HAIL SATAN
The devil's in the details...
I’ve been thinking about the devil a lot these days.
Well, no. That’s not true. I’ve been thinking about the fictional representation of the devil a lot these days. That and how films influence other films—in both a meta sense and in a textual sense. All of which is to say that I’ve been thinking about Longlegs and The Exorcism on a nearly constant loop.
As I have mentioned before, I was in the crowd for the first big public screening of Longlegs in its completed form. It truly ruled and was one of those great audience experiences that you dream about as a cinephile who just hopes to see something great. And, honestly, it’s one in a long list of really amazing experiences because of how great American Cinematheque is in Los Angeles. I love them so much!
Anyway, I got to see Longlegs nearly a month and a half ago and I’ve been thinking about it a lot ever since. Obviously, there’s a ton of hyperbolic conversations happening because nobody can be normal anymore. That’s a different conversation, though I do think it has its place in the larger discussion about Longlegs and the internet ecosystem the film is entering into. However, I don’t really care if people think Osgood Perkins made the scariest horror film of all time. Or if people think Longlegs is gonna come and get them. I think both things are silly. They’re just the way that many people who don’t know how to contextualize how a film made them feel, into actual words that mean something, know how to express themselves. It’s kinda whatever, though it’s monstrously exhausting.
The actual thing I’m interested in about both films relates to the conversations that The Exorcism and Longlegs are having with iconic horror movies of the past, rather than the ones the public is having about them. William Friedkin’s The Exorcist is the very clear inspiration for The Exorcism, in a deeply meta-textual way, while Longlegs is in deep conversation with Jonathan Demme’s masterpiece, The Silence of the Lambs in just a standard textual way.
The Exorcism is a film about the making of a film, in particular they’re remaking The Exorcist. Though, of course, everyone is playing coy about it and purposefully not saying the name of the film. It stars Russell Crowe as a former movie star (Tony Miller) who let his life fall apart with drugs and alcohol. As he spiraled, his wife died and he abandoned his daughter in the process. He’s back, though, clean and sober (I do have some questions about that, though), and he’s trying to make a comeback. When the actor playing the priest in this remake of The Exorcist dies on set, they have to recast, and they eventually land on Crowe’s character. As the film moves forward, it becomes clear that the demon in the film is real and he’s taking over Tony, much like he takes over Blake (the Regan stand-in) in the movie.
Unlike the relationship between Longlegs and The Silence of the Lambs, these two films aren’t necessarily in plot conversation with each other. Instead, The Exorcism is using the historical knowledge we have, culturally, about the filming of The Exorcist to try and ratchet up the tension and fear. It’s much more of a meta-textual dialogue, than a creative one. However, part of the reason I haven’t stopped thinking about The Exorcism since I saw it in theaters is that while it is ultimately something that fails on every level by the end, the first half (like the full first half, not just the first act) of the film is filled with rather interesting ideas.
For instance, I think horror films about the making of horror films are fun. They’re usually not great, unfortunately, but I’m literally always happy to give them a chance. I also think doing a film about remaking a classic, especially given how poorly the real-life sequel did rather recently, is interesting! I don’t think The Exorcism ultimately does anything of use with either concept, but it gets points from me for making an attempt.
However, I do think the most interesting thing the film makes a play at is Tony’s history. By which I don’t mean the drug and alcohol abuse, but I actually mean the childhood sexual abuse committed against him by his church’s priest. It’s something that gets mentioned a lot, although it seems like his daughter doesn’t totally understand or know what happened to him, and we see bits and pieces of it in flashes. It’s clearly something that haunts him, as you can imagine, and I would argue it’s likely the actual breaking point for his substance abuse issues that seemed to only exacerbate themselves with the illness of his wife.
It’s a rather big deal in the film, but the story and character payoff for it is almost nonexistent. Which I think is a huge waste of such a deeply interesting conceit that feels like it wants to be the center of the movie. The film is, at once, really interested in the psychology of how much the trauma of his past weighs on Tony, especially as he dons the clothing of his abuser, but it’s also quite blasé about what it actually means or does to him. Almost like it wants the shock appeal of the idea but is only interested in pretending like it’s important to the core of the film, despite also feeling like the film is built around it. Which is unfortunate because it’s the strongest part of the entire film, by far.
