Beating Up the Big Apple

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Criminal Minds

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By Ben Elliott

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Movies have long been obsessed with serial killers, even before we had a name for them.

Early Hollywood was flush with stories of murder, though, thanks to the production code, they were usually supernatural monster movies like Tod Browning’s Dracula. Human monsters, meanwhile, were relegated to foreign productions like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger and Fritz Lang’s M. Decades later, serial killer movies like Hitchcock’s Psycho and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom would push the envelope so far that they helped end the production code altogether.

Psycho, 1960

Longlegs, 2024

After that, as stories of real-life monsters began to make their way into the press, movies produced killer after killer, from Michael Myers to Hannibal Lecter and Patrick Bateman. The cinematic serial killer boom eventually bled into television procedurals and true crime podcasts, creating a thriving genre with no signs of slowing down. Even while the actual rate of serial murder has seen a steep decline since the early 2000s, we’ve become overwhelmed by so much murder-related content that serial killer stories can now seem ho-hum.

Enter Longlegs, which opens at The Triplex this week: A surprise hit that has broken through a summer of sequels with its story of an FBI agent on the hunt for a Satanic killer. Director Osgood Perkins (son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins) pulls from inspirations like Silence of the Lambs, The Omen, and Annabelle to create a hazy, off-putting production that keeps you anxious from the very first frame.

Longlegs strikes a nerve because its hero doesn’t truly understand what she’s up against or how she can stop it. It brings an uneasiness back into a genre that’s become synonymous with “comfort watching.” It reminds us that true evil is unknowable and that, even if they’re old news, serial killers are far from mundane.

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