Over-Explaining the Occult in Horror Films

Is the devil in the detail or can too much backstory ruin a supernatural villain?

[Spoilers: Longlegs (2024), Hereditary (2018), Sinister (2012)]

Definitions of ‘occult’ in early modern dictionaries:

‘Occulto, Occultato, in hugger mugger, hid, privie, that is not knowne, very secret, concealed, close,’ in John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes, Or most Copious, and Exact Dictionarie in Italian and English (London, 1598).

‘Ocúlto, m. secret, privie, hidden,’ in Richard Perceval, A Dictionarie in Spanish and English, First Published into the English Tongue (London, 1599).

‘Occulte: com. Hidden, close, privie, covert, concealed, secret, obscure,’ in Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London, 1611).

Last July I, like many horror fans, rushed to the cinema to see Osgood Perkins’ much-anticipated new film Longlegs. The marketing campaign remains one of the best I’ve seen: every image that was released was pitch-perfect in its creepiness, its uncanny sense of something somehow wrong. It wasn’t clear how these images connected to each other, nor what the plot of the film was actually going to be, but compared to tedious jump scare vehicles and endless sequels of lessening merit this enigmatic original feature looked like quite the treat.

For me, the first third of the movie absolutely lived up to that promise. The opening scene in particular remains one of my favourite horror sequences of recent years, where the title character appears to a little girl as she plays in the snow and starts saying strange things to her - he is unnervingly pleased that it’s almost her birthday. The camera very deliberately refuses to show us the top half of his face. He is wearing his long legs today, he tells her, and just as he’s about to jump down to her level, just as we’re about to see him eye to eye, the camera cuts.

Incidentally, there’s been some debate about the meaning of his name, but I think this scene gives us the key: ‘long legs’ is surely a description of how an adult looks to a child when they are looming over them with sinister intent.

For the first half of the film, we keep glimpsing him this way, never fully in focus, never there all in one piece —

And then in the second half we see almost nothing but his face and the film explains exactly what’s been going in in increasingly ludicrous detail. Guess what? The Devil’s been behind it all along! Dust off your grimoires and your Dan Brown Book of Symbolology – it’s time to dabble in the occult!

Coming from someone who did a PhD exploring early modern beliefs about magic and has handled real grimoires – I am absolutely fed up of seeing them on screen.

Longlegs joins a long list of horror films which have used this kind of imagery without doing anything particularly insightful with it, substituting the clichés of black magic for a satisfyingly original explanation.

Be honest, which image actually upsets you more: the one above which shows a bunch of strange symbols in a book, or the one below where someone is seeing something through a window, something that we can’t see, something that is making them pull this face and clutch for her gun?

To put it another way, guess which one featured prominently in that wonderful ad campaign?

Ironically, that second picture is capturing what has always been the true terror of the occult, a word which doesn’t really mean ‘black magic,’ but rather ‘things which are hidden from view.’ It’s what we don’t see that makes us anxious, and as much as I enjoyed Longlegs and made my peace with the silliness of the final act, it ended up being a lot less scary than the unseen things I went into the movie already half-imagining.

Could Hereditary (2018) be said to have a similar problem? It was another film that audiences often found astonishingly compelling in the first half, only to be let down by the realisation that everything was going to be explained away through convoluted demonology.

Here we even learn the specific demon responsible for the tensions of this dysfunctional family: King Paiman, (from the real grimoire The Lesser Key of Solomon) who wears a crown and rides a camel. Does that explanation make it scarier?

Perhaps the clunkiest example comes from Sinister (2012) which arguably has some of the best creepy-video footage since Ringu where horrible scenes of families being murdered are labelled as if they are home movies: Pool party ’66, BBQ ’79, and Lawn Work ’86 (shudder, Lawn Work ’86…)

But did we really need to know that the unseen force behind these murders was an ancient demon called Bughuul who, of course, seems to have worked with a graphics designer to create a funky little logo and is ultimately revealed to look a member of Slipknot?

I’m being a bit grumpy. I can enjoy a bonkers bit of demonology as much as the next person, particularly when it’s done in fun for campy excess and self-aware silliness like the Evil Dead movies. I suppose it always saddens me slightly when a film that is genuinely terrifying in parts spoils its atmosphere by throwing in a creepy looking book or random ancient deity to explain its monster away.

Perhaps the reason that the Satanic solution of Longlegs felt particularly lazy to so many viewers was that the film already had proved, in that ad campaign and the powerful first act, that it understood exactly what the true power of the ‘occult’ in a horror film can be: those things which are partially hidden from view, and which each person’s imagination can fill in with their own worst terrors.

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