Emily Naser-Hall

We exist encased in screens within screens, at least in the twisted mind of Osgood Perkins. The 2024 film Longlegs opens with a red block embedded within a black screen, the red configured to fit the now outdated 4:3 aspect ratio that more appropriately befit the 8mm camera and which renders the lines imposed onscreen between red and black explicitly apparent. Within the red wash, an epigraph from T. Rex’s 1971 song “Get It On” establishes the terms of Perkins’s film, the sickening mark of possession that stalks the half-psychic FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe): “You’re dirty sweet / And you’re my girl.” Lee, as the first human figure who appears onscreen, becomes through the magic of associational editing the possessed object, whose possession depends on remaining specifically a girl. But her girlhood does not stay entirely frozen in time, for, before the almost-birthday girl Lee appears, we first see her house in a tracking shot from the point of view of a yet-unknown perspective, unidentified yet covered by a translucent black veil. The unknown seer’s vision is further framed by the borders of a car window, the seer’s motion thereby enabled not by her own volition but by virtue of being trapped within a moving vehicle. When the car stops, however, the camera keeps moving as if the seer’s suspension has become animated without her. We learn later that this initial point of view originated with a doll made in the likeness of eight-year-old Lee, a doll that would have infected the minds of Lee and her mother until both suffered violent deaths. Girls and their dolls, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the other way around, walk a tightrope in Longlegs between animation and suspension, with the terms of neither under the girl’s or the doll’s control.

Miniatures, Steven Millhauser reminds us, must exist in relation to a bigger world because, after all, every miniature is a smaller version of something else. The doll, as a minute, manipulable re-presentation of a human child, implicates cultural constructions of girlhood that fantasize idealized girls as perpetual, controllable children. But if cinema’s scariest dolls historically are those that come to life, what of the dolls that show no signs of life of all? These, perhaps, are the scariest of all, because if the miniature remains inanimate, what of the girl she represents? Longlegs explores an alternative evil that emanates from the doll as a miniaturization of the girl frozen in time yet very aware of her entrapment. In contrast with Sianne Ngai’s theory of animatedness, in which the seemingly neutral state of being moved signifies the constancy of external control and objectification, the demonic dolls in Longlegs illuminate the nefariousness of suspended animation when enacted upon the bodies of girls. The film’s bad dolls condemn Dale Ferdinand Kobble’s, a.k.a. Longlegs’s (Nicolas Cage), little angels to eternal childhood whether they live or die. Longlegs opens new critiques of gender regimes that insidiously freeze female children in a state of perpetual girlhood, emptied of independent subjectivity and cast as permanent playthings.

Longlegs’s narrative emphasis on suspended animation and perpetual girlhood is clear. Kobble’s dolls are inanimate, freezing the real girls they represent in a state of eternal childhood because most of these girls are shortly thereafter murdered. The girls who live remain suspended in other ways; Carrie Anne Camera (Kiernan Shipka) exists in a coma until Lee and FBI Special Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) unearth her doll, while Lee herself was only allowed to grow up by virtue of her mother’s (Alicia Witt) participation in Longlegs’s crimes. In this emphasis, the film tracks easily established biographical links between Osgood Perkins, a father figure who unwillingly destroys his family because of outside forces, and a mother who does anything to protect her children: Perkins’s parents, after all, Anthony Perkins and Berry Berenson, played a long game of concealing Anthony’s homosexuality from their children. Focusing on the narrative and the biographical, however, undersells the technical mastery of Perkins’s filmmaking, for the formal dimensions of suspended animation that frame Lee, the other doomed girls, and their dolls within an imprisoning structure of frozen stasis merit serious consideration.

The bond between children and their dolls has long been a source of disquiet in horror films, as this “unusually intricate bonding” blurs, according to Chifen Lu, “the boundary between the living and the inanimate, the self and the Not-Me” (196). Dolls who come to life unearth a certain ontological instability, as the already uncanny relationship between child and plaything dismantles not only our understanding of the physical world but also our ability to distinguish between alive and not-alive, between flesh and plastic. Evil dolls, Lu claims, contaminate “the hallowed domain of childhood that is believed to be immaculate and immune to evil,” whereas films such as The Boy (dir. William Brent Bell, 2016), in which the doll serves as a doppelgänger for a demonic child, destabilize this perception of childhood as innocent and pure (207). Creepy doll movies typically place the emphasis on the evil of putting inanimate objects in motion. The Zuni doll in Trilogy of Terror (dir. Dan Curtis, 1975) and Chucky in Child’s Play (dir. Tom Holland, 1988), for instance, became mobilized by being strapped to skateboards with low-angle cameras positioned level to the ground. Dolls in motion disturb our most basic understanding of Newtonian physics, but they also elude a fundamental human need that the miniature represents: the desire, Millhauser states, “to possess the world more completely, to banish the unknown and the unseen” (135). Miniatures invite us to “become God,” as Millhauser claims, but animated dolls elude our grasp and our control (135).

