Longlegs just broke a huge horror movie record

Longlegs is a hit in cinemas, and has even broken a couple of records.

The film made $22.6 million in its opening weekend, according to Box Office Mojo, comfortably outperforming fellow new release Fly Me to the Moon, with $10 million.

Sure, it wouldn’t be a big number for a superhero flick. But it’s enough to make Longlegs a record-breaker in a few respects.

It’s the largest US opening distributor Neon has seen, despite working on some cracking films, including Parasite, Anatomy of a Fall and Palm Springs, among others.

Longlegs’s opening is also the highest-grossing for an independent horror movie in a decade, according to Neon. The film is about an FBI agent on the trail of a serial killer.

How come it’s such a hit? There’s the Nic Cage factor. He stars, but has been in plenty of decent horror and genre films that haven’t made such a splash. And Longlegs apparently had a super-successful viral marketing strategy, although it’s not one the algorithm deemed to throw our way.

“Not since The Blair Witch Project launched 25 years ago on the same weekend in July has there been an independent genre film that out-projected, out-performed, and over-indexed so wildly that it seemed to the industry it came out of nowhere,” Neon said in a statement.

Longlegs has also received some great reviews, reaching 86% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes.

The New York Post called it "one of the best horror movies of the past several years.”

The Telegraph gave it a full 5-star review, calling it a “skin-crawling chiller.”

Time Out also published a 5-star review: “the most chilling supernatural horror since Hereditary”

The film’s 78% Metacritic rating is also remarkably high, especially for a horror film .

Sure, there are a few stinkers. The Guardian gave Longlegs two stars, saying it’s “a grab bag of ideas and tricks that can’t be coerced into anything resembling a whole.” But as a whole, Longlegs is proving a minor sensation.

Longlegs was written and directed by Osgood Perkins, who directed 2020’s Hansel & Gretel. He also featured in Legally Blonde as “dorky” David Kidney. It seems the career change was the right move.

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