This story contains serious spoilers for Long Legs. Osgood Perkins' nightmarish new horror film “Long Legs” begins with lyrics from the 1971 hit “Get It On (Bang a Gong)” by glam rock band T. Rex: “You've got the teeth of the hydra upon you / You're dirty, sweet, and you're my girl. Their music opens and closes the film, evoking the Satanic Panic conspiracy that rock music contains subliminal messages, but it is the implications of girliness and impurity that crawl under your skin in the first moments and throughout the film.

Perkins' new film (opening July 12 from NEON) is primarily about the stories our parents tell us, but it also seems to have a feminist horror aspect to it. Not only is Long Legs interested in exploring the nature of evil and its manifestations, as many classic horror films have done, but its demonic themes can also be interpreted as a critique of traditionalist and religious expectations of the nuclear family structure and the belief that girls should be obedient and pure In the film, in which FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) investigates a serial killer obsessed with a mysterious code known as Long Legs (Nicolas Cage), there are frequent references to the need to keep girls and “little ones” safe from the “cruel world. In the end, it all comes to a head. In the end, it all comes to a head, and one feels oneself tainted by what one has witnessed.

The puzzling case Lee works on revolves around a series of murders in the Pacific Northwest over several decades in which a father kills his entire family and himself. The murders always occurred within six days of his daughter's ninth birthday, which was always on the 14th, and there was always a cipher left at the crime scene signed “Long Legs”. Lee is convinced that Long Legs is somehow committing the murders outside the house and searches tirelessly to find out who he is and how he has manipulated his family for so long.

Eventually, Lee's detective work leads her to revisit the old farmhouse where one of the murders took place, where she finds an elaborately made doll that resembles the murdered daughter. Inside the doll is a metal chrome ball, and Lee is convinced that this is the Long Legs' M.O.

As Lee becomes obsessed with the case, she also remembers her childhood and her distant mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt). She visits Ruth and learns that she is in poor mental health and seems to have no regard for her family. Ruth, a devout Christian, asks Lee if he prays, but Lee replies that he stopped doing so long ago.

At his mother's house, Lee finds an old photograph and remembers that Long Legs visited him before his ninth birthday (January 14). Lee took a picture of the stranger and cropped out most of his face, but the stark white perfection and long hair were enough evidence to find him in the present.

As the FBI launches a search, Long Legs (whose real name is Dale Ferdinand Coble) senses them coming and waits by the roadside. When Lee asks to question him one-on-one, he mumbles about how he is helping “a friend of a friend,” meaning Satan himself, “the man down there. At this point, Lee determines that the mysterious criminal has an accomplice who brings a doll with a demonic device into the victim's home and demands that he tell him who it is. Creepily, Long Legs says he should tell his mother. Before she can get any more information out of him, he recites Revelation 13:1. It describes two beasts coming up out of the sea to persuade mankind to pledge allegiance to Satan, alluding to how he sees himself and his accomplices. He then commits suicide by striking his head on the interrogation room table.

Terrified, Lee realizes she may have forgotten her childhood, and visits her mother again, only to find a doll of nine-year-old Lee. In a storybook tone, she explains that Long Legs tried to make the Harkers his victims in order to convince Ruth to help him protect her daughter. He then lived in the basement, made dolls that looked just like the real thing, and Ruth began posing as a nun and offering gifts from the church to families that met his requirements.

At the end of the film, Lee realizes that Ruth is continuing her dealings with the Long Legs, targeting Lee's boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), and his family on his daughter Ruby's (Eva Kelders) birthday. Upon arrival, she sees that Ruth has already given Ruby the doll and that Carter is acting strangely. Soon he kills his wife (Carmel Amit) and Lee shoots him. Her mother yells that Lee will be cursed if she doesn't kill the entire Carter family, and Lee tells her mother that her prayers were always in vain and kills her in self-defense. Then, when Lee sees Ruby's doll, she is already attached to it, and the agent freezes, unable to shoot the doll. Nevertheless, she grabs Ruby and takes her out of the scene, and just before the film ends, we cut to a scene in the interrogation room where Long Legs yells “Hail Satan” one last time.

When Lee is forced to kill her mother, it is as if Satan's grand plan was to terrorize Lee from girlhood to womanhood and make her have to kill her mother. As she stares at Ruby's doll, unable to destroy it, it is as if she is facing a lifetime of repressed trauma. One wonders if Ruby is still haunted by the doll, or if she is still haunted, given how much she has misplaced her childhood memories because the doll was hidden in her childhood home. Simply put, evil is still looming.

Lee frequently faces darkness. When he tries to question Carrie Ann Camera (Keenan Shipka), a survivor of the Long Legs massacre, Carrie Ann says, “I'm not sure I'm ready for this. Lee is nervous around Carrie Ann, but the two have a great deal in common: both have been robbed of their girlhood and punished by those devoted to their faith for no other reason than to grow up and leave their innocence behind.

As a child, Lee says she only felt scared when her mother uttered prayers about how she should remain safe, devout, and good, and Perkins seems concerned with how the stories told to her by her parents affect us all. Nevertheless, it is hard to ignore the fact that all of Long Legs' victims are girls. Even the gendered messages are affected by the fact that his lovingly made dolls of serial killers are perfect, eternal girls, hardened in porcelain, and that he even changes even his own appearance to drastically feminine attributes, as if he is adhering to a kind of beauty standard to impress the devil himself! .

Just as Lee felt wronged when she heard her mother's scripture, it is as if we are made to feel defiled by what we witness at the end of “Long Legs.”