In contrast to this lineage of animated dolls, Longlegs places both the dolls and the girls they replicate in states of suspension, restoring the promise that we may possess them and highlighting the specifically patriarchal evil undergirding that promise. Longlegs’s dolls remain perfectly, eerily still, moving only when he moves them or orders them moved. But these dolls still contain the unsettling promise of animation, because viewers of creepy doll films expect them to come to life at any moment. We know that these dolls shouldn’t move, but they could, and that potentiality imbues Longlegs with the embodied sensation of waiting with bated breath for a kind of mobilized propulsion that never arrives. “The body presents the paradox of contained and container at once,” Susan Stewart argues in her study of the miniature; “thus our attention is continually focused upon the boundaries of limits of the body; known from an exterior, the limits of the body as object; known from an interior, the limits of its physical extension into space” (104). Suspended animation resides within this liminal crevasse, and Perkins constructs with painstaking technical detail the borders that simultaneously entrap and display, “in time as well as in space,” in Stewart’s words, the possessed dimensions of perpetual girlhood.

Our initial impressions of the dueling leads in Longlegs introduce a dynamic defined by what must remain in the frame and what is allowed to exceed it. The first time Lee appears onscreen, the light from her window traps her within a narrow slit of illumination before she turns and walks into the dark of her bedroom. Moments later, when we first see Kobble, he stands before Lee with the upper half of his face cut off by the frame, which continues to mimic the aspect ratio of an 8mm camera. A reverse shot shows Lee gazing upward at Kobble’s face, but when the camera returns to Kobble, his face still evades the 4:3 frame’s borders. “There she is!” Kobble exclaims, “The almost birthday girl!” Reiterating the sentiment of the T. Rex epigraph, Kobble’s marking of Lee as an almost-birthday girl defines the scope of their interaction and introduces the propulsive conflict of the film: will Lee die that night and remain forever an “almost” birthday girl, or will she be allowed, by virtue of what counts as mercy for Longlegs, to become a girl who has another birthday? And does it matter, when regardless of which option she’s permitted, she will always be a girl? Kobble’s next line further complicates the film’s perspective on Lee’s suspension. Addressing Lee as if her vision is limited to the camera’s aspect ratio, even when we know by virtue of the shots of Lee looking upward at Kobble’s face that she sees him perfectly clearly, Kobble croons, “I’m sorry, it seems I wore my long legs today. What happens if I just….” Kobble then crouches to Lee’s height, his whole face barely entering the frame before a stinger erupts and the camera cuts to a solid red screen. Kobble conflates the camera’s restricted vision with Lee’s ability to perceive him, a limitation that he links to her stature as a child who somehow, through Kobble’s verbal machinations, cannot see beyond the frame as designated by the outmoded camera.

Lee’s murky (in?)ability to see beyond the frame structures her onscreen depictions throughout the film. The camera frequently captures Lee in the foreground bounded by a four-sided frame-within-the-frame, frozen as if in a portrait or a cage. Even before Lee and Carter discover Carrie Anne Camera’s doll and begin to unravel the mechanisms if not the logic behind Longlegs’s contagious poppet magic, the film teaches us to link the almost-birthday girls with the dolls Kobble crafts to replicate them. Both the real girls and the dolls appear as the central objects of Perkins’s intraframing, visually if not yet narratively connected as suspended in time and space. If Kobble’s dual identity as Longlegs enables him to supersede the limitations of borders, then the girls and the dolls merge into a singular identity that suspends both human and toy in a cinematic structure of entrapment. Both girls and dolls appear onscreen suspended within the borders of windows, projected images, evidence boards, and vanity mirrors, perfectly positioned at the center of these frames-within-frames. And because the dolls cannot move of their own volition, neither can the girls.

