LONGLEGS

*CUT TO THE CHASE*

NOTE: This spoiler was submitted by Jeremy

The film opens in Oregon in the early 1970’s during the winter. A young girl (Lauren Acala) walks outside of her house and sees a car parked near her street. As she walks toward it, she hears a voice. When she turns around, a creepy pale man (Nicolas Cage) approaches her and calls her the “almost birthday girl” and says how he wore his “longlegs” that day.

Part One: His Letters
Twenty years later in the 90’s, FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is assigned to a case with her partner, Agent Fisk (Dakota Daulby). They go to a neighborhood to ask around for a suspect, but Lee manages to point out the house on her first hunch. Fisk opens the door and gets shot in the head, prompting Lee to enter the house with her gun. She catches the perpetrator sitting at the end of his bed with his hands raised.

Lee meets with her boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), who is impressed by Lee’s perception and figures she might have some kind of psychic ability. He assigns her to a decades-long murder case involving multiple families who were murdered by the fathers before they took their own lives. Found at the scene of each crime were letters with satanic symbols and coding, all signed “Longlegs”.

Carter later invites Lee to his house, where she meets his wife Anna (Carmel Amit) and daughter Ruby (Ava Kelders). Ruby invites Lee into her room, where Lee says she used to want to be an actress instead of an agent. Ruby invites Lee to her upcoming birthday.

Lee brings her work back to her home, living in an isolated cabin. She also has a rocky relationship with her mother Ruth (Alicia Witt), whom she tries to contact. Someone then starts pounding on Lee’s door, and she goes to investigate. She looks through her window and sees a figure in the woods standing there. When Lee goes outside to confront the figure, he enters her house, which she notices. By the time she returns, the figure is gone, and all that is left is an envelope for Lee with the instructions to not open until January 14th.

Part Two: All of Your Things
Lee opens the envelope, which is a birthday card featuring similar satanic coding to the letters that Carter brought up. A passage of the book of Revelation, “I stood upon the sand of the sea”, is deciphered, along with a graphic threat of violence.

Carter brings Lee in to investigate another Longlegs murder. The father was once again the culprit, and Lee and Carter both come upon the decomposing body of one of the man’s daughters. At the station, Lee brings her conclusions to Carter. Each of the murders coincided within six days of the birthdays of the families’ daughters, all of the dates being the 14th of any given month. The dates of each murder all form a triangle on a linear calendar, with one date missing from the equation, and it is believed that is when Longlegs will strike again. Lee doesn’t mention that she received the letter from Longlegs but suggests to Carter that Longlegs has someone or multiple people aiding him in the murders.

Somewhere around the area, Longlegs (revealed to have stringy hair, a bloated face, and chalk-white skin) goes to a store for supplies. He tries to pull some weird stuff on the teenage clerk, but she just recognizes him as a local creepy guy. Longlegs returns to his home, ranting and yelling madly.

Lee and Carter look into the Camera family, as daughter Carrie Anne (Kiernan Shipka) was the sole survivor of their encounter with Longlegs since she was at school when her father committed the murders. They travel to the Camera family farm and enter the barn where the murders took place. Under the floorboards, the two uncover a lifelike doll meant to resemble a young Carrie Anne. Inside the doll is a mysterious metal ball serving as the “brain” of the doll. When Lee and Carter speak to the examiner that opened the doll, he puts a mic to the ball, which makes static noise and causes Lee to see horrifying images. The examiner also claims that he believes he heard the doll speaking his ex-wife’s name.

Lee visits Carrie Anne at the psych ward where she has been staying since the murders. The orderly that Lee speaks to says that Carrie Anne had been catatonic for almost 20 years until recently, when a man (Longlegs) came to visit her and appeared to snap her out of her state. When Lee talks to Carrie Anne, she says in a monotone, recounting her vision of her father killing a priest before killing her mother, and how she would now do anything that this man asked her to do, even if it meant killing Lee.

Carter brings up to Lee that he knows that Lee had a previous encounter with Longlegs when she was a child that she seemed to have forgotten. Lee goes to visit Ruth, who seems to be a religious fanatic that is always encouraging Lee to pray, even though she says she never does. Ruth tells Lee that she is lucky to have grown and gotten older because of what she did for her. Lee finds pictures of a mysterious man among Ruth’s belongings. It is a picture snapped by a young Lee (she is the girl in the opening scene) right when Longlegs came to see her and Ruth. Lee brings this information back to Carter.

