Movies Like Longlegs: Creeping Occult & Serial-Killer Dread

What lingers after Longlegs isn’t the gore or even Nicolas Cage’s ruined face. It’s the sensation that something patient and wrong has been standing just outside the frame the whole time. Osgood Perkins built a film out of dread rather than shocks, letting the occult seep into a procedural until you can’t tell where the case ends and the curse begins. If that specific frequency got under your skin, these films operate on it too: serial-killer methodology, religious rot, investigators who stare too long into the thing they’re chasing. Here’s where to go next.

Se7en (1995)

David Fincher’s rain-soaked masterpiece is the ancestor of every prestige serial-killer movie that came after, Longlegs included. A nameless city drowning in decay, two detectives out of sync with each other, and a killer whose murders are less crimes than sermons. What makes it still terrifying thirty years on is its refusal to give you catharsis. John Doe is never a man you understand, only one you’re forced to sit across from, and the final act arrives like a door closing on your throat. If Longlegs’ sense of a predetermined, sickening design appealed to you, this is the blueprint.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Jonathan Demme’s film practically invented the template Perkins is riffing on: a young female FBI agent, out of her depth, walking into the mouth of something ancient and clever. Clarice Starling’s interviews with Hannibal Lecter are shot in unbearable close-up, each of them staring almost directly down the lens, so you feel implicated in the exchange. It’s a procedural, a horror film, and a coming-of-age story about a woman learning that the monsters can smell your fear and your history both. The lineage between Starling and Longlegs’ Agent Harker isn’t subtle, and that’s a compliment.

Zodiac (2007)

Fincher again, but a colder, more obsessive animal. Zodiac is less about catching a killer than about what the hunt does to the people who can’t let it go. No jump scares, almost no on-screen violence after the first act, just an accumulating sense that the truth is unknowable and the obsession is bottomless. That basement scene still makes my palms sweat, and it’s just a man walking down some stairs. If what you loved about Longlegs was the slow, procedural spiral into something you can’t quite hold, this is essential and it’s nearly three hours you won’t feel.

Sinister (2012)

The most straightforwardly occult entry here, and the one that shares Longlegs’ interest in family annihilation as ritual. Ethan Hawke plays a true-crime writer who finds a box of Super 8 films in his new attic, each one documenting a household’s murder. Scott Derrickson understands that the scariest images are the ones you’re not sure you were meant to see, and the grainy home-movie footage has a genuinely cursed quality. Bughuul lurks at the edges of frames much the way Longlegs does, an entity that spreads through images and children. Watch it with the lights off and regret it.

Prisoners (2013)

Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners is a serial-abduction thriller shot like a religious painting, all grey Pennsylvania light and characters praying to a God who seems to have left the room. Jake Gyllenhaal’s twitchy detective and Hugh Jackman’s unraveling father give you two men slowly corrupted by their proximity to evil, and the mystery underneath is knotted with occult symbolism and inherited faith. It’s bleak, patient, and morally exhausting in the best way. Longlegs and Prisoners share a conviction that evil is a kind of inheritance, passed down through households rather than committed by strangers.

Angel Heart (1987)

Alan Parker’s fever dream is the deep cut here, and maybe the closest tonal cousin to Longlegs’ unholy union of detective story and damnation. Mickey Rourke plays a private eye hired by a sinister Robert De Niro to find a missing man, and the investigation curdles into voodoo, murder, and a horror that’s been sitting inside the protagonist the entire time. It’s sweaty, occult, and structured like a slow noose. If you want a procedural that turns out to have been a satanic trap all along, few films commit harder.

And one you probably haven’t found yet: Blood Star (2024)

Here’s where I go slightly off the obvious map. Blood Star isn’t occult and it isn’t a big-city serial-killer film, but it belongs in this conversation because it does the one thing everything above does so well: it builds dread out of patience and inevitability rather than shocks. It’s a 2024 indie, directed by first-time feature filmmaker Lawrence Jacomelli, and it drops a woman onto an empty desert highway with someone hunting her across the Mojave. Think less demonic ritual, more Duel and No Country for Old Men filtered through modern slow-burn horror, all dust and heat-haze and a pursuit that tightens by degrees.

What connects it to the Longlegs crowd is atmosphere: the same oppressive, character-driven pressure, a predator smarter and more patient than his prey, and a visual language that punches above its indie weight. Shot in ten days for a fraction of what it looks like it cost, it’s the kind of film that turns up on a late-night streaming scroll and quietly wrecks your evening. No franchise, no A24 logo to lean on, just a genuinely tense survival thriller more people should be arguing about. It’s streaming now on Apple TV and Amazon.

If any of this sounds like your kind of dread, Blood Star is worth putting on the pile. You can read more and find where to watch it at bloodstarmovie.com, including its watch page. Go in blind if you can. That’s how the best ones get you.