The 10 Scariest Scenes & Moments In Longlegs, Ranked

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Longlegs.

Summary

• Osgood Perkins’ horror movie
  Longlegs
  is full of terrifying moments.
• Many of the scariest scenes in the movie involve Nicolas Cage’s titular killer.
• However, other sequences that are just as scary center on other characters including Kiernan Shipka’s Carrie Anne and Maika Monroe’s Lee Harker.

Longlegs features a plethora of scary scenes. The 2024 horror movie was directed by Osgood Perkins, who previously helmed the horror titles The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Gretel & Hansel in addition to boasting genre credentials thanks to being the son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins. The cast also prominently features two actors with horror bona fides, namely The Guest and It Follows star Maika Monroe and Oscar winner Nicolas Cage, whose recent memorable genre works include Mandy, Arcadian, Willy’s Wonderland, and Color Out of Space.

The Longlegs release has turned out record-breaking box office results, earning the best opening weekend ever for its distributor NEON on its way past the $30 million milestone at the global box office. This strong commercial performance for the movie, which cost under $10 million to make, is partially the result of its critical reception, which has earned it a Certified Fresh 86% score on Rotten Tomatoes. However, it is also the result of word-of-mouth reactions that have earned it a reputation as one of the scariest movies of the year.

10 The Clairvoyance Test

A Bizarre Situation Following A Traumatic Experience

Long before the explosive Longlegs ending, the movie starts ramping up toward its crescendo from early on in the first act by building the atmosphere around Monroe’s character Agent Lee Harker. One such early scene is a moment where her clairvoyant powers are tested by the FBI after she correctly identifies the home of a serial killer for whom her team was searching.

The scene, which takes place more or less immediately after an extremely traumatic day for the character, plunges both Harker and the audience into an uncanny, unknown situation. While Harker demands to know what is happening, a series of images are displayed in quick succession onscreen while she is forced to react to them. The unsettling visuals of the sequence throw the audience just as off-kilter as the character, who does not yet know she is being tested.

9 Ruby’s Birthday Party

The Uncanny Finale Of Longlegs

By the time Lee makes her way to Agent Carter’s (Blair Underwood) house to try and prevent him from killing his wife (Carmel Amit) and daughter (Ava Kelders), the audience knows quite well how Longlegs’ dolls affect the people they are meant to represent. Thus, when it is revealed that the doll has already made its way into the house, the tension immediately ramps up as it becomes apparent there is a time limit that is quickly running down.

Although it is the final horror sequence in the movie, it is just as funny as it is scary. The broad smiles and bizarre dialogue that Carter and his wife display seem like parodies of a sitcom couple. These moments may wring laughs out of the audience, but the humor is juxtaposed with the violent undertones of the scene to create an eerie and uncanny atmosphere in spite of the characters’ outward joviality.

8 The 9-1-1 Call

An Unsettling Vignette

Another possible reason that the Longlegs box office debut was such a success was likely its publicity campaign, which used opaque and unsettling imagery to highlight the mystery at the center of the movie, to the point that the title of the release being promoted was not even revealed for some time. This scene, which takes place while Harker is going through the evidence, was one of the centerpieces of the early days of the campaign, most likely because of its terrifying nature.

It is a simply laid-out moment, where a 9-1-1 call is played over a faded family photograph. However, the paranoid ranting of the man on the phone, who is clearly the smiling father in the photo, becomes more and more unsettling, while the camera staying on the photo underscores the grim fact that the audience already knows: the man in the photo and on the recording is about to kill his entire family, shattering the happy trio forever.

7 The House Call

Lee Harker’s First Shock Of Many

Although it is only the second horror sequence in the movie, the moment where Harker follows her clairvoyant instincts to discover the home of a serial killer is one of Longlegs‘ most terrifying. This scene, despite its supernatural elements, is one of the most reminiscent of the horror classic The Silence of the Lambs, a title to which the Maika Monroe movie has been frequently compared. The way the scene doles out information perfectly accentuates the horror of the situation.

After a slow burn moment of Harker acknowledging her clairvoyant feelings, the danger is revealed in a short, sharp shock when her partner is shot, followed by another slow burn when the person at the door, now revealed to be the killer, vanishes into the house, forcing Harker to chase after him through an exquisitely production designed space full of eerie plastic, presumably meant to make the blood from the killer’s victims easier to clean up. That brief violent punctuation emphasizes how vulnerable Harker is when going into the house unaccompanied.

