D+Directed by Osgood Perkins Starring Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage Review by Jon Kissel |  |
There’s a part in the excellent documentary Hail Satan where a member of the satirical Satanic Temple talks about the irony of the Satanic Panic, where seemingly all of American culture imagined ritualistic sexual abuse and demonic rituals in every dark basement with a heavy metal poster on the wall and Dungeons and Dragons in the cabinet, only for that same vision of sexual abuse to be later uncovered in churches perpetrated by priests and ministers. Osgood Perkins’ horror hit Longlegs wonders, what if James Dobson was right? What if Satan really was infiltrating families in the form of an effeminate metal freak, corrupting them in the service of the dark lord himself? This Robert Eggers-esque approach, where the belief system of a subculture is treated as true, utterly fails in Longlegs. It’s one thing to conjure Norse mythology or Puritan paranoia, and it’s another to plumb a phenomenon so recent, that the falsely accused continue to rot in prison.
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