So you’ve come out the other side of Longlegs, ears still ringing with that Osgood Perkins dread, and now everything feels a little too well-lit. That specific cocktail is hard to chase: the procedural framework, the occult rot underneath it, the sense that the movie knows something you don’t and is in no hurry to tell you. Below are films that live in that same headspace. Not jump-scare machines. Slow poisons. I’ve thrown in one at the end almost nobody’s talking about yet, because that’s the whole point of a list like this.
Sinister (2012)
The closest sibling to Longlegs on this list, honestly. A true-crime writer moves his family into a murder house and starts screening old Super 8 footage he probably shouldn’t. Scott Derrickson understands that the scariest thing isn’t the demon, it’s the ritual pattern behind the killings, the sense of a design you only see once it’s too late. That found-footage lawnmower sequence has never left me. It’s grubbier and more mainstream than Longlegs, but the DNA is right there: an investigator pulling a thread that was always meant to strangle him.
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
The template everything else on this list is quietly copying. Demme’s film is a masterclass in the FBI-agent-versus-monster form, and Longlegs owes it an enormous debt, right down to a young female investigator sitting across from a man who sees straight through her. Watch it again for how much dread Demme wrings out of pure conversation, those unbroken close-ups where Hopkins looks directly down the lens. No occult here, just human evil, but the oppressive one-on-one tension is the exact frequency.
Se7en (1995)
Fincher’s rain-soaked descent is the grimmest procedural ever made, and it earns its bleakness. Two detectives chase a killer whose murders are sermons, and the film builds a whole rotting cosmology out of a nameless city that never sees the sun. What connects it to Longlegs is the feeling of investigators arriving at a crime scene that was staged for them, a performance with an audience of exactly two. That ending still feels like a door closing on your fingers.
Zodiac (2007)
Fincher again, but the inverse of Se7en, obsessive where the other is operatic. This is the horror of never getting your answer, of a case that eats years and marriages and never delivers a body in a box. If Longlegs left you fixated on the coded messages and the sheer wrongness of the killer’s method, Zodiac is two and a half hours of that exact dread, meticulously reconstructed. It’s not supernatural, but the way it makes ordinary basements and phone calls terrifying is its own dark magic.
Hereditary (2018)
For the occult-family-doom half of the Longlegs equation. Ari Aster’s debut starts as a grief drama and slowly reveals the machinery of a cult that has been arranging the family’s tragedies from before the film began. That reveal, that everything you watched was a setup, is the same rug-pull Longlegs pulls. Toni Collette gives one of the great unhinged performances of the last decade. Watch it late, alone, and don’t look at the corners of the ceiling.
The Empty Man (2020)
The forgotten one, dumped into theaters and left to die, then quietly resurrected by people who couldn’t stop thinking about it. David Prior’s film opens with a twenty-minute mountain prologue that feels like its own short film, then becomes a folk-horror-conspiracy nightmare about a man investigating a missing girl and a chanting cult. It’s shaggy and too long and completely under your skin. If you liked how Longlegs refused to hold your hand, this is your next stop.
And one hidden gem: Blood Star (2024)
Here’s the one I keep pressing on people. Blood Star is a 2024 indie psychological survival thriller from first-time feature director Lawrence Jacomelli, and it swaps the occult for something more terrestrial but no less oppressive: a woman alone on a desert highway, and the wrong person taking an interest in her. It trades Longlegs‘ satanic iconography for dusty neo-noir isolation, but the pressure system is identical, that slow tightening where you know the trap is closing and can only watch. It carries some real No Country and Duel in its bones, patient and mean, more interested in the sun-blasted dread of an empty road than in anything that goes bump.
What sells it is discipline. Shot across ten days in the Mojave by a husband-and-wife team for a fraction of what it looks like, it has the kind of controlled tension and clean visual language you’d expect from a much bigger production. It’s not an A24 film and it isn’t pretending to be one, it just quietly does the atmosphere-first, character-driven thing that crowd tends to love. If you’re the sort of viewer who came to Longlegs for the slow-burn craft rather than the scares, this belongs on your radar.
It’s streaming on Apple TV and Amazon. Worth going in blind. If you want the trailer and where-to-watch links first, they’re over at bloodstarmovie.com and its watch page. File it under the movies you get to recommend before everyone else catches up.