Perkins’s little boxes signal violence from the outset. The opening interaction between Lee and Kobble suggests that this violence will derive both from suspension (from the girls’ inability to grow up) and from animation (from Kobble’s long legs). As one of the privileged girls who was allowed to become an adult, Lee’s semi-psychic abilities fuse these competing states into an explosion of violence. Casing a suburban neighborhood where every house mirrors its neighbor, Lee and her partner must search for a serial killer who may or may not be hiding within one of so many seemingly identical boxes. The suburb’s uniformity hints at a kind of middle-class comfort that still ensures privacy. The exterior of these homes promises bland homogeneity and conformity, but what happens within the walls stays out of sight and out of mind, except to the inexplicably clairvoyant Lee. Lee can somehow sense the violence sequestered within the homes, a privilege and a curse that derives from her own placement within the demonic suspension of Longlegs’s frame. As Longlegs tells the doll of Carrie Anne Camera, “You’re not afraid of a little bit of dark, because you are the dark.” These are the terms of Perkins’s suspended animation: an uncanny ability to be and not to be at the same time, to sense and know the darkness because, by virtue of being trapped within it, the girls have become it. A recording of a 9-1-1 call made by the father of Longlegs’s most recent family of victims reinforces this duality of violence: “It’s my daughter. That’s not my daughter.”

Because the girls coalesce with the dolls who double them, they enter a form of stasis in which they are forever stuck in their prepubescent states, eternally almost-yet-not-quite one year older. The first time adult Lee appears onscreen, she is centered in a wide shot surrounded by men, with the offscreen voice of a senior special agent instructing, “All right, kids. This is the part where you get to do the things the grown-ups don’t want to do anymore.” Although she has physically matured, Lee has not truly grown up, and her infantilization becomes immediately apparent as a source of danger. During the search of the suburban homes, Lee warns her partner that the serial killer resides in one of the homes, with no evidence other than an innate sense. Her partner does not believe her and refuses to call in her tip, opting instead to ring the doorbell and confront the inhabitant. When the door opens, a shot immediately rings out, and Lee’s partner falls dead on the sidewalk, a victim of his disregard for Lee’s premonition.

Lee’s relationship with Carter’s daughter Ruby, whose birthday is approaching, signals another kind of kinship among the girls who will remain girls. Ruby is shot almost entirely within an immobile frame, with only her head swiveling to observe her surroundings. The camera teases that Ruby may not grow up. Her death, however, will not entirely erase her but rather entrap her within a state of suspended animation, still able to see by virtue of the doll’s continued existence. This ability to see beyond death, of which Lee’s clairvoyance is a manifestation, becomes the defining feature of suspended animation within the film. As the father on the 9-1-1 call reasons, he needs to kill his daughter when she’s sleeping, because that’s when her eyes are closed. Ruby, however, seems uncannily aware of the fleeting bittersweetness of girlhood, a hint that she, like Lee, will survive a Longlegs attack. “Dad says he wants to keep some of my old stuff around, so I don’t grow up too fast,” she tells Lee when Lee asks about a reading tent in Ruby’s room. “But I’m going to grow up anyway. Even veals grow a little, and they live in a box with their legs all tied up and everything.” Lee considers Ruby’s point, then adds, “Veals have it pretty tough, don’t they?”

Suspension in Longlegs takes on tenuous dimensions, because maintaining perfect lines and borders requires a constant, almost frenetic yet entirely invisible level of attention. This obsessive attention to the borders between self and not-self, between girl and doll, between life and death makes the suspension of Longlegs’s doppelgängers of an animated kind, while the suspension paradoxically renders the animation invisible. It is these borders, however, that the girls who grow up destabilize, not because they have become separated from their dolls by death but because they remain tethered to their insidious mini-mes. Carrie Anne Camera describes precisely this in-betweenness of eternal girlhood before recalling her parents’ murders, which she and the audience see from her doll’s point of view: “So dark. Like a world of dark. A nowhere between here and there. What’s that called? Doing the limbo.” Limbo, a state of suspension between heaven and hell, becomes, in Carrie Anne’s construction, an action, a game that relies on the player’s body not disrupting the line. As Stewart contends, “[T]he miniature image consoles in its status as an ‘always there’” (126). Longlegs’s little angels may endure, but they hardly console. They disrupt, they watch, and they render the conditions of their entrapment invisible, like control, like violence, like a family, like making a movie.

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Works Cited

The Boy. Directed by William Brent Bell, STX Entertainment, 2016.

Child’s Play. Directed by Tom Holland, MGM/UA Communications Co., 1988.

Longlegs. Directed by Osgood Perkins, Neon, 2024.

Lu, Chifen. “Uncanny Dolls and Bad Children in Contemporary Gothic Narratives.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 45, no. 2, 2019, pp. 195-221.

Millhauser, Steven. “The Fascination of the Miniature.” Grand Street, vol. 2, no. 4, 1983, pp. 128-135.

Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press, 2005.

Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke University Press, 1993.

Trilogy of Terror. Directed by Dan Curtis, ABC Circle Films, 1975.