Horror film “Longlegs” comes to cinemas.

Der Teufel hat es wirklich nicht leicht. Sein Spezialgebiet, das Böse, wurde zuletzt immer stärker eingegrenzt, sozialwissenschaftlich erklärt oder psychoanalytisch aufgeschlüsselt. Wo gibt es noch Taten, die so richtig grundsätzlich negativ sind und die dabei nicht aus einer „Kultur“ kommen, sodass man sie erst recht wieder irgendwie zu verstehen meint?

Der Horrorfilm „Longlegs“ von Osgood Perkins zeigt, dass schiere Willkür die letzte Zuflucht des Teufels ist. Das beginnt schon mit dem Namen. „Longlegs“ nennt sich ohne auffälligen Grund eine weiß gekleidete Gestalt, die sich mit sabberndem Gelächter durch die Welt bewegt.

Es ist nicht der Teufel selbst, der auf vorgeblich langen Beinen unterwegs ist, sondern einer seiner Fans. Ein Teufelsanbeter, von dem wir später auch noch einen bürgerlichen Namen erfahren: Dale Ferdinand Kobble. Das klingt ein bisschen weird, aber nicht genuin satanisch. Der Teufel steckt auch hier im Detail eines Klangs, der von fern die prinzipielle Außenseiterrolle heraufruft.

In the world of cinema, Kobble goes by the name of Nicolas Cage. The American actor has made it his hobby to string together the strangest characters on his career thread, year after year, that someone else has come up with. “Mandy” by Panos Cosmatos, “Pig” by Michael Samowski, “Dream Scenario” by Kristoffer Borgli. In “Massive Talent” Cage played himself in a way that sold the principle of self-irony to the devil for all time. In “Longlegs” he has a cameo, a brief appearance. He is the monster that everything revolves around, but that you don’t need to see all the time.

In a horror film, you usually follow an everyday character who has to deal with the extraordinary. In “Longlegs” it is Lee Harker, a young FBI agent who is characterized by a certain intuition. She often has a “hunch”, a strange premonition that cannot be explained. Maika Monroe follows in the footsteps of Jodie Foster here, because the dramaturgy of “The Silence of the Lambs” was obviously a key inspiration for Osgood Perkins.

A serial murder as a huge production to lure a young woman for the decisive duel. As the prologue makes clear, Harker is predestined for this role from the start. She saw Longlegs once before as a child. Perkins makes this encounter look like a home movie, a signal from another era of cinema, when the imagination was not yet hampered by thousands of traditional oddities. When it was enough for a car to stop in front of the house and then no one gets out. This is how a nine-year-old girl can be enticed to go out and take a look.

Perkins later returns to this beautifully eerie moment. He lays out many tracks and closes all the circles. Because the circle is the devil’s real métier, as language has always known. One of the most interesting tracks is a reflection on the devil as a media artist. Because he doesn’t act himself, he lets others do the work. The Enlightenment therefore had an easy time abolishing him and only seeing his delusional henchmen.

But Perkins pulls out all the stops, right down to a fascinating porcelain doll with a shimmering metal ball in its head – a brain? The image of a little smoke rising from this doll after its skull has been blown away by an all-too-mundane pistol bullet is perhaps the detail in which “Longlegs” reveals its narrative strategies. Because the more you want to know something about the devil, the more likely you are to come across a little cloud that fizzles out in the atmosphere.

But the atmosphere is exactly the level on which “Longlegs” is convincing. Just the many lonely houses. Lee Harker lives in a wooden house in the forest, as if she wanted to darken the white house of her childhood. There is still so much space in America that there are many houses standing around in the countryside that seem to be waiting for a visit from a serial killer.

Why he ends up with a family with the ambiguous name “Camera” in a light blue VW Beetle and in nun’s habit is one of the many resolutions in “Longlegs”, which also point to a next, metaphysical level. One of the devil’s dangerous characteristics is that he lets people bargain with him. But anyone who makes a pact with him ends up in a hopeless loop.

Osgood Perkins even allows himself the joke of dropping the word “algorithm” once. The devil works according to patterns that no one else recognizes. And if someone does have an intuition, as is the case with Agent Harker, then that is an indication that this person is already half on the wrong side. An ideal constellation for an aspiring horror filmmaker like Osgood Perkins: “Longlegs” can really only end with a moment that is worth repeating. In the next circle of hell that no one believes in anymore.