Longlegs, The X-Files, and Wormwood, oh my! Or, when governments and moms go bad, duck.

Longlegs was not a movie that I particularly enjoyed.

Having said that, I believe it is an important film, in that it augurs the resurgence of a genre of horror that has lain quiet for a couple decades, but will probably burgeon at least for the next 4 years.

That genre is the governmental horror genre.

We are all probably familiar with this genre if we are millennials or gen x-ers, because we grew up in the era of The X-Files. That television series, starring the inscrutable David Duchovny and the inimitable Gillian Anderson, was probably the most important and popular horror/sci-fi series of the 20th century. It established norms about how we are meant to feel about our government: highly unsafe and highly skeptical. And that was in the 90s. Now, in the era of deep-fakes, fake news, and apparent collusion and conspiracy in the government on both sides of the aisle, it should be no surprise that this genre is coming back right now.

At the same time that it locked in governmental conspiracism as a form of horror, The X-Files also pulled off a pretty neat philosophical trick: it established the possibility of a collaboration between the supernatural and the hyper rational, or between emotion and logic. To be more specific, it neatly segregated the two halves of that dialectic into its two main characters, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. Throughout the entire series, Mulder (Duchovny) represented the possibility of the supernatural and the importance of listening to intuition and emotion. He was a “vibes and gut” thinker. By contrast, Scully (Anderson) represented a hostility to the supernatural, an unflinching commitment to the rational, and a reliance on cognitive abilities above all else. She was a “books and data” thinker.

Part of what I continue to like about that somewhat heavy-handed choice is that it goes against 2000+ years of misogynist philosophy that locates emotionality unpredictability, superstitious belief, and cognitive shortfall in women, while associating men with rational excellence, the capacity for clear intellectual thought, and the ability to resist the overpowering force of the passions. By flipping that gender script, the show helped to accomplished something extraordinarily important for American popular culture, which was to establish the possibility that a woman might be the repository of reason, thought, and intellectualism in any given situation. (There’s really interesting sociological data out there to show that, in the years following the start of the series, the number of young women who went into science and medicine skyrocketed. See https://geenadavisinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/x-files-scully-effect-report-geena-davis-institute.pdf for more info.)

Of course, the irony, which somewhat undermined the show's feminism, was that Mulder was almost always just a little bit more correct about what was going on than was Scully—that is to say, the woman might be smarter and more rational, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s right.

Now, Longlegs is nowhere near as inventive in the 2020s as The X-Files were in the 1990s, but it does owe an immense debt of gratitude to the earlier TV series. Of course, as anyone who has seen the film will remember, it stars a main character who, like Mulder and Scully, is a member of the FBI, and is pursuing a serial killer. This was a very familiar plot line of the original series. In the film, however, rather than segregating the capacities of rational thought and intuitive emotional assessment to two different characters of two different genders, they are instead rolled up into the main character. This main character is a woman, androgenously named Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), who has the perhaps unenviable distinction both of being hyperrational, like Scully, and of being subject to certain kinds of psychic visions—intuitions, the kind of stuff that happened to Mulder all the time. On top of that, the film is set in the 1990s, and there's a pretty high degree of aesthetic follow-through on that choice throughout the film, with the result that the movie feels and looks very much like the original X-Files series. As you probably know if you have been following this substack for a while, I have a tremendous degree of reflexive respect for a well-made remake, so once I realized—very early on in the movie—that this thing was lining up to reboot The X-Files, I got pretty excited.

But the film ran into a lot of trouble. First and foremost, it made the incredibly poor decision to have Harker ultimately be aligned with the victims of the film—she shares the same mystical birthday pattern with all of the other children whose families fall prey to the serial killer, and we know that from too early in the film. So, in one fell and ill-considered swoop, the film makers have blown any pretense of objective distance that she might have had on the phenomena she's observing, because it all just feels a little bit too close to home for her, and the film has disclosed one of its central mysterious conceits way too soon. Put succinctly, the movie is enormously predictable.

To be fair, the original X-Files series sometimes collapsed the distance between the Mulder character and objective study as well, because there was a series-long plot arc about how Mulder’s sister was abducted by aliens, and his belief that this was true motivatd a lot of his more intuitive, out-of-the-box, non-rational assessment and methodology. But, crucially, Mulder knows that he’s motivated by the supernatural disappearance of his sister. He’s, like, obsessed with it. For Harker, by contrast, there's not enough subjective awareness within her that her own personal life motivates a lot of her intuitive leaps, so the plot doesn't hang together especially well.

The thing that really killed me about this movie, though, was that it ultimately fell back on one of the most predictable tropes of the last 20 years in horror films: it's all the mother's fault in the end. Don't get me wrong, there really is a scary serial killer named Longlegs, played surprisingly terrifyingly by Nicholas Cage, but he has apparently been using Harker’s own mother as a hench-person for years. So Harker has to come to terms with the fact that her mother has been aiding and abetting a serial killer for most of her life.

