SHRINK CHAT: Longlegs, Oddity, Nicolas Cage & Folk Horror

Why does silence frighten you more than anything a horror film can actually show you?

Longlegs and Oddity were two of the most talked-about horror releases of 2024, and neither of them scares you the way horror usually does. Osgood Perkins' Longlegs stars Nicolas Cage as a devil worshipper who has orchestrated the murders of entire families and evaded the FBI for thirty years, with Maika Monroe as the agent decoding the letters he leaves behind. Damian Mc Carthy's Oddity, from Shudder, is an Irish folk-horror piece about a woman using haunted objects to find out who murdered her twin sister.

Therapists Shannon and Cathy review both on the thing that actually makes them work: atmosphere over imagery, and what silence does to a viewer's mind. Silence puts you inside your own head, and the horror your brain builds there is worse than anything a director can put on screen. That is a clinical observation as much as a film one — and it is why both of these films land on an audience that horror has otherwise made very hard to frighten.

In this episode:

• Longlegs (2024) — Osgood Perkins, Nicolas Cage, Maika Monroe
• Cage's performance as something genuinely different from the meme — the Tiny Tim influence, and why horror deserves awards-season treatment
• Why the film is called Longlegs: the whole thing is filtered through a child's-eye memory, and children encode people by physical features
• Maika Monroe's agent as a character shaped by her own childhood, not just a procedural device
• Perkins as Anthony Perkins' son, Cage as Coppola's nephew — two people raised inside the industry making a film about inherited horror
• Oddity (2024) — Damian Mc Carthy, Carolyn Bracken, Shudder
• The folk-horror reading nobody else is giving it: isolation, rural Ireland, a summoning, and skewed moral belief
• Why the scariest object in the film is visible the entire time — the wooden mannequin — and how that inverts the usual hidden-threat structure
• Jump scares that go somewhere versus jump scares that cheat
• Desensitisation: why genuine dread is so rare for horror fans, and what both films do to get past it
• Mc Carthy's first film Caveat, and what a sophomore effort with real money looks like
• What's coming: Terrifier 3 · Nosferatu · Heretic · Nightbitch · Salem's Lot · The Crow · Smile 2 · Beetlejuice Beetlejuice · Alien: Romulus · The Man in the White Van

Clinical concepts discussed: the psychology of silence and internal threat construction · atmosphere versus gore · desensitization in horror audiences · childhood memory and how children encode faces and bodies · dread as a somatic response · folk horror, isolation and moral transgression

Two licensed therapists — one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT.

Until then... sleep safe. 😴

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