In fact, considering how big of a piece of shit the director was, both generally but specifically to Tony about his abuse, I’m kind of surprised the demon didn’t have more to really say about it. Also, that the director gets to live is kind of insane—but back to the demon. For a film that is living in the shadow of The Exorcist, it’s very strange to have the demon possessing Tony be as impersonal as this one is. Even the visions Tony has, the flashes back to his abuse, are not necessarily fueled by the demon. Instead, they seem to be brought up by the fact that nobody can shut up about the article that exposed the priests at his church and that Tony, the film seems to imply, was named in the piece. Which… unless he talked to them for the piece (which seems doubtful) is a huge breach of journalist integrity. But, again, these are things the film is not interested in. It’s a film filled with categorically fascinating ideas, ones that I think could have made it a classic if done with a deft hand, but instead is indifferent to the suffering and inner lives of the characters. Which is not even to mention how categorically the film fails his daughter as a character.
The Silence of the Lambs is a film that is, largely, occupied with gender. It does this in both its serial killer of the film, Buffalo Bill, but also in how Demme shoots Clarice Starling and how he shoots the men perceiving her. From the elevator scene to the very end, The Silence of the Lambs is about how women navigate a man’s world—in the literal sense of being taken and killed, but also in the bureaucratic sense of the FBI. In Longlegs, Agent Carter’s daughter asks Lee if it’s “scary being a lady FBI agent.” Her answer is a soft “yeah.” She’s tucked away, awkwardly engaging with a child she doesn’t know but with whom she’s actually being quite genuine with about her emotions. Of course it’s scary being a lady FBI agent—it’s scary being a lady.
However, as a film Longlegs is not as preoccupied with gender as its predecessor. It clearly has a thought about it, but the overwhelming thing it’s interested in is childhood trauma and the lies parents tell their children. Oh, yeah, and the devil. Because that’s the thing about The Silence of the Lambs compared to every other film I’ve mentioned in this piece, it’s the only one that isn’t supernatural. The monsters are good ol’ fashion humans and, honestly, that makes it the scariest of all of them. However, Clarice Starling is not without her own childhood trauma, which Hannibal Lecter zeroes in on immediately and it becomes the entry point of their relationship.
Two things I think are interesting in the conversation that Longlegs is having with The Silence of the Lambs are the film’s answer to the Hannibal/Clarice scenes and the atmosphere of the world. Obviously, they’re both set in the early 1990s and Longlegs really nails the same vibe of serious and realistic films of the era, but there’s a certain bleakness that exists in both films that feels unique in their draw. Obviously, lots of films that tout being “adult” and “realistic,” especially in the wider crime genre, are often just tonally bleak as fuck. But something Demme and Perkins do quite well is situate that feeling and make it part of the story. It becomes a forward feeling, but a secondary thought. You feel it in the story and eventually ask the questions that allowed the feeling to seep into your body. Where is everybody? Why don’t people seem to actually care about what’s happening? Why is everyone so completely isolated? Why was this family allowed to rot for almost a month? The type of world that would allow these things to happen is terrifying, which is a specific function of the setting in each film.
But more than that, I’ve been thinking about the Hannibal and Clarice of it all. The titular Longlegs is, at once, both Buffalo Bill and Hannibal Lecter in Osgood Perkins’s story—which is a really interesting adaptation of those two relationships. He gets to be the serial killer lurking in the night, leaving clues and almost no survivors, but when Longlegs and Lee get to sit across from each other the (questionably) helpful killer springs into action. And because Lee believes there’s an accomplice (our new Buffalo Bill for the rest of the film), she’s still looking for answers as to how to find them. The scene has many functions, but certainly one of them is the same as Clarice visiting Hannibal for insight. And even Longlegs killing himself in the room is just Perkins’s way of having his Lecter escape the prison. There’s something so delicious about the ways that he’s built this film to feel familiar, while being in a completely different subgenre of crime films.
But, at the end of the day, all four of these films are using monsters (of both the biblical and human kind) to talk about childhood trauma. In The Exorcist, there’s no doubt that Regan is experiencing something deeply traumatic—it’s happening to her as the film moves forward. Perhaps it’s something she’ll even repress and try not to think about, like the adults the other three films are centered on. In The Exorcism, Tony has tried to dull his childhood abuse with drugs and alcohol, which has gone so poorly it’s a tragedy. The Silence of the Lambs references the childhood trauma the least but, like Lee Harker after her, Clarice seems to be in a general fugue state of memory. And then there’s Longlegs, where the trauma is not just pressed down upon our lead, with the monster living in her house in more ways than one, but with the ways we keep seeing trauma happening to different families.
Satan is a great metaphor for the pain and darkness we gather as children. It’s a nugget of a message that puts the fear of God into some and nothing but pain into others. Real or imagined, I’ve been thinking about the devil a lot lately.
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