his irrelevance, draws from it strength that dramatically changes the established order and places the frightened main character in new circumstances for which she is not ready.

At its core, parody is like horror, because both directions disfigure the usual order, but in Longlegs they deliberately conflict. Osgood Perkins adds frightening elements to thicken the darkness, and then destroys the oppressive atmosphere with a kind of humor. It is he who becomes the ominous focus — familiar horror breaks down into theatrical and impulsive jokes.

At the same time, Lee takes what is happening as seriously as she has no reason to doubt reality. A funny and crazy villain in a clown outfit kills happy families by order of Satan, and the tense main character tries to stop him at all costs, including the life of his own mother.

As he slowly glides across the surface of history, especially in contrast to the “colorful” Longlegs, Lee proves to be a simple function. It exists only to emphasize the paradox of two atmospheres opposing each other and testing the strength of the picture. She has no bright character, and her emotions are limited to a violent manifestation of fear.

The main character is an excellent detective who finds it difficult to communicate with people, she is fixated on work and is cut off from the outside world. And this detail gives rise to madness, the scale and unreality of which are difficult to assess in familiar categories. Unknown colors penetrate Lee's grey world that not only transform reality, but make her alienation a new form of evil.

Throughout the movie, the girl is waiting. First, he prepares to chase after a maniac, then for his own past, and finally tries to change the long-established order. In all cases, Osgood Perkins mixes narrative with facts from his biography, bitter jokes, and reflections on everyday topics.

By the end, all the superstructures will evaporate. Even the expressive Longlegs is anonymized and fades into the background, turning into a blurry still frame. From an independent subject, he turns into a crooked mirror that distorts the post-horror genre (read our text).