in serial killer cases. She doesn’t have a similar knack for interpersonal relationships, which has resulted in her being of a lone wolf in the department. Her immediate supervisor, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), is the only person who appreciates her talents.

Carter puts Lee to work on a serial murder case that’s baffled the authorities in the Pacific Northwest for two decades. Several families have been brutally murdered over the years, and, in each case, the killings occur around the 14th day of the month. In each case, the father inexplicably snaps, kills his family, and then commits suicide. Further, the police find clues at each site through occult drawings and coded messages. They suspect a single person might be behind all the killings but can’t explain how they persuade the fathers to do their bidding or who that person might be.

Of course, the audience knows immediately who the person is since, in the film’s first scene, a young girl who grows up to become Lee (a thoroughly unsurprising twist) is approached by a stranger who appears to have very long legs and sounds a lot like Nicolas Cage at his creepiest. Later, Lee receives a birthday card with more coded messages from a “stranger” whom the audience instantly realizes is Longlegs, whose real name is Dale Cobble. Later, when the audience finally sees Longlegs, he resembles the 60s novelty singer Tiny Tim as an older man. However, he sounds like Nicolas Cage at his most warped.

I won’t discuss the plot of Longlegs any further except to note that the film explains the killings and Cobble’s involvement. The movie’s goal is not uncovering the killer’s identity, as was the driving force in similar movies like Silence of the Lambs and Se7en. The audience experiences no moment of satisfaction in realizing that a serial killer has been stopped. Instead, the film’s goal is creepy horror for its own sake. And “Longlegs” is one of the most successful films in that regard I’ve seen in a long time.

The success of Longlegs is primarily because of writer/director Osgood Perkins, who comes by his familiarity with the horror genre naturally. He’s the son of actor Anthony Perkins, the original Norman Bates from Psycho, and a man associated even more closely with that film than Alfred Hitchcock was. The younger Perkins shows off his skill in the aforementioned opening scene, where he intentionally frames his image to avoid showing Longlegs’ face, instead relying on Nicolas Cage’s voice alone to create a feeling of dread. That feeling is intensified over and over during the movie. An encounter between Lee Harker and the surviving daughter of the first Longlegs family (Kiernan Shipka), who has been in a mental institution ever since, is particularly chilling. The daughter was catatonic before a meeting with Cobble the day before. Now, she casually notes how she would gladly kill Lee if Cobble told her to.

The filmmakers may have pulled off a casting coup by getting Monroe and Cage as the leads, but the actors don’t just rely on audience familiarity with their previous performances. Maika Monroe has been solid in several genre performances in recent years, but she and director Perkins contrast Lee Harker with the female archetype for this character, Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling from Silence of the Lambs. Foster was tough in scene after scene and a match for Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter. Monroe is haunted by her past and never quite sure of herself. Even her mousy appearance as a character who does not try to enhance her looks contrasts with Monroe’s natural beauty. (I could not believe at first that she was the same actress I’d seen in earlier performances.)

Playing twisted creeps is nothing new for Nicolas Cage, but he’s in exceptionally fine form here. From the moment he opens his mouth, he’s off center, but under Perkins’ direction, he avoids making Longlegs a mere comic distraction. Cage also reveals his character’s bizarre charisma, which makes his attractiveness to his acolytes more understandable. Cage doesn’t display Hannibal Lecter’s perverse charm, but it’s more offputting to audiences and equally effective. I would love to see Nicolas Cage get a well-deserved Oscar nomination for this role.

Longlegs requires more than the usual suspension of disbelief for most films of this nature, and the movie’s plotting has several gaps and holes regarding the investigation. Also, the film’s last scene doesn’t work as well as most of the movie’s earlier moments. However, Longlegs is the rare horror movie that disturbed me as I left the auditorium. It also had me subconsciously looking around to see if anyone was there in the empty men’s room I visited after the show. Even a week later, as I write this review, the movie’s imagery creeps me out. This is a movie that values creep out more than gross-out. Longlegs will have some very long legs for horror fans.