6 The First Longlegs Interrogation

A Performance Showcase Moment For Nicolas Cage

The scene where Nicolas Cage’s Longlegs is interrogated by Agents Carter and Browning (Michelle Choi-Lee) is one of the longest sequences featuring the character up to that point in the movie. It allows Cage the opportunity to pull out all the stops, emphasizing the unusual physical and vocal tics he has developed in order to allow the character to feel truly inexplicable.

One of the most terrifying aspects of the scene comes from the fact that Lee Harker is watching it on a videotape, which would seem to give her a degree of separation from the subject being interrogated. However, he seems to recognize her presence nevertheless and begins singing her happy birthday, shattering the illusion of safety. The fact that she then learns that Longlegs is occupying the room directly beneath her feet underscores how close, and how dangerous, he truly is.

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5 Visiting Carrie Anne

A Standout Kiernan Shipka Performance

The scene where Harker visits Longlegs’ only surviving victim, Carrie Anne Camera (Kiernan Shipka), is a deeply unsettling moment in the film. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which being the fact that Carrie Anne has clearly embraced the influence of Longlegs, whether by her own free will or not, meaning that she could be a conduit for the violence that Harker has been trying to avoid throughout the movie.

Shipka’s performance is another driving factor behind the unsettling atmosphere. In her only showcase moment in the movie, she puts the pedal to the metal and delivers a carefully crafted character, bringing Carrie Anne’s slippery manner of speech from the page to the screen in an unforgettable torrent of language that sees the character slide between lucidity and a trancelike state seemingly at random.

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4 The Second Longlegs Interrogation

A Scene Of Preconception-Shattering Brutality

The second interrogation is similar to the first, though it packs an even bigger punch. Once again, it allows Cage a showcase moment for his performance, with the added benefit of allowing him to interact directly with Monroe, as this marks the first time that Harker has knowingly shared a room with the killer who she has been tracking down over the course of the movie.

However, as the scene reaches a terrifying crescendo, Longlegs dies by suicide in a brutally violent explosion of gore. In addition to shocking the audience through grotesquerie, his actions are unexpected, as it would have made sense for him to be the primary villain of the movie named after him. However, both Harker and the audience know that his death won’t mean the end of the horror, reminding both parties of just how little they still know about the deadly mystery at the core of the movie by that point in the story.

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3 Lee Harker At Home Alone

An Unsettling Sequence Utilizing A Common Fear

One of the scariest moments in the movie is also its most simple. Lee is home alone, but she hears a noise and goes to investigate a shadowy figure she sees outside. However, once she has left her supposedly empty home, through the windowshe sees someone moving inside. The sequence plays on the same common fears of home invasion as legions of other horror movies including The Strangers, Hush, When a Stranger Calls, and many more.

This sequence also comes at a time before the audience has seen too much of Longlegs himself. At that point in the story, very little is known about the character or exactly what he is capable of, which adds another dimension to the danger in which Lee finds herself. Even when it is revealed that he has only delivered a letter, the violation of the agent’s safe space continues to amp up the chilling atmosphere.

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An Uncomfortably Close Look At Longlegs’ Activities

The first major Longlegs sequence in the movie outside of the prologue, the scene where the character goes shopping allows Nicolas Cage yet another time to shine. Although his face is in frame, unlike his first appearances in the movie, the actor uses his physicality to cover it in various ways, including draping his fingers over his face in a decidedly spiderlike manner. This carries on the movie’s unwillingness to linger on his identity, keeping the character shrouded in mystery for as long as possible.

The fact that the sequence is a standalone moment that doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of the plot actually enhances it. It operates as a red herring, offering the audience a chance to believe that the teenage shop clerk he is menacing is his next intended victim, rather than the daughter of Harker’s superior, Agent Carter.

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1 The Prologue

A Memorably Eerie Introduction To Longlegs

There are many reasons the Longlegs opening sequence, which is set roughly two decades before the events of the movie, works so well. This includes the fact that it lays the blueprint for a lot of the story to come. In addition to introducing Longlegs himself, it offers many clues as to his relationship with Lee that will become clarified over the course of her investigation. However, that element isn’t the reason that the beginning is so terrifying. There are two core sources of fear in the scene, the first being Nicolas Cage’s uncanny performance in the role.

The second source is the filmmaking of Longlegs, which uses cinematography and editing to highlight how little the character fits into the world of young Lee Harker. His entrance into the scene comes in the form of a jolting smash cut, and his face remains resolutely out of frame until an eerie moment where he leans down, leering close to the camera. These filmmaking choices emphasize how he is either too close or just out of reach the entire time, highlighting the mystery and menace of the character.