Typically, horror films become a lower-budget, higher-profit investment for studios and indie distributors. The genre has a core of dedicated franchise fans, aficionados, and casual admirers who just want a good scare. There is a significant audience for it, and every month, they come in droves to see the latest and scariest. The genre spawns new franchises from original ideas more often than any other. Horror is a genre built and maintained by originality.
In 2023, M3GAN bowed in January to carve out a $95 million gross. In 2022, Nope, Smile, and The Black Phone took in over $90 million apiece. These box office totals don’t count the tens to hundreds of millions brought in by the most recent additions to the Saw, Halloween, and Scream franchises, some of which have been going for 20+ years, all based on an original idea.
Despite all of this success in the last 25 years of Oscar nominations, only four original horror films have been nominated for Best Original Screenplay. The Sixth Sense (1999), written by M. Night Shyamalan; Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), written by Guillermo Del Toro, Get Out (2017), written by Jordan Peele, and The Shape of Water (2017), written by Guillermo Del Toro and Vanessa Taylor. Get Out went on to win in the category. Before that, the most significant horror win was in the Best Adapted Screenplay category when William Peter Blatty won for adapting his novel The Exorcist (1973).
From an objective point of view, you can see how an awards body like the Academy would dismiss the genre. Even though many horror films are original concepts, they aren’t always well written. It’s not just clunky dialogue but missing character motivations and glaring plot holes. It can even be the incomprehensible survival of certain characters over others or how a character takes down the antagonist with an easy, simple solution. There is and always will be schlock within the genre. It’s enjoyable schlock, but schlock nonetheless.
However, when a script can compel the intellectual and primal sides of the brain, it’s time to sit up and take notice. The script for Longlegs, written by Oz Perkins, is taut, thrilling, terrifying, and brilliant. It’s a film that harkens back to the best serial killer thrillers like The Silence of the Lambs and Zodiac and spooky satanic and demonological thrillers like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. Even with these parallels, Longlegs is still uniquely its own.
The plot has enough twists and turns that never let you get ahead. Oz Perkins is a master at the slow reveal. He leaves bread crumbs and shows you pieces of possibilities but never gives up the game before he’s ready. Perkins has crafted a film that gets under your skin and burrows deep into your gut, keeping you in constant unease.
The most sinister of Perkins’ machinations is in Longlegs (Nicolas Cage) himself. He’s an enigma whose face is as slow as any reveal and as terrifying as any evil he perpetuates. Longlegs oozes into the heads of the other characters and seeps into ours as well. He’s the kind of off-putting that gives nightmares. Too much of Longlegs, and he loses his mystique; too little, and he won’t have the impact he needs, but Perkins gives us just the right amount.
It helps that Longlegs’ foil, Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), is also a fascinating character. Perkins imbues Harker with intriguing idiosyncrasies and unique abilities that don’t make her a “Mary Sue” but a highly competent person. She’s a character who’s always thinking, tinkering, and executing. But when she’s completely thrown off her game, the internal struggle written into what she doesn’t say makes her compelling. Perkins takes his time with Harker. The full picture of who she is and her past is so beautifully laid out.
Longlegs is a terrific script. It’s a narrative that winds around and around and around but finds its end again. It’s a perfect example of a well-executed horror story and should be included in every conversation about the 2024 race for Best Original Screenplay. In the vein of the other original horror films mentioned, it is also on track to hit the $74 million box office mark, and a nomination or two could be a way for the Academy, always desperate for more eyes, to catch the attention of those elusive viewers who don’t see the films they love represented enough.
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Here is where I see the Best Original Screenplay race as of now. Speculation about films that bow later in the year will come, but for now, the list is limited to films that have had their release in theaters or on streamers.
- Challengers – Justin Kuritzkes
- Ghostlight – Kelly O’Sullivan
- I Saw the TV Glow – Jane Schoenbrun
- Kinds of Kindness – Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthimus Filippou
- Longlegs – Oz Perkins
