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One upside to the so-called “elevation” of horror movies over the past decade or so has been the revelation that performers can make full and well-rounded careers out of scream queen (or king) gigs. That’s not a knock on the actresses like Barbara Crampton or Adrienne Barbeau, who worked so consistently and effectively in ’80s horror; nor an under-appreciation of someone like Jamie Lee Curtis, who struggled to make it out of the genre space at first, only to star in multiple classic comedies, some major-auteur action pictures, and eventually won an Oscar, while still finding time to reprise her most famous horror role multiple times. But in 2024, if actresses gravitate toward and excel in horror, they can often stay in horror without sacrificing some all-timer roles or serious-acting cred. Look at Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Kathryn Newton, and Rebecca Hall; they’re all done multiple horror movies, and many of them arguably have stronger overall filmographies than bona fide superstars like Sandra Bullock or Jennifer Lopez. The queen among these queens, as it were, may be Maika Monroe.
Monroe is not a household name; Goth is probably more famous, by name or by face, in part because she’s done plenty of non-genre fare like Emma, and Ortega likely has them both beat thanks to the youth vote (plus, it’s not as if Wednesday or Scream are exactly arthouse obscurities). But Monroe might have the best modern horror-thriller filmography in the game: David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows and its upcoming sequel; Adam Wingard’s The Guest; Chloe Okuno’s Watcher; a pair of intimate genre-benders from Dan Berk and Robert Olsen called Villains and Significant Other; and now Longlegs, a serial-killer horror picture from Osgood Perkins that seems poised to become a surprise summer hit for Neon.
In this impressively unsettling film, Monroe plays Lee Harker, perhaps not coincidentally sharing a surname with a famous victim of Dracula. No blushing bride, Harker is an FBI agent on the trail of a serial killer—a type of role that non-scream queens Bullock and Lopez, incidentally, have both more or less done, back when serial-killer movies were the classier way of dabbling in horror. (Thank Jodie Foster for her superlative work in Silence of the Lambs, the only horror movie to win Best Picture, upon which it seemed to no longer count as horror anymore.) In story and structure, Longlegs isn’t all that different from Silence or the other horror-agnostic movie-star thrillers that followed it in the '90s, but Perkins directs it with an eye toward existential, rather than situational, unease. Dread isn’t just for exploring dark corners of a killer’s lair; it pervades even (or especially) the neatest of the movie’s frames.
Monroe arrives well-suited to this environment; she plays fear and unease particularly well, in large part by underplaying them. Harker’s investigation of the killer known as Longlegs (played, in a few scenes, with uncanny creepiness by a semi-recognizable Nicolas Cage) uncovers plenty to shock and terrify her, and Monroe never appears numb to the horror. At the same time, she seems prepared, somehow, beyond her FBI training. It’s an ineffably pre-haunted quality that Perkins turns into a spooky literal superpower; early on, it’s clear that Harker has some kind of subtle extrasensory perception. That’s not the case with her character in Watcher, but that movie, where Monroe plays an unwilling housewife in a foreign country who comes to suspect she’s being stalked, depends on a similar ability to lock into looming, atmospheric threats that others can’t necessarily see.
With blonde hair and a girlish voice befitting her California upbringing, Monroe made a convincing near-teenager in It Follows and The Guest, both of which position her on the cusp of an adulthood that she may not be prepared to face. One reason that it’s easy to sympathize with performers hoping to escape their genre past is that horror so often depends on the dewiness of youth before turning on it with a monstrous vengeance: pigeonholing an actress in a particular role, then mercilessly casting them out when their age no longer fits the profile. (That’s what may well await Maxine Minx, if the X trilogy is ever appended with a fourth installment.)
On top of that questionable tradition, millennials and their Gen-Z successors have grappled with the ever-blurring lines of what even constitutes adult life in the first place. It Follows takes great advantage of that ambiguity, where everything is beginning (young adulthood, sex) and ending (stalking, death) all at once. It seems to take place in a time of perpetual season change, as the languid promise of summer gives way to chill of fall. The chipper quippiness of a late-‘90s scream queen (or even a more overtly emo Neve Campbell) would not have worked in that world. Monroe was a more natural fit there than in Independence Day: Resurgence, a different kind of ‘90s throwback that she likely booked in the aftermath of her initial horror buzz. She’s scrappy enough there, but the movie has no real use for her brand of resilient wariness.
Monroe’s more recent horror movies have toyed with the ill-fitting roles of contemporary semi-adulthood, capitalizing on that unease as the tag-along, unemployed wife in Watcher, and now sending her into the professional world as a young but capable agent in Longlegs. Harker remains tethered to her childhood, via some elusive flashbacks and visits with her not-quite-together mother, though Monroe also seems more grown-up than ever before. She also looks a little more gaunt, as if the world has begun to eat away at her. The whole movie feels like Harker’s dawning realization that her previous assessments of evil in that world were further off than she ever suspected.
Longlegs also displaces her in time more specifically than the intentionally watery setting of It Follows; this one is actually set in the ‘90s, underlining its connection to peak serial-killer entertainment. The gendered nature of working as a woman in a violent and male-dominated field at this particular time comes through more in the movie’s framing, where Harker often remains isolated, or slightly askew. Is this the adult world she’s entered into, or have her skills and resourcefulness maybe led her to hell instead? Regardless, there’s no sense of horror purgatory for Monroe. Her performances link together gracefully and only create greater appetite for more, to see how she might navigate this genre in her 40s, her 50s, and beyond. (They Follow, a decade-later follow-up to It Follows, will be her first legacy sequel, which has become a rite of later-career passage in horror.) Monroe doubtless can and will work in other genres, but she’s also become a newer form of generational scream queen, one whose nightmares keep changing shape.