Using the snapshot, the FBI are able to track down and capture Longlegs, who says his real name is Dale Ferdinand Cobble. In a brief interrogation video, Longlegs addresses Lee and creepily sings her “Happy Birthday”. Lee goes into the interrogation room to personally speak to Longlegs and determine who his accomplices may be. He goes on about how he serves “The Man Downstairs” (Satan) and how Lee should ask her mother about anybody he may have been working with. Longlegs wishes Lee a happy birthday before violently smashing his face on the table, leaving him a gruesomely bloody and noseless mess before he dies.

Carter admonishes Lee for not having Longlegs under control, because now they will never know who his accomplice is. He also informs Lee that Carrie Anne could not be it, since she is said to have jumped off the roof of the psych ward.

Lee goes to Ruth’s home with Agent Browning (Michelle Choi-Lee). Lee enters the house and doesn’t find her mother, but Ruth emerges from behind Browning and blows her head off with a shotgun. Lee runs outside to confront her mother, who aims her gun at a doll resembling a young Lee. Ruth tells Lee that she is free from his control, and when she shoots the doll, a puff of black smoke emerges from the same metal ball found in the other doll. Lee then loses consciousness.

Part Three: Birthday Girls
Ruth’s voice can be heard telling Lee a story. Starting from the day that Longlegs first visited, Ruth pleaded with him to spare her and Lee when he came back that night to commit the murders. From that day, Ruth has been his accomplice, delivering dolls that he crafted to look like the daughters of each family that contained an essence of satanic magic that manipulated the fathers into carrying out the killings. Ruth would go to the houses dressed as a nun, saying the dolls are gifts from the church. Longlegs had also been living in the Harkers’ basement, making him “The Man Downstairs” as well. Ruth justifies her actions as doing it to save Lee from dying and going to Hell. The Lee doll had been the psychic voice in her head guiding her in her investigations.

Lee wakes up in her old bedroom and finds her mom gone. She hears the phone ringing and answers it. A creepy voice tells Lee that she is missing Ruby’s birthday. She rushes to the shed to find her mom’s car and heads to Carter’s home.

By the time Lee arrives, Ruth is already there with the doll that looks like Ruby, and the whole family is stuck in some kind of trance. Lee tries to warn Carter, but he is controlled to sound angry and abrasive. Ruth suggests cutting the cake, so Carter and Anna both go to the kitchen, and Anna can be heard getting stabbed to death. Lee tries to get her mom to stop, but she intends to see it through to the end. Lee shoots Carter before he can come near Ruby, and Ruth stands up with fury to try and stab both Lee and Ruby, but Lee shoots her mother in the head. When Lee tries to destroy the doll, she has run out of bullets and simply leaves the house with Ruby.

The last we see is Longlegs sitting in the interrogation room tauntingly laughing over his victory in his plan before ending with “Hail Satan”, and blowing the viewers a kiss.

In the 1990's, FBI Agent Lee Harker is put on a case involving a decades-old serial killer called "Longlegs". His modus operandi is having the fathers of each victimized family carry out the murders before committing suicide, and Lee suggests to her boss, Agent Carter, that Longlegs has an accomplice.

Lee forgot that she encountered Longlegs as a child with her mother Ruth. She finds a snapshot among her old belongings, which identifies Longlegs and is used to help locate and capture him. Longlegs, whose real name is Dale Ferdinand Cobble, only tells Lee to ask her mother about his accomplices before he smashes his head repeatedly until he dies.

Ruth was Longlegs' accomplice all along, as she promised to carry out his deeds so that he may spare her and Lee. Longlegs would create lifelike dolls resembling the daughters of the families, including one of Lee, and inside would be metal balls that serve as the dolls' "brains" which carried the essence of satanic magic that would influence the fathers to commit the murders. Lee realizes that the next target is Carter's daughter Ruby, since it is her birthday. Lee rushes to Carter's house, but Ruth has already arrived with a Ruby doll, and the whole family is under a trance. Carter kills his wife, and Lee kills him before shooting Ruth in the head. She runs out of bullets before she can destroy the doll, but she gets Ruby out safely.