Longlegs is now playing in theaters, bringing its spoilers-filled bone-chilling serial killer plot to the big screen.
Starring the likes of Nicolas Cage and Maika Monroe, Longlegs follows a young female FBI agent as she blows open a case of murders that were long thought to have gone cold.
The horror thriller from director Oz Perkins earned rave reviews early on, debuting at a glowing 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (it now sits at 88%). Audiences praised its commentary on the glorification of serial killers and true crime as well as the sense of dread ladened throughout.
Longlegs Plot Explained
While Longlegs' plot may start as what looks to be a simple police procedural, following a team of FBI agents in their mission to bring in a serial killer in the Pacific Northwest, it turns into something much deeper across its 101-minute runtime.
The movie centers on Maika Monroe as FBI agent Lee Harker. Lee is new to the force and is taking on one of her first cases, looking for a murderer in what looks to be rural Oregon.
However, things escalate quickly as on her first day of door-knocking, a sense of intuition sends her and her partner to the door of a mysterious suburban home.
While she waits back, her male partner goes to knock on the door and is shot in the head immediately before Lee heads inside to find the perpetrator - a father who (as if he were possessed) takes his own life.
This inciting event for Monroe's FBI newcomer sends her head-on into an investigation of what happened, with only a letter with some indistinguishable scribblings on it.
Agent Lee Harker Is on the Case
These opening moments set the stage for the wild goose chase at the heart of Longlegs' story as Lee quickly immerses herself in the case.
With the letter from her partner's murder in hand, she connects the event to a string of murders where entire families were killed that happened over the last 20 years, all featuring letters with these mysterious symbols on them and the signature of an unknown killer known as Longlegs.
The worrying thing about these killings though is that no evidence of a perpetrator being present was found at any of the scenes. Every time, the man of the house seemingly killed his wife and kids (almost exclusively daughters) and then took his own life.
This leads Lee and the FBI to wonder how and who is/was leaving these letters behind, and how they coerced the family to take out one another.
After several days of investigating, Lee suffers more concerning mental events surrounding the killer. She gets flashes of a little girl standing in the snow outside her house being confronted by a mysterious male visitor with a disfigured white face.
This comes to a head after one particularly late night working on the case. After staring at evidence for hours, Lee is forced to take her commanding officer Agent Carter (played by Blair Underwood) for a drink to explain what she has found.
After several bourbons on the rocks, Lee drives Agent Carter home, where she meets his family before heading to her log cabin dwelling deep in the forest.
It is here that Lee gets her first major breakthrough into the identity of the killer and this mysterious mental connection she has with the murders.
While on the phone with her mom (who will become a big part of the story very soon), Lee hears/sees something in the woods outside her house.
She heads outside, only to see a hulking trespasser inside the house while standing in the front yard. He heads back inside to find no one.
This unknown visitor left nothing but a letter for the FBI agent, a birthday card splayed with symbols from the other cases as well as some words that she can now use as a legend for the other letters.
Time to Meet Longlegs
With her 'birthday card' in hand Lee uses the code left behind by the supposed killer to crack what was written in all the previous killing notes left by Nicolas Cage's Longlegs character (read more about the Longlegs killer here).
The notes reveal overt references to satanism, the devil, and a horrific mass killing that happened years before at a nearby Church-owned farm property.
Lee and her FBI colleagues now have a direction, heading to the farm (and finding a weird hand-made ceramic doll hidden there) and going to meet the one and only survivor of this farm-based killing.
In talking with the survivor, Lee is shaken when she references the FBI agent's deep connection to Longlegs and his serial murders, saying the two are very much the same and should be treated as such.
After this chit-chat, it is revealed Agent Carter has done some digging into Lee, this doll that seriously looks like her, and the cases she is looking into. This leads her commanding officer to discover Lee's mother called in a trespasser on Lee's ninth birthday describing a white-faced man that fits Longlegs' description.
She is then sent to meet with her mother and confront her about the phone call she made all those years ago. Her mom (brought to life by Alicia Witt) says she has no memory of that day (despite being visibly shaken by the subject being brought up).
That is when Longlegs surprisingly gives himself up. He is brought in for questioning, and - against the FBI's best intentions - Lee ends up in the interrogation room with him.
She presses him on how he was killing the families, why all of them occurred mere days before the daughter of each family's birthday, and who he was working with.
He gives her nothing. Cage's big-screen killer spouts nothing but demonic satanist rhetoric before, exclaiming "Hail Satan," implicating Lee's mother, and then slamming his face into the metal table in front of him and caving his head in as he does.
Longlegs is dead, and Lee/the FBI still do not know how he killed the families, or if he was doing it with any sort of accomplice.
What they do know though is that if he was working with someone, they were likely to strike again with a date on the calendar mere days away that would complete the satanic symbol Lee discovered in her plotting out the dates of the murderers earlier in the movie.
The Birthday Party and Longlegs' Grand Finale
With Longlegs dead, Lee and another FBI agent head back to her mother's house to confront her yet again about what happened on her ninth birthday.
In the house, Lee finds no one. However, viewers see her mother out in the driveway shooting the FBI agent she came with in the head twice.
Hearing the gunshots, Lee runs outside and sees the carnage, realizing that yes, it was her mother who was the one committing the Longlegs murders for Nicolas Cage's killer all along.
Lee's mother then shoots the dolls found earlier (that look awfully like a young Lee) in the head, which sparks an almost supernatural effect on Lee herself. As the doll is shattered to pieces, so is Ruth's mind. It seems the dolls and a sort of satanic connection to the girls they are modeled after are the keys to all of these killings.
Maika Monroe's FBI agent falls to the ground, having visions of her mother meeting Longlegs that cold day on her ninth birthday, seeing her make a deal with the nefarious madman, saving Lee's life if she vows to carry out his murders for him.
Audiences then see as Lee's mother enters families' homes under the guise of being a nurse from the church, bringing gifts for the girls of the house whose birthdays were close by.
Lee then wakes up having been moved into a room that was originally locked in her mother's house. It is revealed the red-lit garage that had been shown a couple of times as a base of operations for Nicolas Cage's Longlegs was in the house Lee grew up in.
With her mother nowhere to be seen, Lee knows what is about to happen. As she dropped her superior Agent Carter off earlier in the movie, Lee was invited to his daughter's birthday party a few days from then.
Well, that day has come and Lee's mother is ready to strike again. Lee heads to her commanding officer's home to find it may be too late.
The doll has been unboxed with Agent Carter's daughter embracing it. Lee's mother sits there as the Carter family slowly descends into a state of madness. Agent Carter himself quickly gets up with his wife, heads for the kitchen, and can heard stabbing her multiple times in some sort of demonic-fugue state.
As he comes back into the living rooms, where Lee, her mother, and Agent Carter's daughter stand, Lee threatens to destroy the doll, thus ruining Longlegs' grand plans.
This sends Agent Carter toward her with a knife, and she quickly dispatched him shooting Blair Underwood's character twice in the chest. Her mother then lunges at Lee next, before the film's central FBI agent puts a bullet between her mother's eyes.
The movie ends with Lee grabbing Agent Carter's daughter and hesitating to destroy the dolls. Before it cuts to the credits, audiences get one last look at Longlegs sitting in the interrogation room hailing Satan yet again moments before he took his own life.
This ambiguous ending where Lee fails to destroy the doll leaves the viewer to wonder if she too has been taken into the dark lord's grip, or if Longlegs reign of terror has officially come to an end.
Longlegs is now playing in theaters worldwide.
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