The indie horror hit that hid its A-list star

A low-budget indie horror – hailed as the scariest film of the year – has major studios spooked, dominating the box office with a $33m opening.

Nicolas Cage attends the premiere of Neon's Longlegs. Picture: Getty Images

A low-budget indie horror — hailed as the scariest film of the year — has major studios spooked.

Longlegs, the much-hyped occult thriller from director Oz Perkins (son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins), opened to an astounding US$22.6m this week, walloping the Sony Pictures-distributed $100m rom-com Fly Me to the Moon, which stars A-listers Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum, and which took in a paltry $10m.

Longlegs director Oz Perkins. Picture: Getty Images

Anthony Perkins in a scene from Psycho II.

Much of Longlegs’ success — the biggest release to date for indie distributor Neon — can be credited to word-of-mouth hype and its long-lead, tastefully demented, viral marketing campaign. A cryptic, half-page advertisement written in Zodiac Killer-style code was placed in The Seattle Times, leading people to a ‘90s-style (think eerie Web 1.0 graphics) “true crime” website that highlighted the gory crimes of its antagonist. Billboards were plastered around Los Angeles with a phone number that people could call, which led to a message bank filled with threats recorded by the film’s A-list stars — who were strategically left out of all the Longlegs marketing material, but more on that in a moment.

Set in 1993, Longlegs stars Maika Monroe — the professional kiteboarder turned millennial scream queen you may recognise from 2014’s terrifying indie thriller It Follows, in which she was stalked by a malevolent, sexually transmitted force — as Lee Harker, an anti-social Clarice Starling-like FBI agent who is assigned to track down a serial killer known as Longlegs. This Longlegs is a real nasty piece of work: a satan-worshipping murderer who doesn’t do any actual murdering. Instead, he persuades fathers to slaughter their families and then commit suicide.

Remember the aforementioned unnamed A-lister? Well, Longlegs is played by none other than resident freak Nicolas Cage who has enjoyed a renaissance in the indie-sphere since his star turn in Panos Cosmatos’ brutal and bloody 2018 film Mandy.

Cage’s role in Longlegs was largely hidden from audiences. The Oscar-winner appears only briefly in the trailer, and has been kept away from press for the film’s publicity tour.

The hype was not enough to knock Gru and his minions off their box office throne — Despicable Me 4 held on to its top spot for the second week in a row, taking in US$44.6m. But it’s hard to imagine that Neon, who produced Longlegs for $10m and spent roughly the same amount to market and distribute the film, which opens in Australian theatres this week, are bothered by the second-place finish. Particularly considering the volatile state of the box office.

In May, George Miller’s Furiosa, the fifth film in his Mad Max franchise — and the most expensive Australian film ever made, with a budget of AU$343m, not including marketing costs — crashed and burned at the box office, grossing a disappointing US$26.2m in its opening weekend. It has since taken in a worldwide total of $172.8m.

Horror has, in recent years, become one of the few reliably bankable genres at the cinema. In 2022, the Caitlin Stacey-led thriller Smile made back over ten times its $17m budget, taking in $217m worldwide. That same year, Zach Cregger’s Barbarian bagged $45.4m on a $4m budget. Meanwhile, the homegrown horror hit Talk To Me, from Adelaide twin brother directors Danny and Michael Philippou, which was shot on a $7m budget last year, took more than $140m globally. It became A24’s highest-grossing horror film and second-highest-grossing film overall, following the Oscar-winner Everything Everywhere All At Once.