One upside to the so-called “elevation” of horror movies over the past decade or so is that performers can make full and well-rounded careers out of “scream queen” gigs. That’s not a knock on actresses like Barbara Crampton or Adrienne Barbeau, who worked so consistently and effectively in ’80s horror; nor an under-appreciation of someone like Jamie Lee Curtis. But in 2024, if actresses excel in horror, they can often stay in horror while still finding all-timer roles and building serious-acting cred. Look at Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Kathyrn Newton, and Rebecca Hall; they’re all done multiple horror movies, and many of them arguably have stronger overall filmographies than bona fide superstars like Sandra Bullock or Jennifer Lopez. The queen among these queens, as it were, may be Maika Monroe.
Monroe is not a household name; Goth is probably more famous, by name or by face, and Ortega likely has them both beat thanks to the youth vote. But Monroe might have the best modern horror-thriller filmography in the game: David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows; Adam Wingard’s The Guest; Chloe Okuno’s Watcher; a pair of intimate genre-benders from Dan Berk and Robert Olsen called Villains and Significant Other; and now Longlegs, a serial-killer horror picture from Osgood Perkins that seems poised to become a surprise summer hit for Neon.
In this impressively unsettling film, Monroe plays Lee Harker, an FBI agent on the trail of a serial killer. In story and structure, Longlegs isn’t all that different from ‘90s movie-star thrillers like Silence of the Lambs (the only horror movie to win an Oscar, at which point it ceased to count as horror.) But Perkins directs it with an eye toward existential, rather than situational, unease. Dread isn’t just for exploring dark corners of a killer’s lair; it pervades even (or especially) the neatest of the movie’s frames. Monroe arrives well-suited to this environment; she plays fear and unease particularly well, in large part by underplaying them. Harker’s investigation of the killer known as Longlegs (played with uncanny creepiness by a semi-recognizable Nicolas Cage) uncovers plenty to shock and terrify her, and Monroe never appears numb to the horror.
With blonde hair and a girlish voice befitting her California upbringing, Monroe made a convincing near-teenager in It Follows and The Guest, both of which position her on the cusp of an adulthood that she may not be prepared to face. In Longlegs, Harker remains tethered to her childhood, via some elusive flashbacks and visits with her not-quite-together mother, but Monroe also seems more grown-up than ever. She also looks a little more gaunt, as if the world has begun to eat away at her.
As if to underline its connection to peak serial-killer entertainment, Longlegs is actually set in the ‘90s, and the experience of women in violent and male-dominated fields at this particular time comes through in the movie’s framing, where Harker often remains isolated, or slightly askew. Is this the adult world she’s entered into, or have her skills and resourcefulness maybe led her to hell instead? Regardless, there’s no sense of horror purgatory for Monroe. Her performances link together gracefully and only create greater appetite for more, to see how she might navigate this genre in her 40s, her 50s, and beyond. (They Follow, a decade-later follow-up to It Follows, will be her first legacy sequel, a rite of later-career passage in horror.) Monroe doubtless can and will work in other genres, but she’s also become a newer form of generational scream queen, one whose nightmares keep changing shape. —Jesse Hassenger
