In what became the movie of the summer, the title character of “Longlegs” styles himself as a Friend of the Devil. Pale and wraithlike beneath a matted mullet that’s seen better days, the enigmatic serial killer born Dale Cobble — and played with requisite, nouveau-shamanic flair by Nicolas Cage — has made it his mandate to collect souls for “the man downstairs,” carving a swath of terror through Oregon, one hapless family unit at a time. Even after being placed in captivity late in the film, Longlegs proves elusive, wryly promising the FBI agent who’s apprehended him that, regardless of what happens next, he’ll be “a little bit of everywhere.”
For viewers looking to get on the same incantory wavelength as Oz Perkins’ surprise horror blockbuster — which raked in $70 million at the box office while effectively turning summer vacation into spooky season — the character’s statement doubles as both prophecy and user manual. “Longlegs” is a movie designed to be rewatched: look carefully, and you’ll see Mephistophelian figures lurking around the edges of its carefully composed frames.
In story and structure, “Longlegs” owes a lot to certain canonical procedural thrillers, most notably “The Silence of the Lambs,” with which it shares an early ‘90s setting (here re-created as a period piece). Thematically, though, Perkins’ film is very much of a piece with a long-standing — and endlessly regenerative — cycle of movies, books, TV shows and rock music in thrall to the esthetics and mindset of Satanism. More specifically, “Longlegs”’s analogue-era backdrop and provocative integration of occult mysticism and glam-rock lyrics (exemplified by its namesake’s fixation on the songs of T. Rex) marks it as a mediation-slash-exploitation of the cultural phenomenon known as Satanic Panic, the rapidly metastasizing middle-American anxiety over the possibility of demonic forces conjuring their way into everyday life that dominated newspaper headlines, talk show panels and psych journals in the early 1980s.
In a way, trying to locate the primal scene of this movement is an exercise in futility: imagine trying to write a case study of the first person who was ever afraid of the dark. But a case can be made — and has been made, very entertainingly, by former Spin honcho (and current Toronto Star entertainment editor) Doug Brod in his new book “Born with a Tail” — that patient zero for the contemporary phenomenon of Satanic Panic was the Illinois-born showman-slash-philosophical-salesman Anton Szandor LaVey, who capitalized on the social, economic and ideological upheavals of the late 1960s to found the Church of Satan. In the opening chapter, Brod brings the reader back to January of 1967, when LaVey — a keyboard virtuoso with the intuition to play the human mind like a piano — performed an occult wedding at his residence in San Francisco’s Richmond District. “We really pulled it off,” LaVey is quoted as telling the groom. “And you can bet the rubes are going to come back for more.”
As its double-edged title suggests, “Born with a Tail” is a study of somebody with a keen grasp of storytelling, and the rhetoric behind the Church of Satan was no less compelling for being recycled: a mishmash of righteous anticlericalism, libertine posturing and thinly veiled lifts from brand-name thinkers including Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche (with lots of gory pulp fiction sprinkled in to taste). As innovated by LaVey, Satanism split the difference between spiritual subversion and costume-party performativity, a form of diabolical cosplay appealing to converts with a flair for the dramatic. What Brod gets at is how LaVey’s strategic geographic proximity to show business and Hollywood — and its population of high-visibility celebrities, some of whom were all too happy to be sucked in by a sense of novelty and some persuasive oration — was integral to his influence.
Within a year of LaVey founding the Church of Satan, Roman Polanski helmed the movie version of “Rosemary’s Baby,” which imagined a clique of devil-worshippers gathering clandestinely in New York City (LaVey claimed he was a consultant on the production). Ira Levin’s source novel was a superb piece of satire hinting that evil lurks behind the closed doors of your friends and neighbours; the film’s masterful mash-up of humour and paranoia would curdle in short order, however, when the director’s wife was murdered in 1969 by followers of Charles Manson, who was, like LaVey, a self-styled guru presiding over a cult of personality.
In purely cinematic terms, “Rosemary’s Baby” begat “The Exorcist” and “The Omen,” an unholy trilogy of A-list thrillers allegorizing larger generational tensions. The subtext in each was that the Kids Were Not Alright, and also that The Devil Made Them Do It. By the 1980s, though, the polarities had shifted so that the public furor over Satanism had to do with adults imperiling children — a dynamic that was at once a matter of contagious surface confabulation and a sort of deeper truth.
Cue the publication of Canadian therapist Lawrence Pazder’s 1980 bestseller “Michelle Remembers,” ostensibly a case study of a woman who had suppressed memories of ritual abuse by family members during her childhood in Victoria, B.C. The book’s success opened the floodgates for similar accounts of repressed trauma involving conspiratorial cults, resulting in a form of moral hysteria that happened to align with the rise of the American religious right during the Reagan administration. In the longview, the phenomenon looks mainly like the byproduct of a toxic mix of media sensationalism and civilian suggestibility — literally so in cases where survivors realized that their memories had been planted (however accidentally) by their own psychiatrists.
The era of Satanic Panic has already been immortalized plenty in popular culture, including on “American Horror Story,” which featured LaVey as a character in an episode that came under fire from the Church of Satan for inaccuracy. Earlier this year, the Sundance Film Festival debuted Scott Cummings’ documentary “Realm of Satan,” a series of carefully curated portraits attempting to collectively humanize (or at least de-demonize) LaVery’s 21st century followers. Later this month, Peacock will release an eight-episode streaming series called “Hysteria!” which is set in the 1980s and concerns a motley crew of high school students who rebrand themselves as death-metalheads in order to grow their audience. Based on the trailer, “Hysteria!” has distinct “Stranger Things” vibes, with added genre cred in the form of “Evil Dead” star Bruce Campbell.
The question of whether its creators are trying to explore the subject matter or just exploit it as so much sardonic I-Love-the-‘80s nostalgia remains to be seen. As for “Longlegs,” Perkins has made it clear in interviews that he has no plans for a sequel, but as plenty of canonical movie bogeymen have been resurrected against their will, anything is possible — especially with a character who’s already a little bit of everywhere.
