Serial killers may appear in horror movies, and frequently do. But not all movies featuring serial killers are horror movies, and in fact, many are not.
Is Se7en a horror movie? Of course it isn't. It has horrific elements to it, and it may disturb you more than most horror movies, but it isn't scary. Or if it is scary, it's scary more for making you consider the depravity of which human beings are capable, not scary in a "boo!" sort of way.
Se7en is a serial killer movie, which means it focuses more on the people solving those crimes, not the victims of those crimes. I suppose the more general, overarching genre would be "crime movie."
Which is a fine kind of movie, if a little played out. It's just not the type of movie I was expecting when I saw the double feature of MaXXXine and Longlegs on Thursday night.
MaXXXine, the far (far) better of the two movies, might have rightly expected to adhere more to the conventions of horror as a result of the two movies that preceded it in Ti West's apparently now-completed trilogy. X is probably most correctly described as a slasher movie, given that it has an unfathomable killer as its adversary, whereas Pearl blurs the lines a bit more, to its great benefit. It's a killer origin story, but it's more of a pastoral period piece that morphs into a horror movie over the course of its running time. Anyway, both are characterised as horror on IMDB.
As is MaXXXine, but should it be? The distinctions are interesting here. X gets the genre designations of horror, mystery and thriller. I'm not sure about "mystery" there, but okay. Pearl, as an indication of its more complex tone, gets drama, horror and thriller. MaXXXine gets crime and horror, and it's the crime designation that saps some of the value of the horror designation.
I'd argue that the difference between different sorts of serial killer movies is whether there are detectives intimately involved. There are detectives intimately involved in MaXXXine, so intimately involved that they are played by A-list, or close to A-list, actors in Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale. The story is not told from their perspective, and we don't witness their activities outside of their interactions with the protagonist, but they keep popping up throughout the story, interrogating our main character and trying to get her to help them solve a series of murders. It's enough to give the film a major whiff of the serial killer movie rather than the horror movie, an impression strengthened by the use of a number of serial killer movie cliches, like coroners examining bodies, and pentagrams burned into the flesh of victims.
Longlegs, an absolute piece of shit, goes full serial killer movie, though it thinks it is a horror, which is all the more embarrassing.
Before I go off ripping Longlegs a new asshole, I want to establish two things:
1) I still dearly love a horror movie by the director of Longlegs and consider it to be one of the best horror movies of the 21st century. I adore Osgood Perkins' The Blackcoat's Daughter. I just want to say that to give some context to the things I'm about to say.
2) More context: Apparently, I and another friend I've spoken to about Longlegs are in the minority about this movie. Apparently, most people really like it. I have no idea why that is. But if you must take what I'm saying with that grain of salt, take it.
Perkins' career has been composed of prestige horror, which has included Gretel & Hansel and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, in addition to Blackcoat's Daughter. So we would naturally expect that his new movie would also be prestige horror.
But this movie isn't two minutes old before it starts dumping on us the worst and most embarrassing cliches of 1990s serial killer movies. I could name them but it would get exhausting. Never mind, I will:
1) The brilliant but closed off and socially inept female FBI agent.
2) The serial killer who has a personal relationship with that FBI agent.
3) The serial killer who communicates with that FBI agent through encoded messages left at murder scenes, where only the FBI agent can crack the code (and does so suspiciously easily).
4) Indications of devil worship and other religious themes.
5) Murders that occur according to some precise alignments of dates, which form a shape only when those dates are viewed in exactly that way.
6) Other stupid numerology.
7) An older FBI sidekick for our main character whose role is to be supportive but also to throw cold water on most of our main character's hunches.
8) And oh yeah, hunches that suggest some sort of supernatural ability by our main character.
9) Multiple bits of serial killer iconography used randomly and in seeming contradiction with one another.
10) Appearances of the serial killer "in the wild" (like the time spent with Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs) that are meant to make him more disturbing, but in this case, do not.
Yes, Nicolas Cage as the title character (not a spoiler, it's revealed in the opening credits) is not scary at all in this movie.
I don't want to get into all the ways Longlegs fails as a movie -- as a horror, as a serial killer movie, as any movie at all. I'm saving that for my review, which will be posted in a couple days and which you'll be able to see to the right at that time. (The MaXXXine review is already there. But if you're reading this a lot later, you can click to it here.)
For the purposes of this particular piece, let's just say that Perkins' few gestures toward actual horror movie content are very limp by his previous standards, and are mostly undone by the trappings of the serial killer movie.
So I left this double feature at the Sun in Yarraville feeling significantly annoyed by the baits and switches to which I was subjected, at least marginally liking the first movie. But since MaXXXine is much better in its first half and Longlegs is good in no half, that left me without about three hours of disappointing movie to end my night.
A serial killer of my buzz, indeed.
