How Scary Is Longlegs, Nicolas Cage’s Acclaimed New Horror Movie?

For die-hards, no horror movie can be too scary. But for you, a wimp, the wrong one can leave you miserable. Never fear, scaredies, because Slate’s Scaredy Scale is here to help. We’ve put together a highly scientific and mostly spoiler-free system for rating new horror movies, comparing them with classics along a 10-point scale. And because not everyone is scared by the same things—some viewers can’t stand jump scares, while others are haunted by more psychological terrors or can’t stomach arterial spurts—it breaks down each movie’s scares across three criteria: suspense, spookiness, and gore.

It’s time to measure your inseam because this Scaredy Scale is all about Longlegs, the new occult horror flick from Osgood Perkins (the writer-director behind The Blackcoat’s Daughter and the real-life son of Anthony Perkins, aka the original Norman Bates). Longlegs follows a newly minted FBI agent, Lee Harker—played by scream queen Maika Monroe of It Follows and Watcher fame—whose psychic abilities land her on the team tasked with hunting down the film’s eponymous serial killer, played by Nicolas Cage. The marketing campaign for Longlegs has been intense enough to warrant its own headlines: There was the Zodiac Killer–esque code displayed in the Seattle Times, the phone number plastered on a billboard in Los Angeles that would treat callers to Cage-as-Longlegs’ eerie whispers, and, most recently, the viral post that claimed that the first time Monroe saw Cage in his Longlegs makeup, a set microphone captured her heart rate as it reached 150 bpm—a tweet that the distributor has since backed up with the alleged audio, while upping the official rate to 170 bpm. So, according to the promo, Longlegs is pretty damn scary. Per critics’ ratings (as of this writing, a solid 80 on Metacritic), the film is certainly good, but is Cage’s presence as the surprisingly normal-legged killer frightening enough to cause cardiac arrest? Or is this all just very effective PR? Let’s break it down.

Longlegs’ nerve-racking moments aren’t constant enough to feel as if the movie is relying on getting cheap rises out of the audience, but there are still many artful jump scares. Its clever sound design and editing ensure that the hair-raising moments are more innovative than the classic “Someone’s behind the protagonist” incidents you might expect: There are well-timed cuts that deploy the choral score to inspire frights, alongside volume increases from silence that make more basic actions, like opening an envelope, build and pop the tension. So, be strategic about when you go to take a sip of your drink!

Longlegs is far more interested in getting under your skin than it is in grossing you out, but that doesn’t mean it’s all rainbows and butterflies for the squeamish. Although it’s no slasher, the movie doesn’t shy away from showing several of Longlegs’ kills. Some are represented indirectly, such as via the blood splatter from an act that occurs just out of frame, but other gruesome moments are shown in full, like in the scene when one character repeatedly bashes their head on a table as a form of self-harm. It should be easy enough to cover your eyes before any of the carnage becomes too graphic, but I, perhaps naïvely, didn’t anticipate how grisly Longlegs would get.

Spookiness is really Longlegs’ bread and butter. I tend to be more susceptible, scarewise, to horror films that present real-life threats. For example, I’m not planning on taking a trip to a remote village in Sweden to celebrate their pagan rituals à la Midsommar, nor would I remain in a house overrun with homicidal ghosts, so such threats don’t tend to linger with me, but there’s not much I can do about being a victim of a somewhat random act of violence. With that said, Longlegs offers a bit of both: It is a detective mystery plot that dips its toe into the occult and the supernatural, and all of it is creepy. Although there is much ado about Cage’s appearance, I found his voice to be far more haunting. All in all, any regular watcher will be sufficiently spooked—and I would urge women with birthdays on the 14^th of the month to think twice before buying a ticket.

I’ve never been more creeped out by Nic Cage—but I was simultaneously well entertained. Despite the shocks, Longlegs is a refreshingly original and deftly made film that has some line readings so great it made the audience in my theater not just jump but LOL. Is Longlegs the scariest movie I’ve ever seen? No. Did my heart rate elevate to I-just-ran-a-marathon levels? No. But was the story captivating enough, the acting good enough, and the vibes chilling enough to make it a worthwhile viewing experience? Certainly. The marketing may have been an exaggeration, but it wasn’t just hype—except when it comes to the length of those limbs.