Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Horror runs on hype. With every scary movie sold as a new era in dread, we could be forgiven for rolling our eyes at the current genre buzz around Longlegs. And yet, for once, the chatter is not unjustified. It helps that the film stars Maika Monroe, an actor with a hauntingly glassy presence whose breakthrough came in It Follows, the most interesting horror film of the 2010s. Here she is cast as a nervy FBI agent drawn into an old and arcane case: a 30-year trail of unsolved murders involving ordinary American families.Some of director Osgood Perkins’ building blocks are basic: a creep-show fug of swinging single lightbulbs and strangers at windows. Others have a more individual flavour: a 1990s timeframe signalled by portraits of Bill Clinton in Bureau offices; hints of old-school Satanism; most eye-catchingly, Nicolas Cage doing things that, on many levels, only he could.But the clincher might be the skewed and woozy texture, a dreamlike quality made more so by the sense of genre classics being mixed up and repurposed in the film’s subconscious. Se7en is an obvious influence, so too The Shining. Another touchstone is buried deeper still in the basement. For a shivery movie about parents and children, Perkins may be the perfect director: he is the son of actor Anthony Perkins, immortalised as Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho, another portrait of American family life with a deeply unpredictable edge. Clearly, it is in the blood.★★★★☆In UK and US cinemas from July 12
