'Longlegs' is ghoulish, gritty, great—but how gay is it?

Welcome to How Gay Is It? Out's review series where, using our state-of-the-art Eggplant Rating System, we determine just how queer some of pop culture's buzziest films and TV shows are! (Editor's note: this review contains mild spoilers for Neon's Longlegs.)

Do you want to see something really scary?

2024 has already been a standout year for horror with films like In a Violent Nature, Late Night With the Devil, and I Saw the TV Glow, and now, a new movie is stepping up to take the title of creepiest film of the year: Longlegs.

From writer/director Oz Perkins (the son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins), Longlegs is an unflinchingly vile film about young FBI agent Lee Harker (scream queen Maika Monroe) who gets brought on to a serial killer investigation because of her preternatural intuition.

The killer, only known by the moniker Longlegs, has murdered a series of families for over the last several decades, leaving no clues to who he is or how he committed the murders. The only thing that ties the families together is that each family has a daughter born on the 16th of a month.

Soon Harker finds herself much closer to the case than she expected, with Longlegs leaving messages specifically for her. She soon realizes that the killer visited her when she was a child, leaving her questioning her connection to the case.

Longlegs himself is played by an ultra-creepy Nicholas Cage, who doesn't just chew the scenery as a disturbed (and disturbing!) satan-worshiping serial killer, he hungrily gorges on it like Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son.

Cage (The Vampire's Kiss, Mandy) and Monroe (It Follows, The Guest) are both horror icons, and to see them go head-to-head like this is any horror fan's dream. They do not disappoint.

Throughout the film, you can see Perkins' (The Blackcoat's Daughter) love for the genre. It's clearly influenced by movies like Silence of the Lambs and Seven, but by giving the film a demonic angle, Perkins injects enough satanic panic in the film to make it stand out on its own.

Setting the film in the '90s is also genius move, as the lack of cellphones and technology add to the feeling of isolation and helplessness that Agent Harker feels when chasing down Longlegs.

Longlegs is a dreadful film. It's creepy and gross and off-putting, and I loved every minute of iit. It doesn't rely on gore for scares, but when the gore is there, it is highly disturbing and will stick with you for a long time.

There's no icing on this birthday cake, and no sugar in it either. It's pure ghoulish grit, and it's one of the best horror films of the year.

Now, onto the question only Out can ask: how gay is Longlegs? While Cage's titular serial killer verges into effeminate territory, it would be hard to read his character as gay, and it doesn't go as far as Psycho or Silence of the Lambs in its portrayal of gender variance as evil. I give Longlegs four out of five stars overall, but zero out of five eggplants on the Eggplant Rating System.