Longlegs (2024)

Longlegs touches upon profound psychoanalytic, philosophical, and social themes, which elevate the film beyond conventional horror. The narrative’s exploration of repression and identity operates as an intricate palimpsest, reflecting personal trauma through public concealment. Oz Perkins engages with deeply philosophical questions concerning the interplay between knowledge, power, and societal invisibility — a concept that Foucault unpacks in The History of Sexuality. For Foucault, repression is not a mere act of negation but an active force that reconstructs truth into elusive, spectral fragments, constantly seeping through the cracks of discourse and interaction. In Longlegs, this philosophical insight becomes the film's heartbeat: horror is born from what is hidden but never fully obliterated.

At the narrative’s core is the notion of the mother’s “protection through denial,” which serves as a parallel to Foucault’s concept of bio-power — the subtle, pervasive management of life through institutions, norms, and interpersonal control. Perkins’s personal reference to his mother shielding him from his father’s hidden life mirrors the larger societal mechanisms of containment. This resonates with Judith Butler’s critique of normativity in Gender Trouble, where identities that challenge dominant discourses — whether queer, monstrous, or deviant — are culturally suppressed to preserve stability, yet continue to haunt from the margins. The mother’s concealment of truth creates a liminal space where repression transforms into a ghostly presence, an “undead” identity that returns with terrifying insistence.

Perkins’s artistic choice to weave the narrative around “psychosexual tension” recalls Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious. Freud suggested that repressed sexual desires, when denied conscious expression, resurface in altered forms — dreams, neuroses, or, in the case of Longlegs, horrific apparitions. The film leverages this psychoanalytic insight by constructing a labyrinthine plot where the monstrous is never external but is always an expression of the suppressed. The film’s antagonist is less a villain and more a manifestation of unresolved desire and guilt — an embodiment of what Freud calls the return of the repressed.

This psychological reading also extends into the Lacanian domain, where identity is formed through an interplay of desire, fantasy, and the gaze of the Other. In Longlegs, characters navigate a world marked by obscured truths, encountering horrifying reflections of themselves in those truths. The repression of identity — whether Cage’s character’s fragmented self or the hidden desires of other protagonists—creates not liberation but alienation. Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage, where the self is formed through identification with an external image, parallels the film's use of reflection, deception, and duality. In Longlegs, mirrors and doppelgängers do not just reflect but distort, forcing characters to confront an uncanny version of themselves — a process fraught with dread and ambiguity.

Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the Other also provides a lens through which the film’s horror can be understood. For Levinas, the encounter with the Other disrupts the self, challenging it to move beyond narcissistic isolation. In Longlegs, encounters with hidden identities — those forcibly relegated to invisibility — are traumatic because they compel recognition of a part of the self that has been denied. The horror emerges from this forced reckoning, where individuals are confronted not by alien monsters but by their own repressed alterity.

This interplay between repression and revelation extends to the film’s social commentary. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, the film examines the tension between public persona and private reality. Just as Goffman suggests that social actors curate their appearances to align with societal expectations, Longlegs demonstrates how these performances can become prisons, limiting authentic self-expression. The mother’s concealment of her husband’s sexuality aligns with Goffman’s idea of backstage spaces, where hidden aspects of identity are stored away, emerging only under moments of crisis.

Yet Perkins pushes beyond the merely psychological or social, hinting at a metaphysical horror that recalls Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of dread. For Kierkegaard, dread is the vertiginous sensation that accompanies the recognition of freedom — the realization that beneath the surface lies a terrifying abyss of possibility. In Longlegs, the repression of identity generates not just social discomfort but metaphysical disorientation, as characters grapple with the limitless possibilities of what they could become if freed from societal constraints. This metaphysical unease is heightened by the film’s nonlinear narrative, which mirrors the fragmented nature of consciousness itself.

Perkins's decision to cast Cage — a performer known for his ability to blur the boundaries between realism and excess — underscores the film’s philosophical investigation into identity. Cage’s performance as the titular character transforms him into a liminal figure, operating at the intersection of sanity and madness, control and chaos. His character’s grotesque body, as described by Bakhtin, symbolizes the breakdown of stable categories, embodying both the abject and the sublime. The mother’s attempt to shield her children from their father’s truth can be read as an attempt to preserve a “clean” social narrative, but Cage’s monstrous presence reveals the inevitability of contamination.

In the end, Longlegs leaves us with a paradox reminiscent of Jacques Derrida’s hauntology: the idea that the present is always haunted by what it seeks to exclude. The film suggests that no repression is absolute; what is denied will always find a way to return, distorted and amplified. The characters are haunted not just by their personal traumas but by the cultural and historical legacies they inherit—a theme that resonates deeply with Derrida’s reflections on the spectral presence of the past within the present.

Through this web of references and ideas, Perkins crafts a film that transcends the typical boundaries of the horror genre. Longlegs is not merely about a lurking monster but about the monstrous process of becoming — of confronting the repressed parts of ourselves and our histories. It is a film that unsettles precisely because it compels us to acknowledge what we would rather forget: that beneath every surface lies a labyrinth of truths, waiting to break free.