This article appeared in the July 19, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

MaXXXine (Ti West, 2024)

Welcome, dear reader, to our midsummer horror roundup! Things have been grim, terrifying, and relentlessly unpleasant. Heat indexes in the triple digits. The ongoing massacre of the Palestinian people. Unhinged Supreme Court rulings. The Biden boondoggle. The attempted assassination of Trump instantly transformed into a photo op. The death of Dr. Ruth. And Richard Simmons. And Shannen Doherty. And Shelley Duvall.

Compared to all of this, what could cinema possibly offer? And why would anyone in the hellscape of 2024 want to get traumatized at the movies? For devout horror heads like myself, the genre’s vitality—even its urgency—derives from the specific mode of catharsis it offers, sublimating the nightmares of the world into affectively supercharged escapism. For some, the antidote to reality is administered by familiar, friendly pleasures: this season’s biggest hits include Inside Out 2, Kung Fu Panda 4, and Despicable Me 4. For others, only the harshest of homeopathies will do. I’d rather die than watch The Garfield Movie, but bring on the apocalypse, text my address to all the psychopaths, hail Satan, fuck me up please—I am begging you.

But no: even when it comes to a good bad time, we cannot have nice things. It’s been a feeble year for horror, and a batch of high-profile summer releases offer scant remedy. Two recent titles—A Quiet Place: Day One and MaXXXine—expand their respective franchises with a contraction of effect, betraying the logics of their superior predecessors. Arriving on a wave of hype, Longlegs is neither a sequel nor a prequel, yet this nominally original film by writer-director Osgood Perkins is, by his own admission to Variety, a “pop-art piece” that deliberately cribs from the serial-killer canon. The horror genre relies on its own tropes, of course, and there is much to recommend in the occult antics of Longlegs. But let’s save the best for last and start at the beginning.

A Quiet Place: Day One promises to flesh out the backstory of the alien apocalypse chronicled in A Quiet Place (2018) and A Quiet Place Part II (2020). Lupita Nyong’o stars as Samira, a terminally ill cancer patient in hospice care whose group outing to Manhattan goes sideways when intergalactic freaks start raining from the sky. Accompanied by her preternaturally intuitive cat, Frodo, and begrudgingly linking up with a kindhearted British law student (Joseph Quinn as Eric), Samira quickly learns the rules of the Quiet Place game: the aliens depend entirely on their supersensitive hearing to navigate the world.

The first two films organized their narratives around the plight of a nuclear family that, in an act of outrageous heterosexuality I will never understand, decides to add a baby to the brood while hiding from the invaders. Their efforts to keep this ill-conceived munchkin silent supply the central problem of the first film, but the structural MVP of both movies is the deaf teenage daughter, Regan (Millicent Simmonds), who discovers that the frequency given off by amplifying her homemade hearing aid incapacitates the aliens. In the bravura opening sequence of the sequel, we experience the chaos of day one in part through deft shifts of auditory point of view, switching from the cacophonous, “objective” soundscape to Regan’s muffled sensorium. The several minutes devoted to this harrowing first contact trump the entirety of A Quiet Place: Day One on the level of craft, narrative economy, and clarity of purpose.

Michael Sarnoski, taking over the writing and directing duties from franchise majordomo John Krasinski, makes two key mistakes, one pervasively irritating, and the other cumulatively obnoxious. The Quiet Place project depends on hyper-attuning the spectator to sound, which requires a clear, well-delineated mapping of people, objects, and environments. When the visual field is tidy, the soundscape can be booby-trapped for maximum suspense and payoff. Krasinski was good at this. Sarnoski mucks it up by shooting everything in a dingy, blue-gray palette rendered murkier by dust, smoke, rain, shadows, and gloomy underground sets. Everything is underlit, hazy, and indistinct. Rather than sharpen, eye and ear progressively disengage from the muddle.

Displacing the nuclear family for a dying cat lady initially sets up a promising fatalism. As the people around her act dumb, make noise, and get squished, Samira commits her dwindling energies to the modest quest of getting to Harlem for a slice of her favorite pizza. And yet Sarnoski, having betrayed the formal principles of the franchise, goes on to plot Samira’s character arc in even more sentimental terms than the reproductive nonsense of the earlier films. Worse yet, he trades desperate heteronormativity for dubious racial politics, abandoning Samira to the cringiest of denouements—I mean, hey, she’s dying anyway, right?—so that Eric can live another day. Or at least (quietly) finish law school. IYKYK: Nina Simone would have hated this movie.

