How Your Own Fears Made the ‘Longlegs’ Trailer More Terrifying

Someone needs to come and get me because I am paralyzed with fear and anticipation for NEON’s new crime horror thriller Longlegs. Starring Maika Monroe (It Follows) and Nicolas Cage as the titular villain, and written and directed by Oz Perkins (son of Psycho’s Anthony Perkins), the film has crept into the cinematic milieu with uniquely interactive and cryptic marketing to become one of the most hyped film releases of the year. But it’s not the mysterious billboards, untitled teasers, and Blair Witch-style website that is captivating moviegoers.

It’s that damn trailer.

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In just over a minute, the trailer so deftly deploys the power of horror storytelling: the suspense, the atmosphere, and the human attraction to scary things that don’t actually put us in any mortal danger. If you’re a horror screenwriter, these are your most deadly weapons.

So, let’s go over these mechanisms of horror and dig into the psychology behind why weirdos like us can’t wait to finally see the face of this mysterious serial killer.

But first, if you haven’t already, watch this friggin’ thing:

Why Are We Attracted to Scary Things?

What draws people to zombies, possessed nuns, and savage serial killers? Many great minds, from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud, have sought to explain this strange human inclination, but instead of focusing on the why, let’s focus on the what—what makes us attracted to horror? In a 2004 paper in the Journal of Media Psychology, Psychologist Glenn D. Walters lists three factors that establish this attraction:

• Tension: This is created by including horror elements like suspense, mystery, gore, shock, and terror.
• Relevance: This plays into what moviegoers identify with, including universal fears like death and the unknown, cultural fears like government overreach and civil unrest, and personal fears that come from the viewer’s lived experience.
• Unrealism: Moviegoers must know that what they’re watching isn’t real. This is why those who would delight in watching a murder scene in a movie wouldn’t also delight in watching a video of a real murder taking place.

We want to see horror movies that have blood and guts, creeping shadows, and sudden jump scares. We want to see horror movies that showcase fears that we are familiar with. And yeah… we need it to have some level of unrealism because real horror is actually scary—like, run-out-of-the-theater-screaming scary.

‘Longlegs’ (2024)

The Horror of Longlegs Comes From… Us

Maybe one of the reasons why so many people are going nuts over Longlegs is because the film has all three of the elements that Walters suggests increase our attraction to horror entertainment—and at just the right amount. Let’s look at the first two.

The Longlegs Trailer Is TENSE

If there was one goal for the marketing of this film, it was to build tension. The billboards with a mysterious phone number, teaser videos with weird titles, and a very 90s-looking Birthday Murders website. All of these pieces were laid like breadcrumbs along a winding path that refuses to sate our curiosity until we follow it all the way to our theater seats.

But I think the most tension-filled element was the fact that NEON refused to show us Nic Cage’s strange face. This breathy, satanic killer who makes creepy dolls is all types of scary and we’re not allowed to see the most important type of the scary it is. All we get is his eerily meek voice saying cryptic things, his limp hands dangling in front of his powder-white face, and a sh*t ton of horrifying images of ciphers, bloody hands, and people getting axed in the back.

I’m not sure why we as humans want to look villains and monsters in the eyes, but we do, and edging our desires to do so cinematically with shadows, voices, and obscured faces really builds up the anticipation for the most gloriously horrific release when we get to do so.

This is an important lesson for all of you horror screenwriters. You might be great at creating a truly scary villain or monster, but you know who is better? Your audience. The power of suggestion is real and it’s so powerful, so if you give your audience a brief, obscured glimpse into the horrors that they are about to witness, that tension that drew them to your story in the first place will last much longer and lead to a more satisfying end.

‘Longlegs’ (2024)

The Longlegs Trailer is Relevant

Relevance plays a huge role in people’s attraction to horror entertainment for pretty straightforward and obvious reasons. They are the same reasons we consume any type of entertainment—we identify with it. Writer/director Oz Perkins crafted a story that is clearly relevant to a large swath of moviegoers and it’s a lesson in choosing the right themes for your own stories.

Universal Fears

Death is certainly a universal fear for all of humanity, as well as the fear of the unknown and the deterioration of the family unit. You can see Longlegs digging deep into each of these with the brutal slayings of young girls, family members becoming homicidal against each other, and the mysterious circumstances behind all of these events.

Not only that, but it stands on its own as a horror and thriller. It’s the lovechild of Se7en and Zodiac and The Silence of the Lambs, all films that succeeded at blending two closely related genres in such a way that you weren’t anxiously filled with tension, you were utterly terrified at what you were experiencing once the tension was lifted.

Societal Fears

Longlegs tackles themes that are front in center in our current cultural zeitgeist, including religious fanaticism and violence against women and girls.

The cryptic ciphers and killings with religious underpinnings draw on current world events that are getting a lot of backlash, like US legislation that would require schools in certain states to teach the Bible, for example, which many see as government overreach and the fall of the separation between church and state.

Furthermore, toxic masculinity and misogyny have been the topic of conversation for several years, leading to the Me Too Movement and, conversely, the Alpha Male phenomenon on the other side. So, when a film about a female FBI agent hunting down a male serial killer who targets young girls hits theaters, it will be even more relevant now than it was back when Clarice Starling was nabbing Buffalo Bill in 1991.

Personal Fears

This is Perkins’ most autobiographical film yet. He told Indiewire:

“Everything I try to do, I try to make it about myself, only so that it creates a truth for me and an honesty, and I know I’m never full of shit if I’m talking about myself. As coded as it might be and as many layers of other stuff on it that there are, at the end of the day, all the movies I generate are essentially based on my experience, and that tends to be my experience with my parents.”

Even Nic Cage has a personal story, telling Entertainment Weekly about the inspiration for his ghoulish face:

“My mom put on Noxzema cold cream. I was 2 years old, and I opened the bathroom door [to see] what she was doing. For no reason, she turned her face really fast and stared at me after [putting on] the cold cream. The whiteness of the cold cream just really spooked me.”

And let’s get personal here—or I will. I’ll get personal. The film is set in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s. That’s hugely relevant to me specifically because that’s where and when I grew up. The thought of someone like Longlegs doing these unspeakable things at the same time and in the same place I was a young, vulnerable little girl really just… makes me want to experience those fears in the safety and comfort of being an adult in a movie theater.

‘Longlegs’ (2024)

—

Writing horror is tough. There are a lot of moving parts you have to put in just the right place to elicit a very specific response from your audience. Basically, you gotta scare them. If you don’t scare them, then is your horror script really a horror script?

However, the incredible response to Longlegs shows us that great horror writing is still alive and well—killing and dismembering its characters and horrifying the people who love to see that kind of stuff.

But I think success means keeping your thumb on the pulse of what’s going on in the world, in your country, and within yourself. Identify the fears that fester underneath all those polite smiles you see on TV, across the dinner table, and in the mirror because the beating heart of horror is us.

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