The Devil Appears In Nicolas Cage's Longlegs More Often Than You Think

Spoilers for "Longlegs" follow.

Will I ever rewatch "Longlegs"? It's a question I've been asking myself since I saw it. It's a great movie (with one hell of a Nicolas Cage performance as a Devil-worshiping serial killer) and I haven't stopped thinking about for plenty of other reasons. Even so, it's such an uncomfortable watch that I see it joining "The Witch" and "Hereditary" on my personal shelf of horror movies I like but can never quite get in the mood to completely rewatch.

On the other hand — second viewings of mystery movies are always more enlightening than the first. When you have all the big pieces of the puzzle assembled in your head, you can start looking for the smaller details. The "Longlegs" marketing team is leaning into that. Ahead of release, /Film praised the "Longlegs" viral marketing campaign as some of the best horror movie hyping in recent years, and that marketing translated into a box office blowout for distributor Neon.

The marketing hasn't let up — the latest "Longlegs" video, "Look Closer," is premised around daring people to see the movie again.

The third-act twist of "Longlegs" is that this is no mere procedural. Killer Dale Kobble (Cage) is a dollmaker; he kills by placing the essence of Satan inside human-sized dolls and leaving them in homes, where the demonic presence takes root and kills the family living in the home by possessing one of them.

If you do indeed "Look Closer" at many shots in "Longlegs," you'll notice the Devil isn't an invisible evil.

The 46-second teaser opens on an exterior shot of FBI Agent Lee Harker's (Maika Monroe) cabin home. It cuts to a close-up of her looking out the window as Kobble narrates in voiceover, "I won't only be in here ... I'll be a little bit of everywhere." The teaser then shows four shots: a misty night time forest, the space between two shelves at a library (the camera pointing out the window), a basement, and a shot of Lee standing in a doorway then turning around.

In each of these, there is a black, shadowy figure that looks vaguely humanoid but with goat horns. During the movie's climactic exposition flashback, this figure pops up right in front of the frame and is explicitly said in voiceover to be Satan. Throughout "Longlegs," the Devil has literally been lurking in the background keeping tabs on our characters; Perkins hid as many as 15 sightings in the movie. (The living shadow design recalls the silhouetted demon in one of director Osgood Perkins' previous films, "The Blackcoat's Daughter.")

Full disclosure, I didn't notice any of these hidden Devil cameos while I was watching "Longlegs." I had a similar experience with "Hereditary," where I completely missed the initial shot of Toni Collette clinging to the wall like a spider. If I don't know to look for something scary, it can pass me by. (Yeah, I probably wouldn't last long in a horror movie based on that alone.)

The "Longlegs" shots included in "Look Closer" speak to one of my most cinematic fears: wide shots staring down an empty room or hallway, with the walls of the space extending outward from the edges of the frame, cramping in the claustrophobia. Looking at such images, even as a still photograph, conjures a sense of unknown creepiness hidden beneath normality and emptiness. There's a feeling that something might be hidden and could pop out at any moment. In "Longlegs," that's definitely true.

"Longlegs" is playing in theaters.