Director Guillermo del Toro recently shared his thoughts on director Osgood Perkins’ recently released horror thriller Longlegs.
A lot of people are calling this the scariest film of the year, but I didn’t find anything scary about it at all. I was really excited about this movie, but it just did not live up to the hype of the marketing.
There are people that enjoy it, though, and one of those people is Del Toro. He praised the film and the director, saying, “LONGLEGS (2024) A great Oz Perkins film- 100% his vibe. It is comforting when a colleague fares well while staying faithful to the rhythms and motifs that have made his career. His metronome, his meticulous composition and his uncanny sense of evil and impending doom.”
He continued: “Loved that evil Tiny-Tim-esque Cage (our last and best expressionist performer) the Satanic Panic gloom: a closed maze where evil eats the casual stroller.
“And Perkins’ odd, super-dry (quasi exfoliating) humor: T-Rex, the occasional ironic line ‘You’ll still be in the kitchen.’ It’s not horror as usual, or a thriller as usual.
“It bares the same preoccupations Oz has had from the start and his Cosmic dread. It is his vibe and signature and I am delighted he is getting more people to know it.”
Perkins previously talked about the movie, saying: “I can’t look at real things. I don’t like them. They don’t sit well with me. I don’t want to know.
“All this stuff couldn’t be more fictionalized and totally made up. That’s part of the fun of it [for] me. It’s like, ‘Oh, that’s how FBI people probably talk. Oh, that’s how they would probably come into a room.
“I don’t know, maybe it’s something like this’. It’s part of what keeps it light for me, honestly. I’m not interested in what these sickos do. To me, this is a different kind of poem, you know, and it’s totally just make believe.”
I just think that the great marketing for the film ruined it for me. It got me so hyped for a great horror film, a film that would actually scare me, which hasn’t happened in a long time, and it just didn’t deliver that. Even the story fell flat for me.
In the story, “As the case takes complex turns, unearthing evidence of the occult, Harker discovers a personal connection to the merciless killer and must race against time to stop him before he claims the lives of another innocent family.”
If you’ve seen the movie, what did you think of it?