MaXXXine likewise undermines the core strength of X and Pearl (both 2022), which were, for all the gimmicky pastiche employed by writer-director Ti West, credible underdog fantasies that knew they had a star on their hands with Mia Goth. As the final girl in the neo-’70s grindhouse milieu of X, Goth did double duty as budding porn star Maxine Minx and the decrepit psychopath Pearl, who slices and dices her way through the blue-movie crew renting out part of her property. In the backstory prequel Pearl, stylized as a ’50s melodrama, Goth was mesmerizing as she devolved from a rural girl with dreams of stardom into a woman destined for serious need of eldercare.

In X, Maxine recites a mantra shared by Pearl: “I will not accept a life I do not deserve.” MaXXXine, the third and perhaps concluding entry in the series, is devoted to narrativizing this sentiment as the starlet, having made it as a porn star, finally gets her mainstream break in the low-budget exorcism flick The Puritan II… while being menaced by a serial killer. Set in mid-’80s Los Angeles, MaXXXine conjures the sleazy vibes of low-rent La La Land, reveling in its red-light districts, dingy VHS shops, mountains of cocaine, and skeezy operators (including Giancarlo Esposito as Maxine’s agent and Kevin Bacon as a corrupt private investigator). This is rich terrain on which to stage Maxine’s ascendency, yet West seems most enthralled by his own rise from indie darling to multiplex auteur. MaXXXine is, perversely, less invested in its leading lady than in enacting the very problematic she’s fighting to overcome by marginalizing her at the expense of an industry player flexing the perks of his A24 clout. From the oversize needle drops (Animotion’s “Obsession”) to the flashy use of iconic locations (the Psycho house at Universal Studios, the Hollywood sign, Mann’s Chinese Theatre), the movie’s most persuasive thematic is West’s access to newfound resources.

Longlegs is, in its own manner, another auteurist indulgence reliant on pastiche—but at least there’s some menace in that manner. FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) investigates a series of enigmatic murder-suicides fomented by a killer who calls himself Longlegs (Nicolas Cage). How, over the course of several decades, he has managed to instigate these crimes through some form of spooky action at a distance is puzzled out through a grab bag of clues: Zodiac-style letters written in glyphs, geometric patterns lurking in the dates of the killings, the discovery of creepy dolls with weird metal orbs in their heads, and Harker’s growing intimation that she is implicated in all this mumbo jumbo.

For all its twists and turns, Longlegs is more adept at conjuring an aura of complexity than actually being complex. A climactic exposition dump is as corny as the third-act fiasco of MaXXXine (a ludicrous reveal of the serial killer’s identity), and the pervasive stylistic quirks—timeline shifts, tranced-out longueurs spiked with smash cuts, narrative cul-de-sacs—are less compelled by any storytelling imperative than by Perkins’s emphatic formalism. But moody as it is, Longlegs is having an awful lot of fun with its material. How seriously, really, can we take a movie that enlists glam-rock legends T. Rex as handmaidens to Satan?

If most of our time is spent tagging along with the affectless (and potentially psychic!) Harker, the movie screams to life every time Cage pops up to devour the fastidious scenery. Styled like the love child of Buffalo Bill and Pennywise, Longlegs is a splendid creepazoid. The movie can feel at once overdesigned and underwritten, but his role in the proceedings is legitimately gripping and key to the film’s best effect. Longlegs has been widely compared to The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Se7en (1995), and Cure (1997), but it shares an overlooked kinship with Rob Zombie’s The Lords of Salem (2012) in that both films, whatever gobbledygook they toss on screen, are slow-burn chronicles of unstoppable Satanic forces. Longlegs is mega-gnarly, but in the end he’s merely one avatar of a pervasive, implacable evil seeping into every corner of the world. Now that is a vibe for summer 2024.

Nathan Lee is an assistant professor of film at Hollins University and a longtime contributor to Film Comment.