Longlegs Is Not the Best Nicolas Cage Horror Movie of 2024
The one that's inspired by A Goofy Movie is better
I woke up at 2:45am-ish today and couldn’t get back to sleep. Stuff like that happens a lot to us tortured genius types. That’s what I am, right?
Doesn’t matter. What matters is that, in situations like this, my go to move to remedy the problem is to wake up, watch a movie, and hope that by the end of it I’m sufficiently tired enough to sleep again. Groundbreaking technique, I know.
This morning, to combat the can’t sleeps, I took a gamble that so many of us take all the time these days. I decided to watch a Nicolas Cage movie.
The thing about Nic is that he will seemingly say yes to any script you put in front of him. Which probably has a lot to do with how he blew a significant portion of his fortune on things like a $276,000 dinosaur skull that turned out to be stolen and had to be returned to the Mongolian government.
Cage has always been a fairly prolific actor, but after news of his terrible investments surfaced in 2018, his output skyrocketed. Over the course of that year and the next, he appeared in FOURTEEN films. That’s a movie every two months for two calendar years, with a couple more movies to spare. He slowed down a little during covid, as the law demanded, but since 2023, he’s back to his “all my money is tied up in shrunken baby heads” pace of 2018-19. Since last year, he’s released another nine movies, with three more still on the way this year.
As you’d expect, these films run the gamut in terms of quality, but more than a few of them have been legitimately great. If you’ve never seen 2021’s PIG, for example, give it a watch and get ready to be emotionally destroyed by a movie about the seedy underbelly of fine dining in Portland.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock or off the internet, both of which sound like wonderful neighborhoods to me, then you’ve probably heard the buzz around the latest Nicolas Cage joint, Longlegs. It’s getting a whole lot of “scariest movie of the year” talk.
Having seen Longlegs, I can confirm … it’s fine. I liked it and I think I will like it even more when I eventually rewatch it, but it would be hard for literally any movie to live up to the kind of hype that movie got over the last few months.
Maybe the lack of advance hype has something to do with why, for my money, the best horror movie of 2024 so far is a different Nicolas Cage film.
It’s called Arcadian, and I went into it knowing nothing more than that the trailer was good and the 90-minute runtime fit my “get back to sleep eventually” agenda. So imagine my surprise when what I got was maybe my favorite movie of the year in general, horror or otherwise.
I love when a movie can take a subgenre that’s been beaten to death and make something unique out of it. Like 2016’s Train To Busan, for example.
It’s one of the truly great zombie movies of all-time, and it came out at a point in history when zombie movies as a concept deserved a proverbial bullet to the proverbial head.
In the case of Arcadian, it’s one of those post apocalyptic flicks where, uh oh, when it gets dark out you better get inside, because something’s out there! I was admittedly a little concerned about that being the premise on account of how Ishana Night Shyamalan’s The Watchers is the same thing and that movie is a goddamn fiasco.
I will do my level best to explain why I love Arcadian as much as I do without spoiling too much of it.
For starters, one of the things a lot of apocalypse movies struggle with is explaining exactly how society got to the point it’s at in their universe. Sometimes, like in 2013’s Snowpiercer, all it takes is a couple of sentences worth of text up top. “We tried spraying something in the sky to stop global warming and it backfired so now we all live on a train to stay out of the cold.” Got it!
And then sometimes it takes a whole entire separate movie (we call it a “prequel” in the biz) to explain what happened, like the most recent installment of the A Quiet Place franchise.
As for Arcadian, the filmmakers explain the apocalypse in the simplest way possible … no one knows exactly what happened. The events of the film take place a decade or so after the apocalyptic event, and it was obviously something that impacted city folk way more than the rural inhabitants the story revolves around. There’s one scene where two teens play a game where they each try to explain what happened in ten seconds, and it’s clear that they’re both just making things up. That’s as far as the movie goes when it comes to explaining why these people are in the pickle that they’re in, and I found that kinda refreshing.
What’s clear is that it’s not the monsters that come out after dark. Director Ben Brewer confirmed in a recent interview with IGN exactly what’s implied onscreen, which is that these monsters came about as a result of what happened. They weren’t the cause of it.
Another unique feature of the monsters in Arcadian is that they are highly defeatable. They are not the Xenomorph. They are not the Cloverfield monster. If you get the drop on one of them you can fuck it up real good through completely conventional means like a shovel to the head or a stab to the abs.
Regarding the vulnerability of the Arcadian monsters, Brewer told IGN:
“I haven't really seen a movie that shows a monster that is about as dangerous as like a coyote or something.”
A kid captures one in the movie and, when it escapes, instead of immediately devouring everyone in the room, it reacts like a shelter dog that’s just been let loose in its new home for the first time. How many other apocalypse movie monsters have you seen scurry under a bed and then cower in the corner because two teens had it locked in a cage?
That dynamic doesn’t hold for long, obviously, but the fact that it exists at all makes this the rare apocalypse film where it seems like humanity might actually pull through and rebuild. I don’t hate that!
A lot of what I love about this movie has to do with those monsters, and I suspect that’s gonna be a make-or-break point for a lot of viewers. I consulted a horror movie watching friend about their thoughts on Arcadian and they told me the monsters looked “goofy.”
I concede that this is true, but that’s just another highly interesting thing about the creatures that inhabit the film’s universe. They look “goofy” because they are based on the Disney character of the same name.
If it sounds like there’s no way that could possibly look cool or scary in any way, please consider that, before directing Arcadian, Ben Brewer was best known for his work as the lead video effects artist on the visually stunning Academy Award winning film Everything Everywhere All At Once.
So, yeah, the monsters are based on a scene from 1995’s A Goofy Movie that Brewer found weirdly terrifying as a child, but also the original sketches for said monsters looked like this:
And that was before Nicolas Cage reportedly intervened and demanded that they be even scarier.
I’m not going to include images of the monsters as they appear in the film, nor am I going to explain why stuff like how they move in open spaces or the sound they make before they attack cements these weirdos’ spot in my personal movie monsters hall of fame. Just watch the movie. Maybe you’ll think they’re goofy too. I dunno.
Oh and one last thing. I haven’t mentioned Nicolas Cage and his antics in this film, and that’s because there are no antics. This is Nicolas Cage as you rarely ever see him … completely normal. His character is a dad who cares and that’s the extent of his personality.
After his performance in Longlegs, watching Nicolas Cage have to reign it in for a change is a breath of fresh air.