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Over on threads a response I made explaining why Alien 3‘s opening sequence is a mistake had prompted a little push back from fans of the 3rd film in the franchise.

What is posted was; ‘It’s worse than that. It’s telling the audience from Aliens that they were suckers for investing any emotional energy in Newt or Hicks. All of your emotional strain and joy — wasted — because we can’t give an ef what you feel.‘

The response that has intrigued me the most goes like this; ‘That’s life man. No rhyme, no reason, no ef’s given for your feelings. The people you love sometimes die in accidents, that doesn’t make you a sucker for loving them. Alien 3’s opening is gut-wrenchingly real.’

That response is a clear example of nihilism, that life and existence is essentially meaningless. The vast cold universe is utterly uncaring of your little concerns and your efforts to impose order and meaning are futile.

I myself am not a nihilist but it is a valid philosophical disciple, but does it negate the point I made about the betrayal of the audience with the uncaring killing off of the characters of Newt and Hicks?

Nihilistic art has its place and a long tradition even in cinema. The French film The Wages of Fear is famously nihilistic and its ending a somber examination that a person’s fight for life is futile and that death comes for all of us is woven into the films story and mood.

Alien and the direct sequel Aliens are not nihilistic pieces. Ripley survives the first film triumphant. Ridley Scott did not invoke The Wages of Fear and have an asteroid slam into Ripley’s shuttle after her defeat of the alien to demonstrate the futility of existence. James Cameron’s script and film for Aliens is a voyage of healing and becoming whole after a traumatic event. It contains not only message of hope that healing can be had but message against racism with Ripley’s acceptance of Bishop after her near murder by Ash. It is far from nihilistic.

This is what makes Alien 3 the sequel rejected by so many fans. The franchise had not been nihilistic. The series itself, born in the cinematic garden that followed Star Wars in rejecting the overly cynical mood of the 70s for a more upbeat and optimistic vision. While Alien and Alienscontained the sub-plot of the ‘Corporation’ and its corruption providing motivation for events absent in the original drafts of the script the overall tone of the films are is not cynical. The 1980s were not fertile ground for cynical stories, the audiences had experienced enough of them in the 1970s and wanted adventure and escapism, hence why two film now considered classics and masterpiece works, Blade Runner and The Thing failed utterly at the box office.

Alien 3‘s sharp turn to cynicism and nihilism is at odds with the previous films and with the mood of the audience. It is thematically divergent from the franchise and while each film must hold its own unique vision and theme to work within the franchise they must hold the encompassing theme of the greater work.

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From writer/director Osgood Perkins who gave us the disturbing possession tale The Black Coat’s Daughter comes the occult/police procedural Longlegs.

Neon

After junior FBI Special Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) displays an intuitive sense that borders on the clairvoyant she is reassigned to William Carter (Blair Underwood) to assist with a perplexing series of murders that stretches back decades. Entire families slaughtered by the father without any physical evidence of another person present but at each crime scene as coded cypher signed ‘Longlegs.’ The daughter of a religious mother (Alicia Witt) Lee is troubled by the strange apparently unrelated mass murders but with her added to the investigation what had been cold dead trails blossom with new leads and clues. By the end Lee discovers that ‘Longlegs’ is no garden variety serial killer and families can harbor dark dangerous secrets to safeguard their children.

Osgood Perkins does not make splatter horror. That is not to say his film are devoid of violence or blood but rather that the horror comes from a deeper character and human condition than any sudden explosion of on-screen violence. The adjective that best sums up the sensation of watched Longlegs is ‘unsettling.’ There are scenes where in terms of movement and action literally nothing is happening and yet the composition of the frame, the ingenuity of the sound design, and delivery by the performs combine into a miasma of uncanny dread.

Perkins and cinematographer Andres Arochi makes frequent uses of characters staring directly into the camera lens turning the fourth wall permeable, subtly drawing us into the scene. In The Silence of the Lambs when characters looked straight down the barrel of the camera it was from Starling’s Point of View, we were slotted into her perspective as a woman in what was perceived as ‘man’s world. With Longlegs it is rare that this is from a character’s point of view, but rather it is the audience that the performers are staring at and making complicit in the scene.

Another area where Perkin and editors Graham Fortin and Greg Ng break from convention is in how the film utilizes ‘jump scares.’ In the vast majority of horror cinema, a jump scare is telegraphed long before the director gooses the audience with a sudden sharp cut and sounds. The anticipation of the jump scare is part of the experience, the building dread and certainty that it cannot be avoided. The jump scares in longlegs are sudden and without any buildup or winding of tension. As much as the characters in the story, the audience is caught off guard by the sudden shift in perspective or revelation.

Longlegs in spite of how it begins as a pursuit of a serial killer movie is in fact an occult horror film and that becomes clear in the story’s final act when all is revealed, secrets bared, and terrible truths endured.

This is not a film for everyone. There are no rampaging monsters, nor an endless parade of scantily clad young adults meeting bloody ends for their adherence of drugs and premarital sex. Longlegs is much more akin to Hereditary in tone. It is unsettling, uncanny, and for many people unforgettable.