Upamanyu Biswas
The crime thriller film, ‘Longlegs,‘ dives into an occult-inspired serial killer plot involving an FBI investigation led by agent Lee Harker. The narrative blends a hard-edged crime procedural with supernatural elements that intensify the horror at the heart of Longlegs‘ sinister plan to disrupt the lives of his victims. As such, one of the things that sticks out about the titular villain’s modus operandi is his use of life-sized replica dolls in capturing the psyche of the unwitting families he targets. Before they end up dead, they are all rewarded with Longlegs’s creepy dolls, not knowing that it is one of the primary ways in which he finds a way into their household without actually being there himself! SPOILERS AHEAD.
The Dolls are the Reason Why the Families Kill Themselves
One of the main ways Longlegs is able to convince his victims to kill themselves is by sending them dolls he crafts himself. The dolls are cursed objects imbued with Satanic magic that is mainly concentrated in a silvery orb located inside the head. Once Longlegs identifies his next victim – generally always a 9-year-old girl whose birthday is on the 14th of any month – he makes a life-sized replica of the doll and curses the doll. Eventually, the doll is delivered to the houses of his victims by his accomplice, Ruth Harker, who, under the guise of a church nun, tells the families that they have been rewarded with a doll of their young daughter. However, in the vicinity of the doll, the families are possessed by the curse and kill themselves through the handiwork of the father of the house.
Therefore, the entire operation led by Longlegs is a case of murder-suicide handled from afar that leaves the investigators baffled as to how it might have occurred. It is an ingenious ploy that cannot easily be traced back to Longlegs. When the forensic department investigates one of the dolls, they discover a strange signal emitted from the silvery orb inside the brain, even though it is supposedly hollow. The autopsy officer even admits that he heard his ex-wife’s name being whispered to him throughout the night as he operated on the doll, alluding to its disturbing effect on the psyche of people. It indicates that the doll’s curse is real despite being invisible to the naked eye.
Lee Harker’s Psychic Abilities Stem From the Dolls
Later in the narrative, Lee Harker discovers that she was once a target of Longlegs during her 9th birthday. During that time, the serial killer made a replica doll of hers but ended up not killing her when her mother made a bargain for her safety. However, as a consequence of the doll’s creation, Harker is left with half-psychic abilities that allow her to sense things. In the film’s opening, she somehow pinpoints the house of a killer without even going near it. She is also capable of beating the numbers generator test at the FBI facility, unlike her colleagues, owing to some form of clairvoyance. The agent herself describes it as an entity that is always whispering on her shoulder.
Her abilities are a by-product of Longleg’s dolls and the orb at its center. Although she is cursed, some of that curse magic allows her to glean insight into things that are typically invisible to others. In another sense, she can sense whenever death is around her, possibly due to the fact that the source of the doll’s magic is Satanic in origin. Even Carrie Anne Camera manages to survive her ordeal because she somehow felt something was wrong that day when her father killed her entire family. Therefore, the dolls clearly impact the people they are supposed to represent through some form of manifestation of dark vestigial powers that are sinister in their genesis.
A Real-Life Murder Case Inspired the Longlegs Dolls
While Longlegs is mostly a fictional tale, elements of the story are inspired by authentic details or real-life events, including the dolls themselves. Writer and director Osgood Perkins revealed that the dolls are actually drawn from the murder of a six-year-old beauty pageant participant named JonBenét Ramsay, who was killed in her family basement. In an interview with Inverse, Perkins explained, “The murder took place approaching Christmas, and one present that the parents had gotten for JonBenét was a life-size replica doll of herself, wearing one of her pageant dresses. It was in a cardboard box in the basement, 15 feet from where she was killed, and there was something so insane about that, I’d cataloged it away.”
“With voodoo dolls, if you want to inflict power on someone, you make a doll of them, and you poke it,” the director said on the topic of the doll’s magical abilities. “If you want to bring down a regime, you make an effigy of a politician, and you burn it in the streets. Puppets, effigies, sculptures, statues, dolls — that was all in the magic of the world I wanted to create.” Thus, as one of the creepiest aspects of the film’s horror narration, the dolls hold a lot of weight in terms of their sinister mechanism and how they slowly burrow their way into each family by using Longlegs’ Satanic magic.