As a person who walks around on any given day and spontaneously remembers how seriously Freud damaged western culture’s understanding of women, women's sexuality, maternity, and the status of mothers, I flinch a little bit at horror films that sit around blaming violent psychodrama on mothers who keep too many secrets. Some films of this Bad Mommy genre, of course, are truly excellent: take Umma, for instance (see earlier post), The Conjuring (post forthcoming), or, going further back in history, Medea or The Bacchae (see earlier post). But the idea that the big reveal is that mommy has somehow been up to no good the entire time, that just doesn't sit well with me. It feels too pat, too easy, too obvious, and too clunkily misogynistic.

I can see where the idea came from, though: we do also see it in The X-Files, in that Mulder’s mother always appears to know much, much more about governmental conspiracism and about Mulder’s sister’s disappearance than she is willing to let on. But there, the seeming collusion of Mulder’s mother is with the government, not with the murderer. To me, that’s much more interesting than the simpler reveal of Longlegs, that Mommy works with the serial killer. Because the idea of Mommy being allied with Bad Government makes the whole world feel unsafe—both the domestic sphere and the public square.

Turns out that this Bad-Mommy-Teams-Up-With-Bad-Government dynamic is common in the governmental horror sub-genre. In fact, the surprisingly excellent and highly experimental new Netflix series called Wormwood, which I don't even think the people who made the series would have called horror, absolutely is governmental horror and it joins together Bad Mommy with Bad Government too.

For those who haven't seen this series, it is a hybrid of fictional reenactment and historical documentary. In that hybridity, it is extraordinarily adroit, graceful, and successful. In fact, I am not sure I can call to mind any prior cinematic work that's so elegantly braided together documentarian material—like interviews, newspaper articles and archival findings—with a fictionalized reenactment. It does help that the fictionalized main character is played by Peter Skarsgård, who could probably play the role of a paper bag and make it moody, sexy, and compelling.

So, as I said, I seriously doubt the makers of Wormwood saw it as horror, but I strongly suspect that most of its viewers will experience it in exactly those terms. Just to review, in this substack, and in my scholarship on horror more broadly, I define the horror genre as a work of art that stymies an easy, immediate cognitive grasp of what’s going on; that triggers the affects of fear, trepidation, or unsafety in an audience; that contains some element either of the mysterious or the supernatural; and, crucially, that leaves us with a “horror hangover,” which is to say, we go home from the theater (or, in the case of Netflix, we retreat to our bedrooms from our living rooms) feeling quite a lot less safe than when we started our televisual or cinematic experience. Horror, that is, follows you home. It clings. That feeling of vulnerability doesn’t melt away as the screen fades to black. By this definition, Wormwood clearly qualifies as horror. Augmented by the fact that it is also, apparently, based in reality.

The backstory of Wormwood is simple, albeit gappy. In 1953, a man, a family man, mysteriously jumped or fell out a 13 story window of an old hotel in New York City. It is quickly revealed that there was a massive CIA cover up about this man's death, and it is more slowly revealed that, in point of fact, the CIA was directly responsible for this man's death, as well as for the cover-up that ensued. X-Files fans out there, I know your Spidey Sense is tingling right now.

As the story unfolds, about half of each episode of the series consist of interviews of this man's surviving son, who appears to be somewhere in his 60s. This man, in real life, has been on the hunt for information and clarity about his father's demise for most of his adult life—kind of like Mulder in his quest for information about his sister’s disappearance and presumed death. The point of the Wormwood series, I think, is both to grab our attention with all of the cross cutting between “truth” and “fiction,” and also to make us feel a sustained and disquieting skepticism about the United States government. It is a series that wants to characterize The United States government as shot through with conspiracy, megalomaniacal actors, and world-making powers so robust, that a man's death could go unquestioned for decades before anything about its true circumstances is revealed.

Now, harking back to The X-Files, all of this should seem extraordinarily familiar: Mulder's own basic thesis about the United States government is that it is almost entirely constituted by conspiracies, deep dark veins of twisted megalomania and power, and the arbitrary exercise of lethal force. And again, throughout the series, there’s also a strong sense that Mulder’s mother knows a lot more than she is willing to tell him, both about governmental conspiracies writ large, and about the “alien abduction” of his sister in particular.

As I said, Wormwood bodies forth its own commitment to the Bad-Mommy thesis: there is a very interesting subtext that runs throughout Wormwood that keeps wanting to blame the wife of the defenestrated man, for keeping too many secrets, for refusing to seek the truth, and for leaving her son in this horrible miasma of uncertainty for almost his entire adult life. So you've got a braiding together of something very Freudian—Mommy is a bad guy—and a strong sense that the government is unreliable, mercenary, and murderous.

Trust No One, as The X-Files constantly, constantly reminded viewers. Not the government, and not your mommy.

Just for the record, my all time favorite instantiation of this dual dynamic of Bad-Mommy-meets-worse-government comes all the way back in 1979, with the original Alien film. If you recall, in that film main computer on the spaceship is called “Mother”, and she is in collusion with a governmental weapons corporation back on earth, the end goal of which is to bring back alien specimens, even at the cost of the lives of all of the crew members. Think about the scene when Ripley (Sigourney Weaver closed parentheses logs into the computer system of mother, to discover that she and her crewmates are all classified on the computer as “expendable.”

So, as we lean forward into this new American reality of backsliding feminism and a government that many people don’t trust as far as they could throw it, we should expect to see more and more films and TV shows like these. Governmental horror, here we come.