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MOVIE FEATURE

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Longlegs has gifted us another iconic character for us to dress up as this Halloween, and you can become cinema’s newest boogeyman in just a few simple steps. EGS FOR HALLOWEEN BECOME LONGL

1 Wear a mop

head (for instant matted blonde locks)

2 Wear white face paint

(alternatively, you can smother yourself in talcum powder)

3 Wear a dirty white shirt

4 Suck on a

When it comes to disturbing serial killer movies, Longlegs takes the cake. Words Glenn Cochrane

Raspberry icy pole (or a red ripper lolly) for the full lip effect

W ritten and directed by horror scribe Osgood Perkins, and starring an unrecognisable Nicolas Cage, the film is a tour de force in the grotesque that will leave audiences numb. Set in the 1990s and made in the vein of The Silence of the Lambs , Longlegs follows a new FBI agent, Lee Harker, played by Maika Monroe ( It Follows ), who's assigned to investigate a series of disturbing murders spanning 30 years, committed by a mysterious satanic serial killer known as Longlegs. Longlegs takes the viewer beyond the cusp of horror and into the darkest recesses of humanity. It's arguably the most terrifying film of the year, and STACK spoke with Osgood Perkins and Maika Monroe to discuss their intriguing little film. “Imagery evolves as you work with other people,” says Osgood, when asked what comes first, the nightmarish images or the story itself. “The first thing that happens is the dialogue and the way the movie sounds, and what people are talking about, and what words they're choosing to use. I'm a big words guy and I don't believe in thinking about writing, I only believe in actually writing. Those are two very different entities for me. “So, it starts with the words that I like. It starts with a title like Longlegs , which I like. Then it starts with the way that he talks and the things he chooses to say, and it all grows out of that.” For countless filmmakers before them, the

watching the movie for the first time, I really thought that I had a grip on where it was going and understanding, and then all of a sudden it turned into a whole other thing, this whole other beast”. You'd be forgiven for not recognising Nicolas Cage in the film, and if it weren't for his name on the poster, most audiences would be none the wiser. Longlegs is not only his most disturbing character to date, but is immediately one of cinema's most terrifying. Maika talks about sharing one of the film's most disturbing scenes with him, when her and the killer come face to face. It's an intense and jarring moment that isn't easily forgotten, and she recalls how they maintained intensity on the set. “It definitely felt intense,” she recalls. “We would do a take, and I would step out of the room. It was nice for us to keep our space and then after we'd finished filming that day, and it was actually his last day, we were sitting across

Xxxxxx

occult has been a fun and creative theme to work with, and Longlegs wears its influences on its sleeve. But what is it about satanic worship that Osgood finds so alluring? “When you engage in something that's sort of collective unconscious or collective conscious, sort of standard issue, like the Devil. The Devil is just a thing that everybody has an uncontained notion of. And so you're giving yourself a little rope, in a good way, to venture into something new from there. To pivot off from a recognisable thing to find something that's a kind of nutty, pop art version of that thing.” “I read a whole lot of

from each other while they were taking some still photos and we just started

chatting, and it was the first time I had heard his actual voice. He said to me that he's such a fan of mine and that he loves all of my movies, and I kept thinking 'Is this really happening?' It was crazy, very surreal”

scripts, and it's few and far between that you read something that just grabs

you immediately,” says Maika, who starred in It Follows (2014) “The writing was so good, it was so vivid and probably similar to audiences

• Longlegs is out Oct 9

30 OCTOBER 2024

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