Hype is a hell of a drug, isn’t it? Small, independent features are almost completely dependent on it to find any meaningful commercial success — not a virtue in itself, but in that sphere, it often determines the fate of an artist’s future projects. Yet hype, especially mainstream hype, is the most dangerous thing an underground hit can generate. People tend to exaggerate the quality of something they want exposed to a wider audience. That’s how you get the overenthusiastic reactions to Osgood Perkins’s new horror film “Longlegs” that embellish how much dread the film produced within their souls.
If you couldn’t guess, I did not find “Longlegs” to be all that special. It was no more creepy or intense than any other run-of-the-mill indie horror sensations from the last couple of years. There are brief moments of visual inventiveness where I thought the film might become, if not scary, at least a worthwhile piece of filmmaking. Alas, Perkins stays in the same centrally-framed medium shot that leaves empty space on the edges of the widescreen image for most of the film. Had these shots not been in such shallow focus, allowing the viewer to look throughout the entire composition for something about to pop out at us, it’s possible that the levels of dread hyped up in the early reactions would have surfaced. But we can’t see anything besides what’s directly in the center of the frame, and the widescreen seems to only act as a differentiator between the 4:3 flashback sequences and the present-day story. And yet, audiences are still going crazy for it. Why?
In response to “Longlegs,” Paul Schrader recently commented that “[The horror genre]’s beneath seriousness… other genres can be remolded and exploited to convey serious issues and conundrums. Horror films seem to me the most resistant to this upgrade.” He contends that talented filmmakers like Osgood Perkins are held back from making great serious art because of the limitations of the horror genre, and yet still the cineplexes are filled mostly with horror films. In a film landscape where films dealing with serious themes and issues are primarily confined to the arthouse, mainstream audiences need to find seriousness in what is most easily accessible to them.
In trying to graft seriousness onto what is, at its core, an exploitation film, the film begins to crumble. Sucking the fun out of these ridiculous B movies to allow for serious reading of a film that doesn’t have much to say is lethal. “Longlegs” is another victim of this trend that has impacted recent films like “Barbarian” and “Talk To Me.” Without the “elevated” horror hype, these films could be viewed simply for what they are: fun and dumb thrill rides. When taking a critical eye to a film like this that wants to be taken seriously, the seams become distractingly apparent.
